Villa and Zapata: A History of the Mexican Revolution

by Frank McLynn

  Villa neither smoked nor drank, and used no drugs, but he liked to sing and dance. Emotionally he was not an integrated person, as he had no middle range. Volatile and manic-depressive, he could run the gamut of emotions with astonishing quick-change rapidity, veering from anger to tears or from generosity to cruelty within minutes. Highly intelligent and shrewd except when his judgement was clouded by anger, he was an implacable hater though steadfastly loyal to those he respected. He was a compulsive womaniser who raised the idea of serial monogamy to a new power. He liked to humour his women by going through bogus marriage ceremonies: one of his earliest `wives' was Petra Espinosa whom he abducted and with whom he lived for a short time in Parral.

  Comparisons with Zapata are instructive. Born within a year of each other, both men had been in trouble with the authorities, served time under duress in the Army and acquired intellectual mentors; both were outstanding horsemen, dedicated womanisers and both had singularly useless brothers (Hipolito Villa in this respect being fully the equal of Eufemio Zapata). Both lived in violent times, but the milieu of Chihuahua was `organically' violent, as that of Morelos was not, largely because of the frontier tradition of the north and the long wars against the Apache. In the short term, Zapata faced far the more difficult task as a revolutionary leader. For Villa, revolts in the northern sierras could mobilise the entire community in pan-regional `popular front' resistance with trans-class coalitions and no class traitors, in part because rebellion in the north was concerned with local autonomy as well as land. Conflicts in the north were not just peasants and peons against landlords but often the whole locality in arms against the central government.

  Because of their martial traditions, the men of Chihuahua and Sonora were more explosive and less long-suffering than the Morelos peasants or Yucatan peons, and their military traditions made them more capable of armed resistance; put simply, for them the transition from protest to guerrilla warfare was much easier. Villa had the military advantage that the armies he raised would all be cavalry armies, formed of sharpshooters who had honed their skills in frontier wars. Additionally, he could escape across the border to the USA, or import arms from North America more easily. Moreover, it was easier to co-opt northern rebels as they sought no major socio-economic changes and still less a classless utopia, but wanted merely freedom from interference from Mexico City and freedom to live undisturbed in a macho, martial culture.

  Zapata, however, did have some compensating advantages. For the very same reasons, revolt once initiated in the south was more difficult to suppress or turn off. Since there was no real ideological content in the northern rebellions, and even in what later came to be called Villismo, it was just as easy for the central government to co-opt these movements, or buy off and suborn the leaders with money and lands. It is clear that the issue of land was important in Chihuahua, but in terms of the revolutionary slogan Tierra y Libertad, perhaps the second was the more important in the north. Villa had none of Zapata's mystical feeling about the soil or about the village as personality. He was more of a political opportunist, proactive where Zapata was reactive. In 19zo he showed this clearly by being first into the revolutionary breach. Three days before Madero's call for a general rising on to November expired, Villa and four comrades he had recruited from his cattle-rustling days attacked the hacienda of Chavarria to obtain horses, money and supplies. Meeting resistance, they fought their way into the hacienda, killing the administrator. Villa's life as bandit had ended and his career as a glorious hero of the Revolution had begun.

  THE RISE OF MADERO

  As Madero's 20 November deadline approached, tensions in Mexico were screwed tight. At the very last moment it even appeared that potential revolutionary energies would be dissipated in anti-Americanism. On 3 November igio in Texas, a young Mexican accused of murdering a woman was dragged out of jail by a mob and lynched. Throughout Mexico there was a spontaneous explosion of anti-gringo riots. Genuine revolutionaries used the turmoil to foment dissatisfaction with Diaz, allegedly the protector of the tens of thousands of yanquis in Mexico, and the aged dictator had to allow the anti-American inferno to rage unabated, fearful that he himself might be swept away in the whirlwind. Also, he calculated that the turmoil could be contained within the system, for the demonstrators were mostly students or the urban middle classes. Where people depended for their jobs on the gringo, as in Sonora, where the greatest volume of US investment was located, there were no riots.

  Yet to thoughtful observers the wave of anti-American disturbances that swept across the country was evidence of a new edginess in the people, of a volatility that had not been there before. However, at first, the maderistas were unable to capitalise on it. All their early attempts to engineer risings in the cities came to nothing; many Madero agents were either arrested or gave up in despair. In retrospect, the problem was that the maderistas were aiming at a mere palace revolution or political transfer of power, to be carried out by urban middle-class intellectuals. At this stage rural guerrilla warfare was not a perceived option, and the few people who tried to launch revolt in the countryside chose the wrong areas. One of Madero's chief agents, Colmenares Rios, left Veracruz with copies of the Plan of San Luis and went first to Orizaba, where he found the maderista movement in chaos. He then headed south for the hot lowlands of the isthmus, where he knew the terrain, and linked up with seventy disorganised and badly armed guerrillas in the Tabasco plantations. Unable to attract more recruits, the guerrillas wandered around for a time in a daze, constantly harried by federal troops. When desertions reduced the sorry band to no more than a dozen, Colmenares declared the rising at an end and returned in disgust to Veracruz.

  First blood in the struggle clearly went to Diaz. In Puebla police went to search the house of an important maderista, Aquiles Serdan, a cobbler. Serdan's extended family happened to be in the house at the time, feelings ran high, and armed resistance ensued. In the shoot-out the police chief of Puebla was killed; the police called up reinforcements, sealed off the house, picked off Serdan's most courageous sharpshooters and forced a handful of survivors to surrender. Nobody lifted a finger to help Serdan, who was taken out and shot, even though Puebla had featured as a key area in maderista plans. Madero's men in Puebla were cowed, and energetic police action in other states in central Mexico made his supporters go to ground. At Orizaba the federal garrison easily beat off a rebel attack, while elsewhere in central Mexico police dragnets hauled in some prize catches, including eventually Alfredo Robles Dominguez, the man who was supposed to ignite the rebellion for Madero in the south.

  Madero received the news of these early setbacks gloomily as he prepared to cross the Rio Grande. His own operation scarcely began propitiously. On the morning of Sunday zo November he rode down to the banks of the river, intending to cross, on the assumption that his uncle Catarino would be waiting for him with 400 well-armed pistoleros from Coahuila. His uncle duly appeared at the rendezvous, but with only ten men. Abandoning his plans for an attack on a northern town, Madero went into hiding for a few days, then, after further vacillation, travelled incognito to New Orleans with his younger brother Raul (who had been given the same name as the brother who died in 1887). Despite his aimless wanderings (he would later shift his base of operations to Dallas, then back to El Paso), Madero remained absurdly sanguine about the outcome of the Revolution, as his upbeat letters to his wife (addressed under the pseudonym Juana P. de Montiu) from New Orleans show. In one letter he outlined a typical day, in which he had slept well, had a siesta, read in the library, exercised in the YMCA and gone to the opera. He continued his eccentric researches into the Mahabharata, still deeply influenced by its teachings about the unreality of death, the illusory world of the senses, the necessity for renunciation, and the overriding importance of duty, even if unrequited.

  In Mexico City Diaz was incandescent with rage about `Yankee collusion' with Madero. Some US opinion-makers were quite happy about this, feeling that Diaz had got his come-uppan
ce for his favouritism towards British capitalists; there was also a strong rumour that President Taft and the Standard Oil Company were backing Madero. The truth is that Washington had little interest in the Mexican Revolution in the years 191o-ii. Taft was quite content with Diaz as a strongman guarantor of stability, and the State Department in no way frowned on him for the anti-American demonstrations of November 1910, blaming them instead on `agitators'. The USA was likely to swing against Diaz only if their nationals or property were damaged, which had not happened. All stories that Standard Oil bankrolled Madero were mere canards. It is true that Diaz was genuinely angry with Taft but, as a dictator, he failed to understand that American laws did not permit Taft to stop Madero organising political activities and buying guns.

  The Revolution had stalled, Madero was stalemated and the USA was uninterested. For a while it seemed that Diaz had prevailed. Then came thunder out of Chihuahua - ironically the very spontaneous revolution the magonistas had spoken of, but not in accordance with their blueprint. For all the reasons already mentioned, the people of Chihuahua had had enough of Creel, Terrazas and Diaz; their response to a crisis of political legitimacy was to take up arms and fight, as their forefathers had fought the Apache. It is significant that the first outbreaks of rebellion occurred in the villages in northern Chihuahua particularly associated with the Apache wars: Namiquipa, Bachiniva, Cuchillo, Parano, San Antonio, San Carlos. Soon the entire state was consumed in revolution as an unstoppable chain reaction occurred. From the very beginning the names of three revolutionary leaders were heard everywhere: Castulo Herrera, Pascual Orozco and Pancho Villa.

  The number one ranking revolutionary leader in Chihuahua was Pascual Orozco, a tall, rangy, gaunt-looking, 28-year-old with blue eyes and a formidable reputation. Orozco was no middle-class maderista but was the barely literate son of a village storekeeper who, in his early life, specialised in leading convoys laden with precious metals through the mountain passes of western Chihuahua. This was dangerous work in bandit country, and Orozco soon gained the reputation of being a sharpshooting mountain man who knew the sierra trails backwards. His background as a muleteer aligns him superficially with Villa and Zapata, but Orozco, already worth ioo,ooo pesos, was a living oxymoron, a kind of primitive capitalist-cum-revolutionary. Abraham Gonzalez had tried to recruit him for Madero early in 1910, on the basis that he was known to be `agin the government', but Orozco's horizons were limited. Uninterested in national politics, he wanted to knock his business rival Joaquin Chavez off his perch. Chavez, a client of the Terrazas, had a freight business that threatened Orozco's interests; appropriately Orozco's first `revolutionary' act was to loot Chavez's house. However, Orozco was a formidable organiser, who was soon able to unite a number of different bandit groups and lay siege to Ciudad Guerrero.

  When the red-letter day of 20 November arrived, Pancho Villa took his gang down into the Chihuahua plains and joined the revolutionary manpower commanded by Castulo Herrera. Next day the combined force occupied the old military colony of San Andres, only to learn that a federal troop train was already on its way there. Villa took his own men down to the station and opened fire as soon as the troops started disembarking. After the federal commander and several of his men had been killed, the survivors clambered back on board the train and shunted backwards down the line in full retreat. The news of this `great victory' over the federals was talked up, and within days volunteers were flocking in.

  Herrera appointed Villa his second in command, with effective control of 325 men, but already the deficiencies of Herrera as a guerrilla commander were becoming apparent. Primarily a politician, and unable to control or impose his authority on the wild ex-bandits of the sierras, Herrera was forced to connive at his men's indiscipline, their rowdyism and firing guns into the air in the streets of San Andres. Annoyed at the waste of ammunition, Villa browbeat the rowdies and made them come to heel. In a macho society such dominance was decisive, and effective, if not yet nominal, authority shifted from Herrera to Villa.

  Euphoric and overconfident, Villa decided to start at the top by attacking the state capital, Chihuahua City, with just 500 men. He commanded in person a reconnaissance platoon of just forty men, which he divided into four units of ten, probing the city from different directions. Such was the gung-ho attitude of Villa's unit that they did not back off when they saw 700 federals advancing to oppose them. Villa's men dug in and fought; heavily outnumbered, they were forced to retreat within half an hour, but not before Villa had employed one of the tricks that would make him a legend. Along his defensive position, on the top of El Tecolote hill, he ranged dozens of sombreros to make them look like the hats of defenders. Seeing the hill apparently stoutly defended, the federals advanced slowly, wasting their ammunition against the phantom rebels. Villa sent out a runner to bring back the rest of the units and despatched a message to Herrera to come with all speed with the main force. He and his handful of defenders were about to be overwhelmed when the thirty men of the recalled units arrived; thus reinforced, Villa held off the federals for a further hour, expecting any minute that Herrera would come up with a flanking force. Herrera never arrived: he lacked the courage to commit his men to an engagement whose outcome was uncertain.

  That was the end of Herrera as rebel commander. Extremely bitter and contemptuous towards him, Villa froze him out. Faced with a choice between following the lacklustre Herrera or the vigorous Villa, the guerrillas plumped for Villa. Any lingering chance that Herrera could reassert his position was destroyed when Tomas Urbina, Villa's friend, deliberately led a breakaway movement from Herrera and headed south on an extended raid through western Durango and the towns on the Chihuahua-Durango border. Encouraged by this, revolutionaries on Durango's other border, with Coahuila, attacked the town of Laguna and briefly occupied it, but the 200 guerrillas did not enjoy their triumph long and were soon flushed out by federals. The federal troops gave the first sign of the grim warfare to come over the next ten years by announcing that they would not be taking any prisoners; they shot their captives out of hand and left their corpses to rot as a warning to others.

  Having overthrown Herrera, Villa decided to make common cause with Orozco, who had enjoyed a golden initial campaign. After taking Ciudad Guerrero, Orozco defeated the federals at Pedernales. When the rebels gained another victory at Malpaso, Orozco decided that, with Villa's help, he was ready to fight a pitched battle, and chose the town of Cerro Prieto on the North-western Railroad. This was a bad mistake, for the poor calibre of Orozco's Indian infantry and the immense superiority the federals enjoyed in artillery resulted in a heavy defeat for the rebels. After several hours of ferocious battle, during which at times 2,000 men fought hand-to-hand combat, Villa and Orozco were obliged to break off and flee to the mountains. The lesson was clear. Guerrilla armies could not yet defeat Diaz's forces in set-piece pitched battles.

  After their victory at Cerro Prieto, the federals counterattacked, retaking Ciudad Guerrero from Orozco and relieving the pressure on Ojinaga, Chihuahua City and Ciudad Juarez on the border with the USA. Seeing that the rest of the country was not joining the rebels, Diaz felt confident he could crush Chihuahua. To save the expense of sending a large federal army north, he first offered the rebels a four-week truce, hoping that by its expiry the Chihuahuans would see the futility of their insurrection and lay down their arms. Naturally Orozco and Villa wanted to learn Madero's reaction, so they neatly solved an embarrassing problem by sending the feckless Herrera as their envoy to him, but even before an answer came back, Diaz himself wrecked the truce by deciding he could not afford to offer terms to the rebels. Business confidence in his regime had been severely dented by the revolt, and in Europe Limantour, trying to reschedule the external debt, found the terms of foreign banks rising steeper and steeper as the revolt continued. Believing that only a decisive military victory would now restore confidence, Diaz sent an extra 5,000 troops to Chihuahua under his friend General Juan Hernandez, a man who had campaign
ed in the north and knew the terrain.

  However, Diaz's political touch was failing, as his next action showed. Faced with persistent rumours that the Terrazas family were playing both sides against the middle in Chihuahua, he tried to force them off the fence by replacing the Creel puppet Jose Maria Sanchez as governor with his own nominee. This was a bad mistake, for the Terrazas clan would have had to fight Orozco and Villa anyway. By painting himself into a political corner with uncompromising action against the Terrazas, Diaz had raised the stakes and now had to win an outright victory in Chihuahua. Yet even though it was double-or-quits, Diaz felt he had an unbeatable hand: 5,000 fresh troops plus federal resources already in the state must defeat i,5oo rebels. For a few weeks Diaz's confidence seemed well founded: the string of rebel defeats at Cerro Prieto, Ojinaga and Ciudad Guerrero was followed by upbeat reports from his new governor, asserting that Orozco was on the point of surrender.

  It was all a chimera. By January 191I it was becoming increasingly apparent that both political and military factors favoured the rebels in the long run. Politically, both Diaz and the Creel-Terrazas faction could prevail in Chihuahua only if the ruling classes and the beneficiaries of the Creel land laws held firm. However, government officials fled, peons on the estates refused to fight, and the hacendados declined to arm them anyway, for fear they would go over to the rebels. The hacendados had long known that, ever since the end of the Apache wars, the nexus of rights and duties binding the peons to them had collapsed and that they had made themselves hated by introducing the southern idea of debt peonage. They kept their heads down, deaf to appeals from Diaz and the Terrazases, hoping that if they stayed quiet, the revolutionaries would ignore them. As for other beneficiaries of the Creel-Terrazas regime, goodwill from the `winners' in expropriated land deals had largely evaporated when Creel brought in his tax laws of 1908, since these appeared to take back with one hand what had been given with the other.