Villa and Zapata: A History of the Mexican Revolution

by Frank McLynn

  The Plan contained detailed proposals for land reform. First, there should be restitution of lands seized by hacendados or caciques; then there should be expropriation of one-third of all large estates, assuming a peaceful transfer of assets; if there was armed resistance by landowners, the remaining two-thirds would be expropriated to pay for war indemnities and widows' pensions. The Plan has been described hyperbolically as `communism by a man who did not know he was a communist', but in fact it was not even socialism - there was no proposal to expropriate all haciendas as a matter of policy - merely the restoration of lands illegally seized, yoked to a dream of a community of small independent landowners.

  In alarm at this `extremism', Madero sent another mission in December. This one got through, but when the envoys met Zapata on the Morelos/Puebla border all they offered was the absurd `pledge' that Zapata personally could leave the country in complete safety to go into exile; nothing was said about the problems of Morelos and there was not even an offer of amnesty for his men. This was the apogee of the dialogue of the deaf which always characterised relations between Zapata and Madero. The two men could never agree on anything: for Madero the Revolution had ended when he took power, but for Zapata it would end only when there was true and lasting agrarian reform. Zapata could see only Madero's betrayal, and Madero could see only Zapata's pig-headed obstinacy.

  Zapata was convinced that Madero's downfall was only a matter of time; until then he would keep fighting and hope to make a deal with the new government. He formed a junta of zapatista chiefs committed to the Plan of Ayala, even though not all the Morelos warlords came under his direct orders; Genovevo de la 0 still preferred to operate independently. By mid January there were zapatista revolts in the states of Tlaxcala, Puebla, Mexico, Guerrero and Michoacan. In Morelos itself the situation was complicated. Zapata took the south-east as his personal fief, leaving his colleague Jose Trinidad Ruiz, a member of the junta, to control the north-east and use it as a jumping-off point for raids into Mexico State. The usual pattern presented itself: federal troops controlled the cities and large towns, but the zapatista guerrillas, albeit still short of arms and money, ranged free over the countryside.

  Mexico City tried to portray Zapatismo as a played-out movement on its last legs, but events in late January 19 12 showed how potent a force it still was. A see-saw battle took place in northern Morelos between the federals and Genovevo de la 0, with the advantage shifting first one way, then the other. De la 0 came close to capturing Cuernavaca, then the federals hit back with a vicious counteroffensive on de la O's village of Santa Maria on 26 January. When this offensive ground to a halt short of its objective, de la 0 counterattacked, and for a week there was a series of terrible slugging battles, each one lasting at least four hours each day. From Cuernavaca observers could see the black smoke from gutted ruins, the plumes sent up by exploding artillery shells, and could hear the distant clatter and stutter of machine-guns.

  Madero once more tried the tack of conciliation, and sent his brother Gustavo south to try to patch things up. Circumstance rather than sentiment lay behind the move, for by this time Pascual Orozco had launched a great rebellion in the north. At first fortune favoured Madero, for Ambrosio Figueroa abruptly resigned as governor of Morelos in January, finally conceding that he could not impose his Guerrero henchmen on the state. As the new governor Madero appointed Francisco Naranjo, a northerner from Nuevo Leon with a reputation as a political radical; he was a respected figure and a friend of Diaz Soto y Gama, a leftist intellectual who would later be a member of Zapata's `think tank'. Naranjo said that on his arrival: `I found that Morelos lacked three things - first ploughs, second books and third equity. And it had more than enough latifundias, taverns and bosses.'

  Yet Naranjo's problem was that he was really Madero writ small, faced by the same dilemmas and caught between the same two fires: his plans for land reform foundered on the intransigence of the planters, and his plans for law and order were opposed by the zapatistas. De la 0 rejected Naranjo's radical credentials and issued a public challenge to him by declaring that he would blow up any train that entered Morelos. On 6 February he resumed his attack on Cuernavaca, which had nearly fallen to him the month before, and then the federals escalated the conflict by burning de la O's village, Santa Maria, to the ground; among those who died in the flames was de la O's daughter. This was the kind of mindless atrocity that set back hopes of reconciliation in Morelos by years. Swooping on the village in great force on 9 February, the federals first doused all the houses and buildings with kerosene and set light to them. They then compounded their vandalism by firing artillery shells into the surrounding woods, turning them into an inferno also. By evening, with glowing embers and a coating of ash everywhere, Santa Maria looked like a second Pompeii overwhelmed by Vesuvius.

  In despair at this atrocity which he had not authorised, Naranjo appealed to Madero, but the president either ignored the import of his message or overruled him by sending to Morelos a tough, fanatical, hardline ex-Indian fighter, General Juvencio Robles, whose unspoken motto was that the only good rebel was a dead one. Robles was such a fanatic that he thought even the Morelos plantation owners were zapatistas. `All Morelos, as I understand it,' he declared, `is zapatista, and there's not a single inhabitant who doesn't believe in the false doctrines of the bandit Emiliano Zapata.' His first action was to have Zapata's sister, mother-in-law and sisters-in-law arrested and brought to Cuernavaca as hostages. His troops began shooting and arresting people at will or at Robles's whim.

  Robles had studied the `pacification' methods used by the British in the Boer War and by the US military in the Philippines - principally `resettling' villagers in concentration camps. Once entire populations had been herded into the camps, he sent out flying columns into the countryside, killing all they met, on the grounds that all non-rebels should already be in the camps. Robles then burned down the villages, so that guerrillas could not return to get food or use the houses as redoubts. On 15 February federal troops found the village of Nexpa occupied only by women, children and decrepit old men. Amid the ululations and lamentations of these people, they gutted the place, black `smoke signals' telling the guerrillas they would find no refuge in Nexpa. Other villages burned in the same way included San Rafael, Ticuman, Los Hornos, Villa de Ayala, Coajomulco and Ocotepec. Robles's men brutalised and intimidated all they met, including docile peons resident on the great estates and even hacienda managers.

  Robles's career as an incendiarist alarmed even the people he was supposed to be defending. The planters tried to find a middle way, coaxing General Leyva to go to Cuernavaca with an offer of mediation, on the grounds that he had influence with de la 0, and petitioning Robles not to burn villages for which they could vouch personally. The burning campaign was totally counterproductive, for it created new recruits for Zapata and made the zapatistas feel they had nothing to lose by staying in the field and nothing to gain from negotiating with Madero. Also, they were encouraged by news of the increasing seriousness of the Orozco rising in the north, which forced the president to withdraw troops from Morelos.

  In March Zapata coordinated a grand offensive. His agents were active as far afield as Oaxaca, where 3,000 nominally zapatista guerrillas were led by Jesus Salgado. An admirer of Zapata and ideologically committed to his programme, though not yet linked to the leader by formal alliance, Salgado found it as impossible to control his followers as Zapata did in Morelos, and the peasant uprising in Oaxaca tended to shade into banditry. However, in the Zapata heartlands, everything ran smoothly. De la 0 once more probed towards Cuernavaca, and again there were deadly daily battles of attrition with the federals, this time around Huitzilac. While guerrilla bands penned in the federal garrison at Tepoztlan, the zapatista chieftain Lorenzo Vasquez laid waste the haciendas of central Morelos. Zapata himself launched a series of devastating raids into southern and western Puebla. Robles was dazed, caught off balance and outmanoeuvred by so many simultaneous attacks, an
d his spirits sank further at news of Orozco's victory over the federals in Chihuahua on 23 March 19 12. By April Robles and his men had been forced to abandon the countryside to the zapatistas and were once again cooped up in the major towns. Madero meanwhile cut the ground from under the state's liberals by announcing there would be no land reform in Morelos until the Army had total control of the state.

  Zapata's perennial problem was that he could blow up trains, occupy towns and even defeat the federals in battle, but he lacked the strength for a knockout blow. Even so, April 1912 was good for him. On the second of the month he attacked and took Jonacatepec, the day after his men finally cracked the garrison's resistance at Tepoztlan. On 6 April he and the principal chiefs made simultaneous assaults on Tlaquiltenango, Tlaltizapan and Jojutla, managing to take them but not to hold on to them. Zapata's abiding headache was that his ammunition always ran out before the enemy's. Federal reprisals were brutal: when they re-entered Jojutla, they executed fifty zapatista `sympathisers'.

  Fighting continued almost continuously throughout the month; there was a particularly sanguinary encounter around Huitzilac, which was blown apart by shelling. In late April de la 0 closely invested Cuernavaca and set up his artillery for a bombardment. The city authorities contemplated surrender, but the expected attack never came; it was the old story of shortage of ammunition. By early May the zapatista offensive had run out of steam, or more properly out of ammunition. Stocks were so low that they had to revert to guerrilla activity, frantically trying to replenish their ordnance by theft, robbery and the black market. Zapata sent an urgent message to Orozco in Chihuahua, asking him to send ammunition via the Pacific coast of Guerrero (the Costa Chica), but Orozco was himself hard pressed because of a US arms embargo and had nothing to spare.

  Forced back on to guerrilla tactics, Zapata in late May sent some of his chiefs on an extended raid through northern and eastern Morelos while he himself publicly threatened to advance on Mexico City, in reality shifting into eastern Guerrero. De la 0 moved into Mexico State; to his great chagrin the trains between Mexico City and Cuernavaca started running to timetable again. Nothing could disguise the zapatistas' failure, and in June they were dealt four further blows: many rebels went home to plant the harvest in their villages; black market supplies of ammunition dried up when a renegade Army captain, the principal conduit, was arrested; the zapatista intelligence network in Mexico City was penetrated and broken; and in the north the Orozco rebellion started to falter. The one hopeful development was the marginalisation of Robles, as the moderates took power in Morelos following the success of the Naranjo- Leiyva faction in the municipal elections. Having tetchily refused to rein in Robles earlier, Madero was forced to shunt him out of Morelos into a command in Puebla.

  The heavy rains in June and July forced a halt in the campaigning, but on 20 July Zapata announced his presence with a vengeance. Making his closest pass to the capital yet, de la 0 attacked a train at Parres station, on the border between Mexico State and the Federal District. There were over a hundred civilian casualties, and forty troops out of the fifty-three in the escort detail were killed. As Madero called an emergency Cabinet meeting in Mexico City, Zapata himself came close to taking Jojutla and Yautepec. Frustrated with their governor for being `soft on Zapata', the new deputies in the state legislature at Cuernavaca sacked him and named a figurehead provisional governor, but it was clear to all that the new power in the land was Patricio Leyva, returned from the political dead. Madero recognised the new dispensation in the state by dismissing Robles from all military duties in the south.

  The new military commander there was a man destined to play a key role in the Mexican Revolution, General Felipe Angeles. Angeles had some sympathy for Zapata and was in a good position to follow a policy of conciliation, now that Leyva and the moderates were his civilian counterparts and co-workers, but his position was made difficult by Zapata's uncompromising response. On iz August zapatistas attacked another train, this time at Ticuman, between Yautepec and Jojutla; this time thirty civilians and thirty-six soldiers in the escort were killed. Madero cabled Angeles urgently to find a solution with all speed, but left it open whether this was to be by negotiation or military repression. Angeles opted for the olive branch. He had Zapata's in-laws released from jail and offered amnesty, encouraging guerrillas to return to their villages, ranches and haciendas.

  Angeles's new bearing was a remarkable success, and it went to his head. He boasted that all it took was intelligence, that his predecessors had been blinkered morons who could think only in terms of military occupation and repression. Huerta and Robles fumed at the insult and angrily called for Angeles to be court-martialled, but Madero was pleased with the way things were working out. Morelos seemed to be turning against Zapata, and he and de la 0 were forced out of the state, Zapata to raid in Puebla, de la 0 in Mexico State. In vain Zapata tried to get a rolling strategy going, trying to create a snowball effect that would take him into Mexico City; his efforts soon petered out in hard fighting around Tetecala and Jonacatepec. Had the moderates in the Morelos state legislature pressed on with their reform programme, they might have left Zapata and de la 0 as isolated and marginalised figures with nowhere to go; this was the period of greatest danger for the entire zapatista movement.

  Whether through overconfidence that the rebels were losing, or through pique that, despite their moderation, Zapata and de la 0 still remained at large, the moderate deputies of Morelos suddenly changed tack, began complaining that law and order was the issue in the state, and asked Madero for tough measures. At the same time the promised reform programme slackened, then fizzled out altogether. The turning point was December 1912 when Patricio Leyva became governor and instantly vetoed the proposed bills on communal property. The shelving of these reforms, on which the villagers had set their hearts, was a terrible shock and seemed like just another in a long line of government betrayals. The people of Morelos turned back to Zapata: he had been right all along and he had never wavered, never truckled.

  Zapata swung back into favour, his movement taking heart also from a new, albeit short-lived, rebellion in Veracruz in support of Felix Diaz, which made Madero pull troops out of Morelos. There was a new ruthlessness in Zapata's methods, and it seemed as if he had learned something from General Robles, the Cromwell of Morelos. His novel idea was to make the haciendas pay for the costs of his campaigns; if they refused to pay up, he simply burned down their cane fields. By the end of the year this fate had been meted out to recalcitrant owners at the haciendas of Altihuayan, Chinameca, Tenango, Treinta, Santa Ines, San Jose and San Gabriel, causing the planters losses estimated at two million pesos. Soon the hacendados saw the light and the money began to flow in. The added advantage of the new policy was that Zapata no longer needed to risk alienating the villages by asking them for funds. Moreover, by destroying the cane fields he gained recruits, since the unemployed peons had nowhere else to go but into the zapatista army.

  The planters were now in an impossible position: if they paid Zapata his `tax', they could be accused of collaborating with the enemy and arrested for treason; if they did not, Zapata would burn their crops. They begged and pleaded with Angeles to take decisive action. Forced out of conciliation mode as much by Leyva's new hard line as by the revival of Zapatismo, Angeles began to burn villages and order executions, though his was never a brutal regime on the same scale as Huerta's or Robles's. His military position was increasingly precarious, to the point where no army group less than Boo strong dared venture out of the cities. By the beginning of 1913 Zapata's fortunes had revived spectacularly. De la 0, who had no more than loo men a few months before, now had i,ooo and the same applied pro rata throughout the zapatista movement. One thing was clear. Madero could defeat Zapata if, and only if, that was the only military threat he had to deal with. As the events of 1911-12 elsewhere in Mexico showed, Zapata was in some ways the least of his worries.

  VILLA AND MADERO

  After he lef
t Madero's service, Villa went into the meat business, taking on as partners his brothers Hipolito and Antonio. With his `golden handshake' from Madero, he bought four butchers' shops, all with the latest fridges and freezers from the USA. His property included 200 horses, zoo head of cattle, 1 1 5 mules, plus fields of corn and beans; he deposited only 1,700 pesos in the bank. He settled down to life as a prosperous businessman, though his enemies and aficionados of the `black legend' say that he took part in organised crime. There is no evidence for this. There is evidence of a continuing interest in politics, for Villa told Abraham Gonzalez of his anger when Madero pressurised Gonzalez not to investigate further the notorious Banco Minero robbery. Most of all, he was angry that his veterans had not been given their furlough money or the land grants promised to them during the Revolution, and he had an intemperate interview with Gonzalez on the subject. Continuing pressure secured some cash payments from Mexico City but, as Villa wrote to remind Madero, he himself had to support the families of three of his men killed in the Revolution, as the government refused to do so.

  For most of 1911, however, Villa was taken up with his private life and love affairs. This was the year he married Luz Corral, a woman he had first met in November igio. She was a simple girl who lived with her mother in straitened circumstances in the old military colony village of San Andres. Like all households, the Corrals were asked for a `voluntary contribution' to the revolutionaries' war chest when they rose against Diaz. In despair Luz's mother went to Villa and explained her crushing poverty. Villa was sympathetic, went to the house to see for himself and agreed that the `tax' should be a nominal amount of coffee, corn and tobacco. While there he saw Luz and liked what he saw; he came next day and asked Luz to marry him. Between being the wife of a guerrilla leader and eking out a living in crushing poverty it was no contest, so she agreed. Her mother, however, did not take the same benign view of this development but, not daring to oppose Villa openly, suggested that Luz make him a shirt. She knew of her daughter's non-existent calibre as a seamstress and hoped that Villa would become disillusioned when he saw Luz's domestic incompetence. She scarcely knew her man: unlike Zapata, Villa was careless about what he wore and would certainly not have allowed a shirt to come between him and his sexual desire.