by Frank McLynn
By the beginning of April General Hernandez informed Diaz that the situation in Chihuahua was hopeless. So far from being able to reinforce his army there, Diaz had to pull out more and more men to deal with revolts elsewhere in Mexico, especially in Durango, where Orozco's power was increasing daily; the 5,000 fresh troops soon dwindled to 4,000. It was clear to all that by failing to stamp out the initial revolt in Chihuahua, Diaz had unwittingly lit a national brush fire. Hernandez knew he could not pursue the rebels even if he beat off their attacks for, if he sent a force in pursuit, the townspeople would rise up and slaughter the skeleton garrison left behind.
In despair, Diaz in April offered land reform and a purge of his most unpopular Cabinet ministers as the price of peace. Jumping the gun, he dismissed all his top-ranking colleagues, replacing them with Limantour (who finally returned to Mexico City on 21 March) and Francisco de la Barra, ex-ambassador in the USA, who was promoted to foreign minister. Diaz by this time knew in detail the terms on which Madero was likely to settle, for on his return from Europe Limantour had stopped in New York, where he and de la Barra negotiated possible peace terms with Madero's father, Francisco, and with Gustavo Madero, the family banker. Diaz learned that the Maderos were financing the Revolution by diverting 375,000 pesos advanced to Gustavo as business broker by a Franco-Spanish railway consortium, so he was under no illusions that the revolutionaries would run out of money. Almost certainly, though, Limantour and de la Barra did not reveal to Diaz how cosy and cordial their talks with the Maderos had been, and still less how they had been willing to sell their master down the river.
All Diaz's Limantour-influenced concessions were in vain. Once again it was too little, too late: the rebels merely read them as weakness. Heartened by Diaz's remaining on the defensive, Madero decided to go for the jugular and attack Ciudad Juarez. A successful assault would allow him to control cross-border traffic of all kinds and could well be the final push needed to topple the Porfiriato. As a diversion, he sent forces to attack the town of Agua Prieta in Sonora, across the border from Douglas, Arizona. Agua Prieta had already been the scene of one rebel probe in March, but the April assault was a more serious affair. This was the first time a train played a significant role in a rebel attack. Disembarking troops by train gave the rebels the element of surprise, and in their initial foray they managed to blow up the enemy headquarters. The federals rallied strongly and were counterattacking when US Cavalry intervened from the American side of the border to stop the fighting, on the grounds that bullets were causing damage in Douglas.
Fighting battles on the US doorstep always carried the danger of forcing a major US intervention; as a precaution against the war spilling over the border, President Taft had sent 20,000 troops to police the USMexico border. Diaz fumed impotently at this `national humiliation' and protested that Taft's action was a provocative move against a sovereign state, clearly designed to favour Madero. There was some humbug in the US stance for, while protesting that any damage sustained by American nationals or their property would invite massive retaliation, they did nothing to stop the throng of border sightseers who went in harm's way. Ever since the first Battle of Bull Run in 1861, there had been a peculiar US tradition whereby highborn ladies organised picnics at sites where they could view battles in comfort. On 17 April the sightseers at Douglas enjoyed another melee, as 1,500 federals moved in to recapture Agua Prieta. The action was short, sharp and, from the federal point of view, successful.
Agua Prieta, however, was never more than a sideshow. On 7 April 1911 Madero advanced on Ciudad Juarez with two columns of 500 men each, one commanded by Villa, the other by Orozco. Along the way they occupied Casas Grandes without resistance, but at Bauche the federals made a stand and Madero was able to overrun the position only after a bloody battle. Next day Madero invested the boo-strong garrison at Ciudad Juarez on three sides, leaving as the federals' only outlet the exit route to El Paso on the US side of the border. Both sides were confident of victory. Hitherto, all attempts by the rebels to engage the federals head-on had been a disaster, but Madero was now confident he had found the `equaliser' weapon. The guerrilla leader Ramon Iturbe first showed how regular army firepower could be matched, and fortified towns taken. A dynamite man who had once blasted his way block by block from the outskirts to the centre of the sierra town of Topia, Iturbe advised Madero that the same tactics would work at Juarez. It was in this battle that the (cinematically ubiquitous) use of dynamite as the weapon of the Mexican Revolution first came to the fore.
For his part, the federal commander Juan Navarro, who contemptuously refused Madero's surrender demand, was also full of aplomb. Knowing nothing of Madero's secret weapon he felt that his firepower was more than sufficient to see off the raw rebel levies. Moreover, Madero would never dare to press his attack too hard in case stray bullets winged their way across to El Paso and killed or wounded citizens there, thus provoking American intervention. The one worry was that the federals could not play their most obvious card. The textbook tactic was for the federals to advance north from Chihuahua City and catch the rebels in a pincer between themselves and the Juarez garrison, but for fear of a rising in the city the troops in the capital dared not attempt a sortie.
Faced with the siege of Ciudad Juarez, and with his supporters in a panic, Diaz tried a `peace offensive'. His advisers counselled him to try to detach Madero from the rest of the revolutionists. Since Madero was campaigning for free elections and `no re-election', Diaz should concede these reformist demands, patch up a truce with Madero, and then crack down hard on the genuinely revolutionary demands being heard elsewhere in Mexico; otherwise the continuing anarchy would lead to total loss of international confidence and the probable armed intervention of the USA. Jose Limantour, fresh from his tussles with European finance ministers strongly advocated the two-stage strategy of conceding to Madero and then crushing peasant revolutionaries, but General Victoriano Huerta, the hardline spokesman for the Army, argued against, on the grounds that to recognise Madero would be to recognise his forces as a rival to the regular Army. Despite despondent reports from all field commanders, Huerta arrogantly boasted that he could relieve Ciudad Juarez with just 2,000 cavalrymen.
Diaz was aware that similarly ludicrous boasts had been made on the western frontier of the USA in the 186os and 187os by colonels Fetterman and Custer, with disastrous results, so he ignored Huerta and listened to Limantour. Porfirista envoys were sent north to Juarez to learn Madero's terms. These proved surprisingly mild: he insisted on the principle of no re-election, demanded four governorships and four cabinet posts for his followers but, astonishingly, did not make Diaz's resignation a precondition. Madero, more conservative than his followers, did not want a fight to the death and agreed to a truce, which eventually ran for two weeks from 24 April to 7 May. Not only was he worried about the possibility of US intervention and under pressure from his family and oligarchic friends to cut a deal with Diaz, but he was also concerned that the burgeoning peasant movements of the south would become uncontrollable. Morelos was in flames and everywhere in the south the name of a new peasant leader was being heard: Emiliano Zapata.
THE FALL OF DIAZ
Where Villa was impulsive, emotional, pragmatic and volatile, Zapata was deep-thinking, slow to make up his mind but adamantine and inflexible once he had decided on a course of action. Villa dived into the Revolution on Day One, heedless of consequences, but Zapata thought through all the consequences and implications before he committed himself. This was why there was no initial response in Morelos to Madero's call to arms. Gradually, though, as news of rebel successes in Chihuahua came in, Zapata and the Morelos villagers began to flex their muscles, seeing how far they could push Diaz and his minions. Zapata's first revolutionary act was to lead eight villagers in a seizure of land that had long been a bone of contention between Anenecuilco and the haciendas. When the authorities decided to let sleeping dogs lie because of the tense situation in Chihuahua, his reputation w
as made overnight and his name became known in other villages. By the beginning of 1911 revolutionary electricity in Morelos was on surge power.
The first overt movement into armed guerrilla warfare was made by Genovevo de la 0 of Santa Maria village, who led twenty-five men into the mountains north of Cuernavaca, although at this stage they fought with hoes and pikes, for de la 0 was the only one in the band with a firearm - an antiquated .70 musket.
When the hitherto friendly prefect of Ayala district resigned, Zapata, sensing the power vacuum, came forward as the overall leader of the villages. He built up a defence fund and began to organise and arm a growing number of farmers. In every single one of Morelos's ioo pueblos he had the hacienda fences taken down, and by January 1911 he had a sky-high, statewide reputation. The new prefect wisely did not tangle with him, but contented himself with branding Zapata the state's principal maderista. As yet, though, with few armed followers at his side, Zapata did not seek an open confrontation with the authorities.
In January 1911 Zapata controlled the central region of Morelos, the most important part both geographically and economically. Luck was on his side, in several senses. Had Diaz not been preoccupied with Chihuahua, he would undoubtedly have sent an army to crush this incipient peasant movement. His putative rivals as masters of Morelos, the Leyva brothers (Patricio and Eugenio) lost caste by ducking confrontation with Diaz, pleading ill-health. Moreover, Madero's original plans for southern Mexico assigned Morelos a purely peripheral role. His agent, Alfredo Robles Dominguez, aimed to focus rebellion in Guerrero and Puebla, with Morelos a mere sideshow. Had these plans been followed, Zapata might never have emerged as a revolutionary leader.
When Diaz's police swept up the entire southern maderista network in its November purge, revolution in the south took a spontaneous form. As already related, Zapata's first action in November 1910 had been to send Torres Burgos to learn more of Madero's intentions. As far as Zapata could understand the Plan of San Luis Potosi, Madero's thinking on land reform was confused: he made vague promises to the Indian pueblos but retained the totemic position of Juarez and his `capitalist' stance of individual ownership. Torres Burgos was away, incommunicado, for three months and in his absence Zapata had tough decisions to make. He knew the planters were arming themselves and growing stronger by the day, which meant he should really strike them first, but what if Madero had some other master-plan in mind? In the end, Zapata reluctantly decided he would await Torres Burgos's return. However, he could not control the hotheads among the village leaders, and was in danger of being upstaged by the Morelians who had already taken to the mountains as guerrillas. There were no less than three groups. Genovevo de la 0 had been at large since late igio, and now Gabriel Tepepa of Jojutla made his mark, sacking the town of Tepoztlan in February and gutting the archives and municipal offices. Yet a third band was headed by Bernabe Zabastida, an ex-le yvista who had been sentenced to hard labour in Quintana Roo, and now returned, thirsting for revenge against the people who had sent him to that graveyard; finding them fled, he killed two of their relatives and decamped to the hills with a handful of followers.
The relief of Torres Burgos's return in mid-February, and the envoy's favourable reports on Madero, were offset by the `orders' Madero sent to Morelos: Zapata, it appeared, was to be only the number three ranking politico in the state, behind the feckless Patricio Leyva and Torres Burgos himself. It soon became clear that Leyva was out of the reckoning, and for the time being Zapata accepted the political suzerainty of Torres Burgos. When governor Escandon started bringing in more rurales, Zapata decided the time for military action had come. On to March he, Torres Burgos and Rafael Merino discussed the final details of the uprising, using the annual fair at Cuautla as cover. Next day Zapata led a revolt at nearby Villa de Ayala, disarmed the police and harangued the crowd about Madero's Plan of San Luis Potosi, ending his speech with the slogan: `Down with the haciendas! Long live the pueblos!'
On 12 March armed rebels spread out along the Cuautla river - where Zapata earlier in life used to drive his mules - gathering in more volunteers. Making their camp in the hills, they then swept into the neighbouring state of Puebla, garnering more recruits as they went. Though at first Torres Burgos still retained nominal leadership, Zapata was the master strategist. His long-term aim was to take Cuautla, from which he could take the state capital at Cuernavaca and then control the road to Mexico City and all routes to the south. First, however, he had to train his raw recruits and blood them in battle. He took them on guerrilla raids below a line drawn from Jojutla to Yecapixtla, giving them easy targets and building up morale by assaults on outnumbered police forces. He intended to strike at Cuautla as soon as his own forces were strong enough and Cuautla itself weakened by the loss of troops Diaz would surely have to pull out to deal with the revolt in Chihuahua.
Zapata's tatterdemalion army made up in commitment, zeal and revolutionary elan what it lacked in training and equipment. Foreign observers in Morelos, like Rosa King in Cuernavaca, were patronising about the peasants in their white shirts and trousers, their mock-military habit of pulling multicoloured socks over their trouser legs as if going on a hike, their half-starved, spavined horses, and the motley selection of firearms, some of them flintlock muskets dug out of attics or unearthed in pawn shops. Eyebrows were also raised at the number of women soldiers (soldaderas) serving in the peasant army, some wearing pretty dresses across which bandoleros were slung. However, Zapata's charisma and the revolutionary willpower of his men counted for more than mere weaponry. They loved his economical oratory - `We have begged from the outside not one bullet, not one rifle, not one peso; we have taken it all from the enemy' - and most of all, the slogan he invented, which would be appropriated by La Pasionaria in the Spanish Civil War: `It is better to die on your feet than live on your knees.'
Zapata's slow, methodical approach did not please Torres Burgos, who intemperately linked up with Tepepa and his group, declaring that they were good enough to take on federal troops. Zapata expressed his misgivings, but Torres Burgos overruled him and ordered an immediate attack on Jojutla. Governor Escandon panicked and pulled his troops out of the town on 24 March, leaving only a few snipers to oppose the rebels. A new convert to Zapata's cause, a young Mexico City lawyer named Octavio Paz Solorzano, saw Zapata in action against one of these sharpshooters. From the town hall someone took a pot-shot at Zapata, an easy target, mounted as he was on his favourite horse - a powerful dark chestnut given to him by the parish priest of Axochiapan - and chomping the trademark cigar he always had in his mouth, even in battle. Enraged, Zapata rode into the town hall in pursuit of his would-be assassin, mounting the staircase to the upper rooms on his charger.
The rebels soon showed how much they were in need of Zapata's steadying hand. Torres Burgos, who had overruled Zapata, was now in turn snubbed by Tepepa, whose men refused to take orders from anyone but their chief. In defiance of Torres Burgos they looted and sacked wholesale in Jojutla, a prime target being businesses belonging to the hated Spaniards. In disgust Torres Burgos threw up his command, but on the way back to Villa de Ayala he and his two sons were caught by federal troops (they were literally caught napping, arrested while taking a siesta) and executed out of hand. Perhaps sobered by this event, Tepepa backed the majority of rebel leaders in forthwith electing Zapata `Supreme Chief of the Revolutionary Movement of the South'.
Not all the gachupines learned the obvious lesson from the sack of Jojutla. A Spaniard named Carriles, hated both for his nationality and for being administrator of the Chinameca hacienda, foolishly challenged Zapata to attack the hacienda, boasting that he had enough men and guns to swat aside this military flea. Incensed by the insult, Zapata sent his own handpicked units against Chinameca. The assault was completely successful and was the first exploit to make Zapata the hero of a corrido. The sack of Chinameca also enabled him to provision his army thoroughly. As he moved on through the smaller towns of Morelos, more and more men, attracted
by his growing reputation and caught up in the euphoria of regaining lands and anti-Spanish xenophobia, or simply having nothing to lose, swelled his numbers; significantly, the high wageearners in the foreign-owned enterprises held aloof.
Despite his magniloquent title of Supreme Chief, Zapata did not yet have undisputed sway over all local leaders in Morelos and still less, at this stage, in neighbouring states. His rivals saw clearly enough that, if the revolt in the south was successful - which seemed more likely as weeks went by - whoever had the title of military supremo would almost certainly be the next state governor. Zapata had the inside track, for he alone had received significant financial backing - from Rodolfo Magana, a middle-class revolutionary, who `grubstaked' him to the tune of io,ooo pesos - and he also had other advantages: nobody had his long-standing record, his reputation, and no one else was so trusted by villagers. However, like Villa, he was a charismatic leader dependent on prestige; he was only as good as his last exploit. None the less, nobody was surprised when on 14 April Madero's new agent in Morelos officially designated Zapata as Madero's principal representative in the state.