Villa and Zapata: A History of the Mexican Revolution

by Frank McLynn

  This was not achieved by dire exploitation of his workers, for Madero was a compassionate man who lived in austerity in imitation of Francis of Assisi. The workers on his hacienda of San Pedro lived in clean houses and received high wages and good health care. Apart from feeding sixty homeless children and contributing to numerous charities, Madero, as a believer in homoeopathic medicine, did his own doctor's round, dispensing lime charcoal, nux vomica and other nostrums to his peons. In January 1903 he married Sara Perez, a like-minded woman, and together they created schools, hospitals and soup kitchens, supported even more orphans and funded scholarships. However, the turning point of Madero's life was not his marriage to Sara but two events that occurred a couple of years before.

  In 1901 Madero's beloved mother Mercedes died of typhoid. Severely affected by this and probably at an unconscious level guilty that he had `caused' her death, Madero gave up drink and tobacco and sold his wine cellar. Perhaps not coincidentally, his interest in spiritualism moved up a gear. His first attempts to contact the spirits had scarcely been auspicious: practising automatic writing, he came up with the banal sentence: `Love God above all things and your neighbour as yourself.' However, in igoi he also began to receive daily `visits' from the spirit of his brother Raul, who had died by accident in a fire at the age of four. `Raul' instructed him to practise self-mortification and self-denial, to avoid the material in favour of the spiritual. Some Madero scholars say this, rather than the death of his mother, was the real trigger for the new regime of vegetarianism and explains why he gave up smoking and destroyed his wine cellar.

  Until the age of twenty-eight Madero was apolitical. His first glimmerings of political consciousness came when Bernardo Reyes, governor of Nuevo Leon, used excessive violence when dispersing a political demonstration on April 1903-2. For the first time Madero started questioning the very roots of Diaz's power. Conveniently, `Raul' now instructed him that the best way to help his fellow-man was to enter politics. He became a candidate in municipal elections, founded the Club Benito Juarez to get Mexico back to the liberal principles of the Constitution of 1857, and narrowly lost his first electoral contest. He wrote articles for the press, trying to link the world of politics with spiritual values and signing them `Arjuna', the hero prince of the Hindu epic, the Mahahharata. He went on to contest the election for governor in Coahuila in 1905 and was nearly arrested when his rival Miguel Cardenas won. Cardenas, returned a third time as state governor, was sufficiently alarmed by Madero's challenge to warn Diaz that the `crank' Madero showed every sign of becoming a political embarrassment and one, moreover, who, with unlimited funds at his disposal, could develop into a real headache. Cardenas pointed to the way Madero had financed his own newspaper (El Democrata) as well as a satirical publication (El Mosco-The Fl)). Alarmed, Diaz consulted Bernardo Reyes and asked him if he should jail Madero. Reyes advised against: the best first step was to persuade Francisco Madero Senior to get his wayward son to simmer down.

  Madero did not lose hope after his defeat by Cardenas but consoled himself with a fervent belief that his hour would come. Seeing himself as an apostle with a mission, and his political work as a fulfilment of the words of a crucified Saviour, he wrote to his brother Evaristo in Paris, asking him to come back and join in the great work. Meanwhile, starting in 1907, he began to have visitations from Jose', a more militant spirit. Biographers of Madero have compared his notebooks, detailing the messages from Jose', to the `spiritual exercises' of Loyola. The notebooks are suffused with a profound sense of guilt - not just guilt that he is `failing' Mexico but also that he cannot beget a child on Sara Perez; there is the suggestion that Madero is being punished and that his wife will become pregnant once Madero fulfils his patriotic mission.

  Soon another spirit arrived to reinforce `Jose' and ordered him to preach his political message nationwide. Madero wrote prolifically in all opposition newspapers, even buying them up to make his message known. Early in 1907 the spirits ordered him to abstain from sexual intercourse, but then, in October 1907, the spirits gave him the nod that he had `purified' himself sufficiently and had triumphed over matter; he was now to read Mexican history copiously in preparation for a struggle that would reach its apogee in 1908. To make himself an ever worthier vessel, Madero increased his campaign of austerity, cutting down on sleep, eliminating the siesta, going to bed late and rising early. By now a virtual recluse, teetotal and with no pleasures, he began eating less food and set himself a massive programme of reading in Mexican history. After the Creelman interview he also decided to write a long tract on the 1910 presidential election.

  On his thirty-fifth birthday - 30 October 1908 - Madero got a message from `Jose': `You have been chosen by your Heavenly Father to carry out a great mission on earth ... for this divine cause you will have to sacrifice everything material, everything of this world.' In November a new visitation - this time the spirit of Benito Juarez - told him that the pamphlet he was writing would send Diaz into a panic and that he should use the `sword of truth' against the president. Against Diaz's shrewdness, use loyalty, `Juarez' urged; against his falsity, sincerity; against hypocrisy, candour. Madero finished his book, then went into retreat for the biblical forty days and forty nights on a desert ranch he called `Australia'. He told his father that he had been chosen by Providence for a great task and that his book on the election would be published not later than 25 January 1909.

  The first edition in 1909 of Madero's The Presidential Succession of igro sold out immediately. Madero structured his book on a twofold spine of diagnosis and cure. The diagnosis was that absolute power in one man was always bad and had harmful consequences: Madero instanced Czarist Russia and its humiliating defeat by Japan in 1905. He pointed out that Diaz had come to power expressly on the slogan `No re-election'. While conceding that don Porfirio had made some economic progress, Madero pointed to the debit column: the enslavement of the Yaquis, the repression of the workers at Cananea, the national levels of illiteracy, the toadying to Standard Oil and other US interests, and the entire system of autocratic centralism. When condemning Diaz's `patriarchal politics' he went into full flight: `This is the cause of ... the corruption of the spirit, the disinterest in public life, a disdain for law and the tendency towards deception, towards cynicism, towards fear. In the society that abdicates its freedom and renounces the possibility of governing itself, there is mutilation, a degradation, a debasement that can easily translate into submission before the foreigner ... We are sleeping under the cool but harmful shade of a poisonous tree ... we should not deceive ourselves, we are heading for a precipice.'

  The cure prescribed by Madero was a simple return to the Constitution of 1857, fair and valid voting, and no re-election. On 2 February igog Madero sent a copy to Diaz, calling on him to attain real historical immortality by embracing democracy. In May agog he sold much of his property at a loss to raise cash for his political programmes, set up the Anti-Re-election Centre in Mexico City and published a journal, El Anti-Reeleccionista, edited by Jose Vasconcelos and Luis Cabrera. His grandfather Evaristo, founder of the Madero dynasty, remarked cynically: `It's the struggle of a microbe against an elephant,' but, undeterred, his grandson made a whistlestop tour through Coahuila in September igoq and was mobbed by enthusiasts.

  By this time Diaz's patience was running thin. Just before the first convention of the Anti-Re-election Party, Diaz decided to strike at the Madero family, to show them the danger of letting their cub run wild. First, he tried to take over the Bank of Nuevo Leon, but was compelled to beat a hasty retreat when it became clear that the public would accept only money issued directly by that bank. After vainly pressurising Evaristo Madero, Diaz decided to go straight to the nuisance and arrest Madero himself, on a trumped-up charge of dealing illegally in rubber. A warrant was issued for Madero's arrest but never served, because of protection extended to the Maderos by their old family friend Jose Limantour, still Diaz's indispensable minister of economics.

  The new
party's convention took place in igio. The day before it opened, Diaz tried to pre-empt Madero by inviting him to an interview. This was, predictably, a dialogue of the deaf in which platitudes and bromides were exchanged. Madero professed to admire Diaz as a man but insisted that his system must give way to democracy. Diaz hinted that the man who took power from him would be accepting a poisoned chalice and asked ironically who Madero had in mind as the next president. When Madero said that it did not much matter as long as he was honest, Diaz commented sardonically that to govern Mexico a man needed to be much more than honest. Madero said he wanted Mexicans to take seriously the idea of free and fair elections and Diaz said, again possibly ironically, that that was a laudable ambition. Each man went away from the meeting with a low opinion of the other. Diaz said he had just met a lunatic to match the genuine madman (Zuniga y Miranda) who had been put up by students as a presidential candidate in 1896. Madero turned Diaz's farmyard similes back on to him by remarking that don Porfirio was no longer the fighting cock of yore. To his intimates he said that Diaz was in his second childhood, but still retained the cunning of a senile control freak.

  In the convention hall next day the strength of Madero's movement was apparent. Madero was nominated as presidential candidate and chose as his running mate the career politician Francisco Vasquez Gomez, formerly physician to the Diaz family and a leading supporter of Bernardo Reyes. It was notable that most of the reyistas had moved over to Madero now that their leader had been exiled. Most of the finest intellects in Mexico, including Jose Vasconcelos, had joined him and the speaker list was studded with names that would become very familiar in the next three years: Roque Estrada, Federico Gonzalez Garza, Pino Suarez, Felix Palavicini. Convinced by his meeting with Diaz that peaceful change was impossible, Madero began to hint that perhaps only a revolution could shift the dictator and warned that force would be met with force. Following the successful convention, the momentum of the Madero campaign seemed unstoppable and he set out on a nationwide tour. He was acclaimed by a crowd of 30,000 in Puebla City, by 10,000 in the city of Jalapa and by another 20,000 supporters in Orizaba. In Veracruz he announced his manifesto, to include individual rights, municipal liberties and the autonomy of states.

  Diaz had meanwhile not been idle. Having exiled Reyes, he dealt with the next hopeful, Limantour, by removing him from his inner circle and failing to consult him about the next batch of `nominees' to Congress. In the summer of igio Limantour angrily departed for Europe, aware that his presidential chances were over; ostensibly he was going to negotiate a new debt agreement with European banks, but it was an open secret that he would not be back this side of the presidential election. Still saddled with Corral, whose cancer had gone into remission, Diaz even tried to sideline him by building up another hopeful, governor Teodoro Dehesa of Veracruz, as the rising star. However, as the crowds flocked around Madero on his triumphant whistlestop tour, even the myopic Diaz realised at last that he had a serious challenge on his hands. When Madero reached Monterrey, he was arrested on charges of plotting armed insurrection and imprisoned in San Luis Potosi.

  Diaz now ordered a purge of the new party. After more than 6,ooo arrests of the leading lights, the smaller fry went into hiding and Diaz was left free to fix voting turnout figures and intimidate the electorate. Madero remained in jail while Diaz's lavish birthday celebrations went on in September, and it was from his prison cell that same month that he heard the unsurprising news that Diaz had been re-elected president by a record margin, with Corral as the vice-president. With that nice concern for phoney procedure and statistics that characterises so many autocrats, Diaz actually allowed Congress three months (from June to September) to `scrutinise' the election results and then announced an exact figure for the presidential votes cast for the Anti-Re-election Party: 196 for Madero and 187 to Vasquez Gomez; doubtless this diaphanous travesty was laid on for the benefit of US observers.

  In prison Madero considered his options. His was a middle-class movement, with purely political aspirations, with a definite appeal to the literate urban elites and intellectuals for whom the Porfiriato was a blot on the national escutcheon. It is futile to look for deep socio-economic currents in Maderismo and even Madero's `radical' statements were fustian rhetoric. He rumbled a lot about US penetration of Mexico, but his movement was not a backlash against foreign investment; both Madero and his principal lieutenants deeply admired the USA and looked to it for inspiration. That being so, Madero was in a dilemma. To call for an armed uprising would put property at risk, might lead to the kind of slippage towards real social change that had occurred in the French Revolution, and would probably not succeed anyway, either because Diaz's military power was too great or because the USA might intervene to prevent `chaos'. On the other hand, to do nothing would be to hand Diaz victory on a plate. Reluctantly, Madero concluded that Diaz would have to be opposed by force, and laid plans for a national uprising to begin on zo November I g I o.

  Restless and workaholic even when behind bars, Madero deluged his followers with letters, promising them he would not weaken. When Diaz was declared president, he submitted a huge dossier on electoral fraud to Congress, where it was predictably buried. Meanwhile his father intervened with the state governor and posted a substantial bond, allowing Francisco to ride around San Luis Potosi by day, accompanied by guards. Soon the guards became drugged by the boring daily rhythms and grew inattentive. On 4 October Madero jumped bail, simply galloping away from his lazy jailers. He found refuge in a nearby village and from there travelled incognito by train to the border with the USA where he was smuggled across to Laredo. In San Antonio, Texas, in late October he issued his Plan of San Luis Potosi, which proclaimed the elections of 1910 null and void, declared that he was the real president of Mexico and called on all Mexicans to refuse obedience to Diaz. He proposed himself as provisional president and promised the restitution of lands to villages and Indian communities and an amnesty for political prisoners. Most of all, he called for armed revolution and specified the hour and day when it was supposed to break out: 6 p.m. on zo November 1910. Whether revolution was now to break out in Mexico depended on the national response to that tocsin call.

  THE RISE OF ZAPATA

  Among those who watched Madero's challenge to Diaz with keen interest was a 3o-year-old village chief from the state of Morelos named Emiliano Zapata. Morelos, one of the smallest states in Mexico, lay fifty miles to the south of Mexico City and had borders with Mexico State, Puebla, Guerrero and the Federal District itself (within which the capital was situated). Zapata's native state was in some ways a microcosm of Mexico, since in a relatively small area it contained both the mountain terrain typical of northern Mexico and the tropical lowlands more usually associated with the plantation states of the extreme south-east.

  Zapata was a mestizo, of mixed white and Indian parentage. Race was a factor of extreme importance in Mexican society; in igio a third of the population was Indian and half mestizo. As to the extent of racial prejudice, experts differ. On the one hand, many oligarchs were racist, despised the benighted Indian as a drag on the national chain, and embraced a form of social Darwinism whereby Mexico's future lay in transcending its Indian past; for this reason they looked to England and France for their inspiration and sent their children to school there. On the other hand, the national ethos of Mexico officially took pride in the achievements of the Aztecs and the Mayas, and on a day-to-day basis overt racial prejudice was rare. Everyone knew, though, that whiteness was the supreme ethnic value, and the aim of all aspiring Indians was to be `whitened'.

  Like the Plains tribes of North America, the Mexican Indians never made common cause against their white rulers. This was because differences between tribes were perceived as just as important as between Indians and whites. There were more than too indigenous languages and dialects among the tribes, most of which were clustered in central and southern Mexico, where they made up anything from 50 to 75 per cent of the population. There we
re Indians in northern Mexico - the Mayos of Sinaloa, the Tarahumaras of Chihuahua and, especially, the martial and powerful Yaquis of Sonora - but for the most part the tribes were located south of Mexico City: the Tarascos of Michoacan, the Tzeltales, Tobojales, Chontales, Tzotziles of Chiapas, the Zapotecs, Mijes, Zoques, Huaves and Mixtecs of Oaxaca, the Huastelos and Totonacos of Veracruz, the Mayas of Yucatan, plus an assortment of tribes (Mazahuas, Nahuas, Otomis, Coras and Huicholes) in central Mexico.

  Even so, generalisations about southern Mexico are difficult. Oaxaca, Chiapas (both states a mixture of jungle and high valleys) and Yucatan were overwhelmingly Indian, all living on a subsistence economy of corn, beans and squash, but each of the three was in important ways unlike the other two. Oaxaca had two great advantages: it had a higher proportion of mestizos in the population, curbing racial tensions, and it had more free village land. In Chiapas, by contrast, the plight of the Indians was such that large numbers of them lived as bandits in the area of the coastal lagoons, sustained by their communities and pursued ineffectually by the rurales: they were the classic `primitive rebels' or `social criminals' so beloved by sociologically minded historians. Yucatan, situated on a limestone plateau, was different again. Here the disastrous wars of the castes had raised racial tensions to boiling point, and the white city of Merida sat uneasily as an island in a sea of Maya communities, with the creole communities owning the enormous sisal hemp haciendas. Cut off by jungle and swamp from the rest of Mexico and plagued by malaria and yellow fever, Yucatan was an unhappy land, taking its inspiration from the Caribbean and harbouring vague aspirations towards independence.