by Frank McLynn
The naive Luz Corral seems at first to have imagined she was marrying Villa on the same basis that Josefa Espejo had married Zapata in Morelos. The ceremony, in a Catholic church, may have bamboozled her, but even then she must surely have had her doubts when Villa, asked by the priest if he wanted to be confessed before the ceremony, replied that it would take too long. There must be doubts about whether Villa was ever married in any full legal sense, and the marriage to Luz Corral had no more validity than Villa's earlier espousal to Petra Espinoza in Parral. Additionally, Villa already had maybe a dozen women all over Mexico to whom he had either promised marriage or with whom he had gone through some kind of ceremony. Villa took the pragmatic line that liaisons with women were all about the satisfaction of carnal appetites, and that if women were stupid enough to want a meaningless ceremony of wedlock, he would not disappoint them. However, Villa was aware that the law formally forbade polygamy so, although he `married' dozens of women in the presence of priests or civil officials, once the liaison was consummated, he would have his men destroy all relevant marriage records and copies. In Norse mythology the goats slain in Valhalla by the warriors for their feasts were always alive again the next morning. In a similar way, Villa emerged from every honeymoon a bachelor.
Both Zapata and Villa were in effect serial polygamists. This would not have occasioned the shock in turn-of-the-century Mexico which it does in our politically correct age, but then the entire male population of Mexico would have been regarded as `misogynistic' by the standards of the twenty-first century. Villa believed in ritual courtship, compliments or piropos, gallantry and chivalric behaviour. Although he abducted women, he never raped them but waited for them to give their love freely; of course, because of the circumstances in which they found themselves, many of Villa's women acted under duress. Unlike Eufemio Zapata, he was rarely casually brutal to his women. Soledad Seanez, one of the last of his `wives' and certainly one of the most beautiful, testified that in private life Villa was as volatile as in public, terrible when in a rage, but tender and loving when in a good mood.
Throughout 1911 Villa watched with mounting impatience as everything he had fought for in Chihuahua was thrown away. Victorious in the Revolution, his men returned to their homes in peacetime to find that nothing had changed: the hacendados and oligarchs were still in control. For a year they waited patiently for Madero to keep his promises. Abraham Gonzalez, the new governor of Chihuahua, genuinely wanted real change but was frustrated at every turn. First he had to endure the long waiting period for handover of power that had so bedevilled Madero; then he was told that Madero had replaced the Chihuahuan Vasquez Gomez as his vice-presidential running mate with Pino Suarez from Yucatan - a blow to state pride; finally, when he was actually in the governor's chair, he found himself intrigued against by the CreelTerrazas clique, who still retained all their old power, and sabotaged by lack of support from Madero.
Gonzalez, a large portly man from the middle classes, who looked the embodiment of bourgeois affluence, justified the confidence Villa felt in him. He built up a genuinely trans-class political movement in Chihuahua - the only one in Mexico - but it eventually fell apart because Madero failed to back him. Gonzalez abolished company stores and jefes politicos, reformed taxes and wanted to place a law outlawing debt peonage on the statute book. His progressive taxation system - preventing anyone from owning more than 30,000 acres and distributing the rest to the land-hungry middle classes - brought him into direct collision with the Terrazases. They tried everything to blunt Gonzalez's reforming zeal: bribery, black propaganda to whip up the Americans on the other side of the Rio Grande, intrigues to get Orozco to rebel. Gonzalez stood firm: he had the trump card over the Terrazas in the form of a permanent threat to reopen the file on the Banco Minero robbery. However, what the Terrazas could not do Madero did, with a series of blundering interventions.
First, still engaged on his Sisyphean project of conciliating the old porfirista elite - which would never be reconciled to Madero, no matter what he did - he ordered Gonzalez not to reopen the Banco Minero case. The Terrazas were delighted: at a stroke Madero had removed Gonzalez's master weapon. In disgust, Gonzalez retaliated by releasing the text of Madero's letter about the Banco Minero affair to the press. Madero's next move was either stupidity, machiavellianism or sheer selfishness. He announced that the services of Gonzalez were indispensable as his minister of the interior and he was to come to Mexico City. Although Gonzalez continued to be governor while `on sabbatical', he lost caste in Chihuahua since absentee governors were, by an inevitable association of ideas, the mark par excellence of the Porfiriato. In Gonzalez's absence, his feeble deputy allowed himself to be browbeaten and dominated by the Creel-Terrazas clique.
Particularly after Gonzalez departed to Mexico City, Villa found his position in the state increasingly uncomfortable. Every day he listened to complaints from his veterans and he sympathised: why should they have to return to the status quo ante Diaz and then be pursued by the rurales simply for taking from the haciendas what was their due anyway, and for the bagatelle of cattle rustling. The problem was that Madero had given Villa no power whatever, so that when he spoke up for his men, he tended to get snarled up in vociferous, and potentially violent, clashes with local authorities, especially in Parral where the military commander, Jose de Luz Soto, a veteran of the French wars, hated him like poison. A crisis arose when two of Villa's men, accused of banditry, died in a shootout while resisting arrest by Soto's troops. Villa and Soto appealed to Gonzalez, who initially sided with Villa. Soto then evidently appealed to the General Staff and Huerta in the capital, for the next thing was that a highly minatory letter from Soto made Gonzalez change his mind. Villa then appealed over Gonzalez's head straight to Madero. The president responded with an emollient but non-committal letter, so an angry Villa went public, voicing his complaints to the press. He attacked Soto, without naming him, as a corrupt old man, ridden with hypocrisy and ambition and condemned those who protected him - an obvious jibe at Madero.
By the end of 1911 northern Mexico was a tinderbox. In the summer Sonora was again consumed by a Yaqui war. Fighting for an agrarian programme very similar to Zapata's, the Yaquis rose up once more and fought a brilliant guerrilla campaign. Defeated once, the Yaquis went on the warpath again when Orozco rose in Chihuahua in 1912, and by 1913 had Sonora in the grip of the most serious Indian rebellion yet. As in Morelos, Madero's initial instincts towards conciliation were subverted by hardline landowners and military commanders, who refused to yield an inch to the Yaquis and fought a war of extermination. Durango was also highly unstable by the end of 1911. Another quasi-zapatista group, taking its inspiration from Morelos and operating similarly, even down to the seasonal dispersal for the harvest, opened yet another guerrilla front, and was as difficult to extirpate as its counterparts in the south.
However, it was Pascual Orozco's rising in Chihuahua which lit the fuse that would eventually detonate the Madero presidency. For months the discontented revolutionary veterans had been hoping that Orozco, widely considered a more significant figure in the state than Abraham Gonzalez, would take the field against Madero. This was also in Zapata's mind when he paid tribute to `the illustrious General Pascual Orozco' in the Plan of Ayala in November 1911. Gradually in the north a cult developed around Orozco as a Messianic `expected one'; women gave themselves to him as to a guru; mountains and rivers were named after him, and it was said that there was even a commemorative Orozco spoon minted somewhere. However, Orozco proceeded cautiously; when Bernardo Reyes rebelled and called on him for support, he called in vain.
Orozco's caution disappointed his disciples and at first they turned to other leaders. The first rebels to raise the standard were the followers of Francisco Gomez Vasquez, the man Madero had humiliated by dropping him as his vice-presidential running mate. The vazquistas were initially no more than a fleabite, but there was a danger that their example could be contagious. Then, in February 1912, a grou
p of disgruntled rurales, about to be mustered out, fired shots in the air and called out `Viva Zapata'. Orozco was on notice that if he did not act soon, his mantle as deliverer would pass to others. Throughout Chihuahua there were gun battles, riots and lootings, including the sacking of government offices in Ciudad Juarez. Abraham Gonzalez hurried north from Mexico City with 300,000 pesos to buy off the malcontents and tried to form an army to restore order in Juarez. The revolt in the north gained in ferocity, but still Orozco did not commit himself. He was determined to be on the winning side; as one of his critics said: `He is for Pascual Orozco, first, last and always.' Finally he got the nod from the Terrazas: they would bankroll his movement if he removed the `communistic' Gonzalez.
Issues and motives in the Orozco rising were confused and complex. The social historians of Mexico tend to take a broad-brush approach, seeing the simultaneous opposition of Orozco and Zapata to Madero as the conflict of urban, middle-class, educated, national, progressive sectors, based on universal suffrage and rational legal authority, ranged against rural, plebeian, illiterate, parochial, nostalgic, backward-looking groups based on traditional and charismatic authority. Even more tempting is to see the Zapata and Orozco movements as the inevitable `second stage' of all true revolutions, when the bourgeois victors of the first stage (the overthrow of the old regime) confront the lower orders whose aspirations they have unwittingly aroused. Such a neat schema has some validity in the case of Zapata, but is totally inadequate as an explanation of the Orozco rising.
The northern rising of March 1912 was above all the cynical manoeuvring by different personalities and power groups for control of Chihuahua. At the simplest level, it was a three-way fight between conservatives (such as the Terrazas) representing the oligarchy and the old Diaz system, Gonzalez and Madero representing the middle classes, and the dispossessed looking to Orozco. To defeat Madero and Gonzalez, the Terrazas first had to make common cause with Orozco; clearly their intention was to defeat Madero first, then turn on Orozco. The oligarchs, in short, were playing the old game of divide and rule: use Orozco's wretched of the earth against Madero's huddled masses and, through Orozco, control the entire revolt from behind the scenes. The Terrazas and their ilk saw themselves in a `no lose' situation: whoever won, hundreds of rebellious peasants would have been killed and they would emerge as the tertius gaudens.
Orozco's trans-class alliance of Left and Right, with its army of cowboys, smallholders, villagers, Indians, frontiersmen and bandits bankrolled by the oligarchy represented the attempt by the Terrazases to use a `strongman' to do what they could not do themselves; but what were Orozco's real motives? Both he and Vasquez Gomez denounced Madero for not implementing the Plan of San Luis, but this was mere ideological window dressing. Some say that money was the principal motive with Orozco, that he had expected a pay-off from Madero of 250,000 pesos and a Cabinet post, and had been fobbed off with 10o,oo0 pesos and the nugatory role of military commander in Chihuahua. Certainly Orozco's propaganda organs repeatedly alleged that the Maderos were financially corrupt, drawing particular attention to the 375,000 pesos `loan' from the Franco-Spanish consortium that Gustavo Madero repaid from an `emergency' fund, once his brother was in the presidential palace. Orozco, unlike Villa, was interested in money, and the Terrazas were the right people for such a man to deal with.
Had Orozco sold out, or was he in turn manipulating the oligarchy? It is true that he told his supporters in no circumstances to lay a finger on Terrazas territory or property, but then he could hardly bite the hand that fed him. The real answer is that Orozco never sold out, for the simple reason that he never bought in. He was always an ambitious political adventurer, using whatever weapons and whatever social classes came to hand. During the siege of Ciudad Juarez he had had behind-thescenes meetings with Diaz's agents, and it is likely that he would have supped with whatever devil helped him towards his ultimate ambition: occupying the presidential chair. As a final twist, there are those who maintain that revolutionary leaders among the orozquistas had no illusions about Orozco and in turn were using him.
When Orozco at last appeared in open rebellion, Gonzalez faced a dilemma. He badly needed Pancho Villa's help, but if he made him his strong right arm, Villa might desert to Orozco, his old chief. On the other hand, to give Villa no command would be an insult and might drive him into Orozco's arms. Gonzalez solved the dilemma by appointing Villa colonel in the forces earmarked to suppress Orozco but giving him only 250 men. At the end of February 1912 Villa and his men rode into the mountains of western Chihuahua. Soon their numbers grew to 50o and, because of the tight discipline Villa insisted on, they were very popular wherever they went; in Luz Corral's home town of San Andres, there was heard for the first time a cry that would soon echo around Mexico: Viva Villa!
Villa's support for Gonzalez and Madero has puzzled some historians, who see his interests more naturally aligning him with Orozco. Alan Knight speaks of a `naive personalist ethic' and talks of `the Orozco-Villa vendetta, a violent subplot in the drama of the northern Revolution'. It is true that Villa had never liked Orozco and resented his cult of personality; moreover, an alliance with him was out of the question now that Creel and the Terrazas were backing him. There was also the pragmatic consideration that if he stayed neutral, he would probably end up hated and despised by both sides and a universal target. But, most of all, despite his misgivings about their political programmes, Villa was still psychologically in thrall to Gonzalez and Madero because of the understanding way they had treated him in 1910.
Gonzalez ordered Villa to seize Chihuahua City, but Orozco was too fast for him and got there first. Villa retreated to the Valle de Zaragoza and was on the sidelines until the end of March. At this stage Orozco looked unbeatable. He had a larger army than Zapata in Morelos, had financial backing from the oligarchy, and was well armed and equipped, able to import guns and materiel from across the US border. His weakness - and it was to prove fatal - was that he did not enjoy the mass support the zapatistas enjoyed. None the less, in these early weeks Orozco was euphoric and confident, and there was already wild talk of a march on Mexico City.
Another blow for Madero was further sabre-rattling by the USA. Taft, in effect, now did to Madero what he had earlier done to Diaz, demoralising the uncommitted in Mexico by ordering another massive mobilisation on the Mexican border; this time he sent no less than 34,000 men to the Rio Grande.
At first Orozco was as good as his boasts. A 6,ooo-strong federal army advanced north from Torreon under the command of Madero's defence secretary, Jose Gonzalez Salas. On the afternoon of 23 March, at Rellano - the southern edge of the desolate Bolson de Mapimi desert region, previously famous as a stronghold for Apache raiders - the federals were surprised by the orozquistas. Emilio Campa, a former maderista who had joined Orozco, introduced the second great military innovation of the Revolution (the dynamite bomb had been the first) by pioneering the use of the `loco loco' or mkquina loca. Packing a locomotive with dynamite, he sent it like a missile straight into the federal vanguard; it killed sixty men outright and caused chaos, confusion and finally panic. The orozquistas, fighting under their notorious red flag, which gave them their usual nickname, the colorados, then closed in for the kill. In the rout that followed there were many ugly scenes. One federal. battalion mutinied and killed its two officers; other mutineers slew the chief of staff. Gonzalez Salas, seeing the ruin of all his hopes, committed suicide. On paper the defeat was not so bad - total federal casualties were around 300 - but the shattering effect on morale made many think Madero was doomed.
Orozco now controlled all of Chihuahua except the city of Parral, to which Villa fled after the disaster at Rellano. Orozco at once set up his own government in Chihuahua and issued bonds to the value of 1.2 million pesos to finance the campaign. He suppressed the maderista newspapers and issued his own scandal-sheets which poured scorn on Madero at every level, from his short stature to his urban manners and the mere fact that he lived in a c
ity. Orozco shared Zapata's view that the countryside was the repository of virtue, and the city of vice. He even allowed the Terrazas to peddle the favourite oligarchic line, which took over the Catholic idea that spiritualism involved contact with the forces of darkness; the oligarchic gloss on this was that a spiritualist proposing land reform `must be' in contact with the devil.
On 25 March Orozco promulgated his manifesto, which called for the resignation of Madero and Pino Suarez. More radical aspects of the Plan, which drew an endorsement from Zapata in the south, were the call for higher wages for workers, restrictions on child labour, the nationalisation of all railways, the abolition of company stores and the demand for agrarian reform. A few days later Orozco declared grandiloquently that no opposition to him remained in Chihuahua `save that of the highwayman Francisco Villa, on which point I congratulate myself'. As soon as he took Parral, he intended to march on Mexico City. One obstacle remained: the US arms embargo passed by Congress on 13 March. Although the Hearst press urged President Taft to back the strongman who could fill the void left by Diaz, Taft had no choice but to cut off all arms supplies except to the legally constituted government of Madero; had he not done so, Madero would have been justified in regarding it as a hostile act. The Orozco movement thereafter evinced signs of anti-Americanism; Orozco himself had no intrinsic anti-gringo feelings, but always turned nasty when thwarted.
