Villa and Zapata: A History of the Mexican Revolution

by Frank McLynn

  There followed yet another conference between Madero and Zapata, in Cuautla, and zapatistas began handing in their arms. However, when the 48-hour truce expired, Huerta advanced and occupied Yautepec. Zapata was in an impossible position: he had to resist this or lose all credibility and see himself supplanted by other revolutionary leaders. Declaring that his aim was `to reduce Zapata to the last extremity, even hang him or throw him out of the country', Huerta advanced towards Cuautla; his vanguard was reported approaching even as the zapatistas in the city were laying down their arms. Zapata read this as treachery by Madero and was inclined to acquiesce when his brother Eufemio suggested they shoot `that little dwarf Madero'.

  Madero was reduced to impotently firing off another missive to Mexico City, insisting that his will, not de la Barra's, should be done in Morelos. He left for the capital, promising Zapata that all would be well. On his arrival he found it impossible to locate de la Barra, who avoided him and refused to speak to him on the telephone. This was Madero's chance to denounce de la Barra publicly and expose all his treachery and double-dealing, but the little man merely blustered in private to his associates. Astonishingly, given that his own credibility was on the line, he did not pursue de la Barra but weakly departed for Yucatan on the campaign trail. This was the last straw for Zapata. He concluded, reasonably enough, that Madero had been playing him false all along. He never forgave him and ceased to believe in him at any level.

  Any chance of avoiding conflict in Morelos disappeared when Ambrosio Figueroa occupied Jojutla and executed sixty zapatistas there. In response Zapata issued a manifesto on 27 August, explaining to the people of Morelos that the outbreak of hostilities was the result of blatant aggression by the federal government. Prompted by his brother Raul, Madero vainly attempted mediation, but at a Cabinet meeting on 29 August, de la Barra, heartened by the way Madero had turned tail and fled to Yucatan, ordered `the active pursuit and arrest of Zapata', who was now an outlaw in all but name. Zapata replied with defiance, telling de la Barra that any blood spilt henceforth would be on his head.

  Having occupied Cuautla, Huerta sent a commando squad to try to snatch Zapata at the Chinameca hacienda, but the operation was badly bungled. Ambrosio Figueroa, deeply resentful of Huerta's presence on `his' territory, had had the same idea and also sent a snatch squad to Chinameca. The Figueroa commander decided to charge in past the hacienda guards, who opened fire. Zapata immediately intuited what was afoot, ran out of the main compound and made his escape through the hacienda grounds via a maze of cane fields at the back. He then put eighty miles between himself and his pursuers in a gruelling 72-hour trek that saw him emerge in a Puebla mountain town a long way south. The enraged Huerta asked de la Barra for plenipotentiary powers to wipe out a `nest of bandits' and was given them.

  It was not just the Figueroas who resented Huerta. The Morelos planters too were gnashing their teeth, since Huerta's repressive strongarm methods were converting hosts of waverers and non-politicals to Zapatismo and thus making their own position more precarious. Meanwhile Zapata was raising a considerable force on the Puebla/ Guerrero borders. In a new manifesto he called for free elections, denounced the political illegitimacy of the governors of Morelos, Puebla, Guerrero and Oaxaca, demanded the postponement of the autumn presidential elections, plus political amnesty and agrarian reform. De la Barra tried to blunt the impact of this declaration by announcing that he agreed to political amnesty in general, but not for `rebel criminals' - that is, Zapata.

  Huerta then advanced into south-eastern Puebla and Zapata enticed him on, stretching his lines of communication. In October, feinting with a fake retreat into southern Puebla, Zapata launched an attack on Huerta's flank with 300 veterans. Covering vast tracts through littleknown trails, the guerrillas then reappeared in eastern Morelos, where discontented villagers flocked to join them, swelling numbers to 1,500. After threatening Cuautla, Zapata's mobile army then moved into Mexico State, gathering up more and more recruits. On 22-23 October zapatistas overran villages in the Federal District, just fifteen miles from the Zocalo itself. All Mexico thrilled to the exploit. Jose Maria Lozano, most eloquent of Congressmen, put it well: `Emiliano Zapata is no longer a man, he is a symbol.'

  Zapata's sensational mobile raid through four states coincided with Madero's election as president. Anyone but Madero would have insisted on taking power immediately Diaz left, but his exaggerated concern for constitutional niceties meant that he spent five months as a lame duck, refusing to purge the old porfirista guard and allowing it to consolidate its power. In this crucial five-month period he lost the support of Zapata and Orozco for ever. Sensing Madero's declining popularity, Bernardo Reyes returned from exile and contested the election, posing as a new Diaz, a strongman who would guarantee order and prosperity. However, once Reyes realised he could not beat Madero, he resigned from the presidential race and settled in Texas to plot revolts. The Americans arrested him and his supporters, but he escaped, slipped across the border, tried to raise a revolt in the desert, failed, and ended up surrendering to the rurales on Christmas Day 191 I. If anyone but Madero had been president, Reyes would have been executed for treason, but instead he was taken to a military prison in Mexico City, where he lived in some style.

  Madero did not have much to beat in the October election. The Magon brothers remained in the USA, pointlessly (if accurately) denouncing Madero as a bourgeois opportunist, but the magonistas had no electoral clout; as Madero's supporters pointed out, they were hardly the stuff of which revolutionary heroes were made, and their sole accomplishment in igio-II was to capture the town of Mexicali in Baja California, the state which had the distinction of experiencing least violence in the Mexican Revolution. In the end, the main electoral opposition to Madero came from the Catholics, but they could make only slight headway against the little man with the bowler hat. In a free and fair presidential election, probably the first in Mexico's history despite the predictable opposition cries of `foul' and `fix', Madero secured 98 per cent of the vote and his running mate, Pino Suarez, got 53 per cent as vice-president.

  This thumping electoral mandate did not improve Madero's performance as a politician. Instead of dealing firmly with his many enemies, he published (pseudonymously) a Spiritualist Manual, discussing politics purely in terms of high-flown concepts plucked from his beloved Mahabharata. His Cabinet was the kind some philosopher, trying to find a Hegelian unity through the fusion of opposites, might have selected, not a credible working group selected by a real politician. Far from believing in the art of the possible, Madero seemed never to hit a realistic mark; he either shrank from reality or tried to vault straight past it. He allowed press freedom, but was rewarded with lampoons and insults. He was criticised for every conceivable fault: for being short, uxorious and lacking gravitas; for deferring to his parents; for being friendly to Zapata; for being a mason, vegetarian and spiritualist; even for his love of dancing and for going up in an aeroplane. The newspapers bit the hand of the man who freed them from Diaz's censorship, but Madero, at least at first, refused to gag them with another ley mordaza.

  Beyond these superficial expressions of spite and bile, there were authentic criticisms to which Madero was genuinely vulnerable. He alienated the people who had fought for him, while truckling to those who had fought against him, hated him and would never be reconciled to him. His was the classic fate of pleasing nobody and falling between two stools. He did not please the hacendados, army officers, bureaucrats and political bosses, and he bitterly disappointed peasants, sharecroppers, vaqueros, artisans, proletarians and debt peons. If forced to choose between the propertied and the dispossessed, Madero invariably opted for the former, if only to reassure them that he was `sound' on private property and wealth. It is said that the one thing that infuriated him more than any other was to find that many revolutionaries had expropriated lands and given the owners IOUs which read: `Don Pancho Madero will pay it all.'

  Madero found it impossible to solve any
of the problems bequeathed to him by Diaz. On land reform he was particularly vacuous, for he announced that the state would not expropriate land - rather it would return real estate to the hacendados or compensate them - but would look to the market for a solution, when everyone knew the market could not deliver agrarian reform, since Diaz had already carved up all the public lands and given them away for a song. The logical conclusion for the zapatistas and others was to work for Madero's downfall - something the Right was already trying to accomplish. On debt peonage Madero was worse than useless. Although its abolition was official government policy, his weak provincial governors could not make their writs run against the entrenched elites of plantation owners. Where these elites point-blank refused to cooperate with even the mildest maderista reforms, Madero, lacking the stomach for a fight, simply shrugged his shoulders and looked elsewhere. In any case, land reform always conflicted with social order, and in Madero's book order always came first. This was why he found it easy to impose order in the deep south: in Yucatan, Chiapas, Tabasco and Oaxaca life returned to normal as in the Diaz days, with the plantation owners firmly in power.

  Madero's presidency was in many ways the continuation of the Porfiriato by other means. Self-confessedly uninterested in agrarian reform, he failed to make his mark even in the areas where he was interested, such as education and finance. Economic reform was ruled out because the state governments were all in debt through the cost of maintaining garrisons. Forever caught between two fires in every arena he entered, Madero had to navigate between provincial demands for funds and a retrenching, deflationary Congress. Scholars debate the soundness of the Mexican economy in the Madero period, but the president's failure cannot be set down to economic causes. Mostly he lacked the will and elan for taking on any significant opposition. He detested drunkenness and bullfighting, but did not dare to tamper with the pleasures of the masses.

  Madero was just as feckless when it came to military problems. He found it utterly impossible to integrate revolutionary and regular Army units and structures, both because recent enmities and hostilities were too strong and because the revolutionaries regarded the old guard as bogus maderistas, johnny-come-latelies who had joined Madero only when he was certain to win. Guerrilla leaders particularly objected to being fused in military hierarchies where they were expected to take orders from people who had done no fighting, and young warriors resented the fact that Madero gave most of the plums to the middle-aged. In the end, Madero could not get enough recruits for the Army, and was forced to introduce compulsory military service and press-gangs, Diaz's leva in all but name.

  Above all, Madero could never extinguish the old culture of reflex violence and casual atrocity he had inherited from Diaz. The ley fuga continued to flourish; the Army continued to expose the corpses of rebels `as a warning'; in Guerrero, Ambrosio Figueroa had a journalist executed simply for writing an article in praise of Zapata; in Puebla, federal troops machine-gunned more than loo maderistas even after Madero had been elected president.

  Yet Madero's victory in the election of 1911 did at least mean the end of de la Barra and, in Morelos, of Huerta. Zapata's great October campaign meant he could retire from the fray with honour if peace terms were forthcoming, and at first it seemed they were. Madero issued a public letter in his home state of Coahuila on the eve of the poll, saying that when he was president there would be a pacific settlement of the Morelos rising. Gustavo Madero, who had always realised the value of the zapatista movement as a counterweight to the would-be putschists like Bernardo Reyes, again made contact with Zapata, bringing the new president's fraternal greetings. Madero's agent Robles Dominguez went south with an attractive-looking deal that would clear the Figueroas out of Morelos, even their stronghold in Jojutla, and make the state over in its entirety to Zapata.

  In this all too brief interregnum in autumn 1911, before misunderstandings once more took over, Zapata was able to devote a few precious weeks to his private life and take the honeymoon that had been so violently interrupted in August, when Huerta burst in upon Morelos. For in August 1911 Zapata had married, this time with full legal panoply. The bride was Josefa Espejo, one of the daughters of a prosperous Ayala livestock dealer who died in 1909. Before the old man died, Zapata seems to have bid for Josefa's hand and been turned down, on the grounds that he had no solid wealth in real estate. With the patriarch dead, and Zapata a general of the Revolution, there was no longer an obstacle. Emiliano's many earlier affairs and even his common-law marriages would not have been considered an impediment to wedlock in Morelos society; the macho code endorsed a `boys will be boys' attitude to sexuality.

  Marriage in Morelos was an institution entered into primarily for the purpose of fixing property, lands and title deeds on heirs; it fixed the roles of the powerful in society, making clear who the leading lights in a community were and who their legitimate children: in a word it was a solemn contract concerned with money, bequests and succession. Despite the Catholic ceremony, the teachings of the Church had little weight: marriage was certainly not about the `allayment of mutual concupiscence' and it was not even about the procreation of children; still less was it concerned with `love'. Zapata already had children by at least one woman and would not have remotely imagined that marriage committed him to sexual fidelity; nor would any Mexican woman have expected monogamous constancy. None the less, in a solemn marriage there were certain rituals concerning courtship and engagement that had to be gone through and that were taken seriously.

  Before marriage, the girl of good family, who was always a virgin, would meet her future husband only under heavy chaperonage. Their conversation would be a pat, ritualised formulaic affair, in which they would exchange dichos - traditional sayings or cliches, which were meant to ward off `improper' declarations of passion. `Birds of a feather flock together', `A monkey in other clothes is still a monkey', `The eyes are the windows of the soul', `Beauty is in the eye of the beholder', `Death is always preferable to dishonour', might be some of the exchanges in the rather less than Attic dialectic. The lover would then have musicians serenade his lady at night, returning in a state of drunkenness at about 5 a.m. to sing las mananitas or the morning song.

  Zapata married Josefa in a Catholic church, as would have been expected in Morelos. We know little of her, and photographic evidence of Mexican women of this period is unhelpful, since most snapshots show them looking particularly mournful and dolorous, as if wishing they were a thousand miles away. Perhaps significant of a macho society is the formal wedding photograph showing Zapata sitting while his wife stands. Anecdotal accounts of the Zapata wedding are unhelpful, since they cannot even agree on what Emiliano was wearing: some say he went to the wedding ceremony in a black charro outfit, embroidered with silver, others that he was married in the ill-fitting business suit in which he appears on the photograph.

  Domestic matters did not detain Zapata long, because a new and unexpected crisis arose in November. Madero, always a hopeless politician, unwontedly tried duplicity only to find his whole tangled web ensnaring himself most of all. He issued a strong statement, designed to appease the hawks in Congress, saying that he would deal uncompromisingly with Zapata. His official letter, handed to Robles Dominguez was harshly worded: `Let Zapata know that the only thing I can accept is that he immediately surrender unconditionally and that all his soldiers immediately lay down their arms. In this case I will pardon his soldiers for the crime of rebellion and he will be given passports so that he can go and settle temporarily outside the state. Inform him that his rebellious attitude is damaging my government greatly and that I cannot tolerate that it continue under any circumstances, that if he truly wants to serve me, to obey me is the only way he can do it. Let him know that he need fear nothing for his life if he lays down his arms immediately.'

  In private he offered Zapata a more favourable deal, which was to be communicated orally by Robles Dominguez, together with an assurance that the sabre-rattling communique was purely for pub
lic consumption. The plan misfired badly, because the Army commander in Cuernavaca would not let Robles Dominguez proceed into Morelos. Zapata meanwhile read Madero's public text, saw military preparations being made, and drew the obvious conclusion. He wrote back blisteringly to Madero: `You can begin counting the days, because in a month I will be in Mexico City with 20,000 men and I will have the pleasure of coming to Chapultepec ... and hanging you from one of the tallest trees in the forest.' Fighting broke out again and Zapata retreated, heading into the mountains of Puebla, once more sweeping up volunteers as he went.

  Zapata continued to brood on Madero's treachery. This was the worst crime of all in his book. He said: `I can pardon those who kill or steal because perhaps they do it out of greed. But I never pardon a traitor.' In late November, at Ayoxustla, a small mountain town in south-eastern Puebla, Zapata issued the manifesto on which he would fight for the next seven years. The famous Plan of Ayala utterly repudiated Madero, spoke of his treachery and tyranny and recognised Pascual Orozco as the legitimate chief executive in Mexico. The motif of treachery was still uppermost in his mind, for the word `betrayal' (traicion) occurs five times in the manifesto.

  The Plan of Ayala made Zapata out to be a perfect Ishmael: `I am resolved to struggle against everything and everybody.' The joint work of Zapata and Otilio Montano, the Plan began from the premise that peaceful change was an illusion. Zapata told his intimates that his ancestors who asked for justice always suffered one of three fates: `shot while escaping' (the ley fuga); being drafted into the military; or banishment to Yucatan or Quintana Roo. One of his sayings had a particular relevance: `You must never ask, holding a hat in your hand, for justice from the government of tyrants, but only pick up a gun.'