by Frank McLynn
In Parral, Villa's old nemesis Soto came out for Orozco, but loyalties in the garrison were divided, and not all felt like heeding the dictates of the military commander. When fierce fighting broke out among the soldiers, Villa, who had been hovering nearby, saw his opportunity, slipped into the city with just sixty men and tipped the balance against Soto. Contrary to expectations, Villa did not execute Soto but sent him down to Madero in Mexico City under armed guard. Then he set about the defence of Parral, impressing the businessmen and foreign residents by the iron discipline he exerted over his men. He confiscated all arms and ammunition and obliged the wealthiest citizens to make him a forced loan of 150,000 pesos. He mulcted the leading citizens, knowing very well from his long residence in the city who they were, keeping them under arrest until they paid up, but giving receipts for everything, except to the Banco Minero, whose funds he considered the Terrazas to have stolen anyway.
When Orozco's 2,5oo-strong army advanced on Parral, Villa had a tough choice to make: should he stand and fight against far superior forces or pull out and revert to guerrilla warfare. He decided to fight. The first clash came on 2 April when i,ooo orozquistas with a cannon and two machine-guns tried to establish themselves on the heights outside Parral from which they could pound the city into submission. However, as they manhauled the cannon up the hillside, Villa unveiled his first secret weapon in the shape of US mercenary Tom Fountain, a crackshot in charge of a machine-gun. Fountain's shooting was so accurate that he took out all the mules and men dragging the cannon. Unnerved, the orozquistas fled down the hill, abandoning the cannon; this loss shook the morale of the rest of the troops and, after heavy fighting in the outskirts, they withdrew around 6 p.m. as darkness came on.
Villa continued his stubborn resistance for three days with just 300 men. By the afternoon of 4 April, heavily outnumbered, Villa could no longer hold out, so he ordered a retreat under cover of night. A remarkable number of villistas managed to escape, though surrounded by 2,500 of the enemy, and their order and discipline contrasted sharply with what was to come. When the orozquistas entered Parral after nightfall, they gave themselves over to an orgy of looting and rapine. Never ceasing to fire off their guns, the crazed soldiers first broke into the liquor stores and got roaring drunk. Then they proceeded to sack the other shops and stores, killing all who resisted, entering houses at will, manhandling the occupants, stealing jewellery and other valuables. Having gutted the Banco Minero, the drunken soldiery terrorised middle-class families by racing through their homes with the safety catches off their rifles. When the troops finally withdrew, sated with drink and booty, a second wave of pillage overwhelmed the city as the town mob went on the rampage, looting and raping. Drunken pillagers hurled dynamite bombs at every door that would not yield to an inebriate `open sesame' command.
Orozco admitted that he had lost control of his troops on the night of 4 April, and news of the sack of Parral did incalculable damage to his cause. Although by and large foreign nationals and property were not touched, he was widely condemned for executing the manager of the slaughterhouse and his brother for being villistas. Angry that Parral had been wholeheartedly behind Villa, Orozco was determined to teach it a lesson, but he went too far in ordering the execution of Tom Fountain, the American soldier of fortune, who had been unable to get away with Villa. Holed up in a drugstore for three days, and starving when the owner found him there, Fountain might have expected that his US citizenship would have given Orozco pause. However, he was taken out before a firing squad and executed on the spot, without trial.
Villa's valiant action at Parral had delayed Orozco a vital three days and allowed Madero to reinforce Torreon. The president sent Villa a letter of congratulation, but again showed a shaky grasp of his psychology by offering him money. Convinced that Villa would always be loyal to him, Madero gave him a colonel's rank, but insisted he and his men would have to serve under the regular Army commander. When Villa arrived at Torreon, he found that this was none other than the muchfeared `iron man', Victoriano Huerta. Villa's men begged him not to accept Madero's offer, but Villa had not yet taken the measure of Huerta, the monster he agreed to serve. Huerta seemed to loathe and despise all other human beings, especially those who were not members of the Army or the oligarchy. He particularly hated Abraham Gonzalez for being middle class, and as for Villa, this uncouth, semi-literate bandit, as Huerta saw him, needed to be taken down a peg or two.
Villa was now at close quarters with the most repulsive figure in the entire Mexican Revolution. Nudging sixty, of uncertain date of birth (perhaps it was even as early as 1845), Huerta was the son of a mestizo peasant woman and a Huichol Indian father from Nayarit (some said this was the clue to his mixture of stoicism and cruelty). He entered the Army at fourteen, became the protege of General Donato Guerra, and under his patronage graduated from the Military Academy. Joining the corps of engineers, he campaigned all over Mexico: in Tepic in 1879; Guerrero in 1893 (where he put down a rebellion under Canuto Neri); in Sonora against the Yaquis in 19oo; again in Guerrero in 19o1; and finally in the Yucatan where he at last ended the rebellion of the Mayas in the War of the Castes. A believer in the use of force to solve all problems, Huerta was a cruel, bloodthirsty authoritarian, who went in for press-gangs, deportations, firing squads and summary executions. A long-time supporter of Bernardo Reyes, he urged his patron to attempt a coup d'etat in 1904. By 1907 Huerta seemed a busted flush, took extended leave to do civilian engineering work in Monterrey, and by 1909 was on an Army pension, which he supplemented by part-time teaching.
It was Diaz, a fellow authoritarian, who brought him back from obscurity in April 1911 by asking him to pacify Guerrero, and it was Huerta who accompanied Diaz to Veracruz after the dictator resigned. De la Barra gave him the assignment against Zapata that made his name a byword for savagery in Morelos, and Huerta never forgave Madero for dismissing him from that command. However, Huerta was always lucky. Five months later one of his cronies, Garcia Pena, became war minister and persuaded a reluctant Madero to give him the command against Orozco. Stocky, bullet-headed and myopic, Huerta was distinctive with his crew-cut hairstyle and dark tinted glasses. Almost never seen without a frown on his face, Huerta was one of those people who seem to be in a permanent near-apoplectic state of exasperation. As a drinker he was legendary for his consumption of brandy; one wag said that his only friends were two Europeans named Martell and Hennessy. Mrs Rosa King, who knew him in Cuernavaca, recounted an incident when Huerta was due to lead his troops against Zapata, but instead spent the whole day in a bar while his men shivered outside in driving rain. Villa confirmed that Huerta would start drinking at seven in the morning and would continue all morning, afternoon and evening, so that he was never wholly sober.
It would not have taken great insight to predict that the meeting of Villa and Huerta was a personality clash waiting to happen. The martinet against the man of caprices, the drunk against the teetotaller, the snob against the humanist, the desiccated calculating machine against the overemotional dynamo, the by-the-book plodder against the inspirational and improvisational leader: such a collision could have but one ending. It did not help that Villa revered Madero while Huerta hated him. The relationship got off to a bad start when a tired and dusty Villa reported to Huerta's headquarters. Huerta and his officers, all in full dress uniform looked the upstart up and down through pince-nez and upturned noses. Villa later remembered: `Those men looked me up and down as though I were a stray mongrel with a bad smell.'
After establishing his headquarters at Torreon, Huerta planned a slow campaign of attrition. Since morale was low and his troops decimated by typhus, he refused to be hurried and reorganised his army at leisure, working out the logistics of the coming campaign in a ponderous, mathematical way. Although he had been promised a free hand, he was further angered by a constant fusillade of anxious telegrams from Madero - who had been badly shaken by the defeat at Rellano and even imposed press censorship in his panic - and b
y the intervention of his brothers. Huerta's hatred and contempt for Madero was hardly a secret: when a maderista sent him a consignment of Madero lapel buttons, Huerta had them thrown into a rubbish bin.
Yet, as both Zapata and Villa conceded, the man did have some military talent. His dispositions were clever for, dug in around Torreon - which Orozco would have to take in order to advance on Mexico City - he left the enemy only three options, given that the Sierra Madre barred large-scale westward movement: stalemate by remaining in Chihuahua; an eastward march into Coahuila; or a frontal assault on Torreon. Orozco, seeing the danger, went for the Coahuila option, but the poor did not rally to him and the miners and urban middle classes, fearing the radical policies and looting practices of the dreaded colorados, declared for Madero. Orozco defeated the so-called rising military star of Coahuila, Pablo Gonzalez - who would eventually gain the unwelcome reputation of `the general who never won a victory' - on several occasions, but could never dominate the state.
Beginning to run low on ammunition and badly needing another victory to maintain revolutionary momentum and prevent desertions, Orozco was finally tempted south. On 12 May at Conejos he clashed with Huerta and was badly mauled. The colorados fell back, ripping up railway track as they went to slow Huerta's advance, but on 22 May Huerta overhauled them near the scene of Orozco's great victory two months before. In the second battle of Rellano, the orozquistas were cut to pieces by Huerta's cavalry; Orozco fled from the scene, leaving behind 6oo casualties (including zoo dead) and large numbers of horses and guns. Dogged by Huerta and plagued by desertions, Orozco turned at bay for a last-ditch stand at Bachimba canyon, forty miles from Chihuahua City, and in desperation tried a variation on the mkquina loca trick that had won him the first battle of Rellano. He drew up his army to invite Huerta to attack, and seven miles south of his position he mined the railway track with ioo pounds of dynamite, hoping to annihilate the federals as they steamed north in troop trains. However, the explosion was a failure, destroying just one coal car, and the disembarking federals soon routed the main colorado force.
Huerta entered Chihuahua City on 8 July, restored Abraham Gonzalez, and recaptured Ciudad Juarez by mid-August. Leaving his subordinates to mop up, he returned to Mexico City to a hero's welcome. Madero, furious that Huerta either would not or could not give an explanation for a gaping hole in the campaign accounts, was forced to promote him to divisional general, when he ought really to have charged him with peculation.
The Orozco movement was not quite finished yet; although Orozco himself fled across the border to the USA, he still had hopes of directing a viable guerrilla movement, and to this end ordered his men to make the long march to Sonora. Three thousand colorados braved the mountain passes of the Sierra Madre and debouched in Sonora, only to find they were no more welcome there than they had been in Coahuila. After some unpleasant skirmishes with the local peasantry, the orozquistas gave up and left the state. By autumn 1912 they had been expelled everywhere, but not before a young cavalry commander named Alvaro Obregon had made his mark in action against them.
The orozquistas dispersed into guerrilla bands, full of bitterness, spreading stories that their leader had been holding orgies in his private train while his men were dying in battle, and had salted away 500,000 pesos in a bank in El Paso. The great Orozco rising that was to have swept the hero into the presidential palace petered out in acrimony, but for a while it had been touch and go, and Mexico City and Madero himself had trembled. Villa, who played such an important role in thwarting Orozco, learned many lessons from this campaign that would be invaluable the following year, but the real significance of the Orozco rising was the way it placed Madero in thrall to the Army. Faced with the threat in the north, the president had had to secure a 20 million peso loan and double the military payroll. Previously a stern critic of press-gangs, Madero was obliged to connive at Huerta's use of them.
In general the result of the Orozco rebellion was what has been called `the militarisation of politics and the politicisation of the Army'. Once again, there are those who detect the spirit of Machiavelli abroad. Huerta's fiercest critics say that, even before he defeated Orozco, he was dreaming of ousting Madero and becoming the new Diaz, and that the failure to wage war to the knife against the defeated orozquistas was because Huerta thought they might be useful pieces to bring on to the board later. Some anti-Huerta commentators even allege that he was already secretly in communication with the exiled Orozco for this purpose.
This would make sense of a sensational event that occurred in the middle of the campaign against Huerta. The predictable non-meeting of minds between Huerta and Villa soon escalated to something far more serious. From the very first Villa had been irritated by his new position, for he heard Huerta's officers laughing at his title of `honorary general' behind his back, and deeply resented it. Then, Villa's position as charismatic chieftain, responsible for his people, collided with Huerta's insistence that everyone in his camp, even the irregulars, had to obey strict military discipline. In May Villa's favourite lieutenant, Tomas Urbina, raided the Anglo-American Tlahualilo company and demanded money with menaces. The US ambassador in Mexico, Henry Lane Wilson, who had an irrational hatred of Madero, made a vigorous protest to Huerta, who promised to execute Urbina. Hearing of the threat, Villa and all the irregular commanders said they would pull out of the campaign if Urbina was shot. Huerta backed down, but from that day his loathing of Villa was intense, and he vowed to take his revenge once Orozco was beaten.
Further petty clashes between the two men over horses, with Villa being insubordinate in Huerta's eyes, led to unacceptable tension. Once Orozco had been beaten at Rellano, Villa sent a cable to Huerta on 3 June, announcing that his own force, which he now named the Division del Norte, would cease to come under Huerta's orders, with immediate effect. Villa was within his rights: according to the deal he had signed in 1910-I i, irregulars needed only campaign while there was a prospect of battle, and here was Orozco thoroughly defeated. Huerta, though, regarded the cable as an express act of desertion and sent Colonel Guillermo Rubio Navarrete to exterminate the villistas. Rubio Navarrete was the wrong man for such an act of callous butchery. When he came on the villistas unawares and found Villa and his men asleep, he surrounded their camp with troops and returned to Huerta to get the orders confirmed.
Next morning, finding his compound encircled by federals, Villa began to get some vague inkling of what was afoot and decided to take out insurance by sending a cable to Madero. Unfortunately, to send the telegram he had to go to Army headquarters, where he was arrested; Huerta then ordered him executed as a deserter, without court martial. Rubio Navarrete performed his second life-saving action by alerting Emilio and Raid Madero to what was going on. Raul Madero cabled his brother in Mexico City, asking for a stay of execution until the whole matter could be investigated. Villa meanwhile was taken out into the yard, where the firing squad was ready. The platoon sergeant in charge of the detail made a cross on the wall with a mattock and asked Villa to stand at the foot of it. Villa kept exclaiming, `Why, why? Why are they going to shoot me? If I am to die, I must know why.'
At this point Villa broke down, wept pitifully and begged for his life. The fact is undisputed, but the reasons are not. Those hostile to Villa portray this as the cliched reaction of the coward/bully; Villa said that he was playing for time, knowing that Raul Madero had cabled Mexico City, trying to stall until the reply came in. Villa was enraged that he had been seen kneeling and grovelling, and later rationalised his guilt and shame to his own satisfaction: `I could not continue for the tears that choked me. At the time I hardly knew whether I was weeping from mortification or from fear, as my enemies said. I leave it to the world to assess whether my tears in these supreme moments were due to cowardice or despair at seeing I was to be killed without knowing why.' Cynics will draw the obvious conclusion, but in Villa's case tears of frustration are not implausible, given his psychology - frustration at not being told the
reasons and at having fallen so stupidly into Huerta's trap.
For the third time Rubio Navarrete intervened to save Villa's life. He halted the firing squad when it was in the very act of presenting arms and took Villa back to headquarters. Stupefied at the reappearance of the man he thought safely dead, Huerta raged at Rubio Navarette and threatened him with execution too. The colonel answered calmly that he had never seen any sign of hostility or armed resistance from Villa such as one would expect from a deserter. Huerta was in a difficult spot, for he could not admit that he already had in his pocket a cable from Madero, forbidding the execution, which he was going to pretend had arrived too late. He therefore sent Villa on to Mexico City, incorporated the villista units into his army, and wrote Madero a long screed of self-justification, accusing Villa of theft and rebellion. Huerta's letter was a farrago of lies: he claimed to have `high regard' for Villa and alleged that Villa had offered him armed resistance.
All of this verbal froth was an elaborate charade, since Huerta had already made plans to dispose of Villa under the old ley fuga dodge. Huerta sent orders to the commander of the Torreon garrison, Justiniano Gomez, to intercept Villa's escort and execute him. Gomez, uncertain of his ground, consulted his senior officer, General Geronimo Trevino, who, doubtless having been sent a copy of Madero's original cable, countermanded Huerta's order. Enraged, Huerta tried another tack and issued the same orders to the garrison commander at San Luis Potosi; he too would not accept the responsibility, contacted Mexico City, and was told to send Villa to the capital, alive and unharmed.
