Villa and Zapata: A History of the Mexican Revolution

by Frank McLynn

  Wilson behaved in the high-handed, intemperate and totally inappropriate (for an envoy) way he always did with Madero, blustering and fuming. Summoning all his patience, Madero allowed him through the lines to treat with Diaz, unaware that Wilson's sole purpose in meeting Diaz was to plan the next stage of the conspiracy. Wilson's next action was an impertinent proposal to `part the combatants'. When Madero retorted acidly that Wilson was overstepping his proper diplomatic bounds, Wilson threatened armed intervention by the USA and claimed this was President Taft's official policy. An indignant Madero cabled Taft in protest, and the bemused president replied that he did not know what Madero was talking about.

  One result of Wilson's intolerable meddling was a wave of antiAmerican protests; nevertheless, his twisted actions wove their black spell. In alarm at the spectre of the Marines crossing the Rio Grande, a delegation of Mexican senators called for Madero's resignation and the appointment of a provisional president who would halt the civil war on the streets of Mexico City. This was what Huerta had been waiting for. The senators' action gave him the fig-leaf of legality he needed for his planned coup. By the end of the first week of the military stalemate, close observers noted something very strange about the siege of the Ciudadela: the blockade was so loosely enforced that Diaz and the rebels were able to slip out and get supplies of food, drink and ammunition; the rebels for their part made no attempt to destroy key federal targets. This was all part of a cynical deal between Huerta and Diaz, secretly brokered by Lane Wilson. Huerta further diminished Madero's power by sending units known to be loyal to Madero on suicide missions, ordering frontal charges on rebel machine-gun nests.

  Once again it was the energetic Gustavo Madero who found the evidence of Huerta's duplicity. At 2 a.m. on 17 February he arrested Huerta at gunpoint, took him to the president and laid before him the evidence of the secret dealings with Diaz. Huerta raged, blustered and swore up and down that he was not in any plot; he vowed on his scapular that he was loyal, agreeing that his soul should be consigned to the everlasting fires of Hell if he was lying. He further promised, equivocating in the best traditions of the Delphic oracle, that, if Madero would only trust him, he would finish the rebellion within twenty-four hours. Incredibly, Madero believed him, gave him back his pistol and his freedom and granted the twenty-four hours requested. This was one of the most egregiously self-destructive actions in all history. Whatever possessed Madero to behave in such a way? Mexico's literary icon Jose Vasconcelos later speculated that on the eve of defeat all `saints' fall victim to a kind of paralysis, and that unconsciously Madero was acting as the Christian martyr, turning the other cheek and allowing God's will to be done. More secular analysts dissent from the `imitation of Christ' theme, but agree that the answer must be sought in the realm of psychological pathology rather than power politics.

  Within twenty-four hours Huerta did indeed bring the rebellion to an end, but hardly in the sense Madero had understood. Just after noon on 18 February, General Aurelio Blanquet arrived at the National Palace with a squad of men to arrest Madero. The president indignantly refused to be his prisoner, and when Blanquet drew his pistol on the president, Madero's bodyguards opened fire, killing two of Blanquet's men before being themselves shot dead. During the shoot-out Madero escaped from his office but was intercepted on the stairs. Blanquet then proceeded with the arrest. Madero slapped him in the face and called him a traitor. `Yes, I am a traitor,' Blanquet replied blithely. Meanwhile, some thirty minutes before these events, Lane Wilson effectively proved his collusion by wiring Washington that the Army had now taken control of the situation in Mexico.

  The serpentine Huerta had meanwhile invited Gustavo Madero to a meal in a downtown restaurant as a gesture of reconciliation. There are two versions of what happened next. One is that Huerta excused himself at table, made a phone call to confirm the success of the coup, and then disappeared, leaving his men to arrest Gustavo Madero. The second version is more melodramatic: a messenger arrived, handed Huerta a note confirming the arrest and telling him he was needed at the barricades. Huerta pretended he would have to go straight there and needed a revolver, so asked if he could borrow Gustavo Madero's. For once Madero was not on red alert and stupidly handed his weapon over. Exultantly, Huerta pointed it at his heart and told him he was under arrest.

  Whatever the exact details of events in the Gambrinus restaurant, it is certain that Gustavo Madero was then taken to the Ciudadela, where Cecilio Ocon, a rabidly right-wing Mexico City businessman who had been in the conspiracy from the very beginning, acted as `judge' in a kangaroo court. Charged with treason, Gustavo Madero indignantly repudiated the accusation, invoked his privileges as a member of Congress and denied the authority of the rebels to try him. Ocon condemned him to execution, then struck him violently in the face, saying: `This is how we respect your privileges.' Felix Diaz then led Gustavo Madero away to another part of the Ciudadela, but on the way Gustavo was brutally assaulted by rebel soldiers. Incensed, Gustavo lashed out at his tormentors, whereupon a soldier named Melgarejo pierced his one good eye with a sword, blinding him instantly. This outrage was greeted with savage laughter by the mob, and as Gustavo reeled around, groping, staggering, clutching his socket and pouring blood, the `chorus' of barbaric soldiers taunted him.

  Ocon then arrived to take his prisoner outside to face the firing squad. Gustavo pulled away and Ocon tried to grab him by the lapel of his coat but, blinded as he was, Gustavo was still too strong for him. The seedy businessman then settled the argument by drawing his pistol and pumping more than twenty rounds into the stricken Gustavo Madero, who slumped lifelessly to the floor. This atrocity was too much even for some of the rebel soldiers. One of them, Adolfo Basto, quartermaster-general in the National Palace, made the mistake of swearing vengeance, so Ocon had him taken out in Gustavo's place and executed by the firing squad.

  The treacherous Huerta was meanwhile revealing himself a monster of perfidy, reneging on his word, forswearing sacred oaths and even doublecrossing his own allies. It had always been understood that, once the coup was successful, supreme power would devolve on Felix Diaz, but Huerta suddenly announced that he intended to be president himself. An enraged Diaz was inclined to resist and civil war could have broken out yet again, had not the depraved Lane Wilson once more intervened. At a specially convened meeting, he bestowed the presidential mantle on Huerta and warned Diaz that if he resisted the `will of the people', he would be fighting the USA as well as Huerta. It was further agreed that, as Diaz had had his way with Gustavo Madero, Francisco Madero and the vice-president Pino Suarez would be at Huerta's disposition.

  Huerta did not want to sully his reputation by murdering a president in office, so first he had to get Madero to resign. After Huerta had once again taken a mighty oath on his scapular that no harm would come to Madero and Pino Suarez, the minister of foreign relations, Pedro Lascurrain, volunteered to get Madero to hand over executive power to him. Madero, knowing nothing as yet of his brother Gustavo's murder, anxious to avoid bloodshed, and confident that he would be dealt with as leniently as he had treated Bernardo Reyes and Felix Diaz, wrote out his resignation, as did Pino Suarez. Lascurrain was next in succession according to the Constitution, and he achieved the dubious distinction of being the shortest-lived president in Mexican history. He `ruled' for forty-five minutes, then turned the presidency over to Huerta.

  Madero had been promised exile, safe passage to Veracruz and then a shipboard voyage to Cuba, but already suspicions were arising that Huerta would not keep his word, especially when it was heard that the train to take them to Veracruz had been `cancelled'. The only person with the power and influence to save Madero now was Lane Wilson, who probably hated him even more than Huerta did. He had been expressly ordered by the State Department to ensure that Madero left the country safely, but Wilson was on the way out anyway and calculated that Washington had no credible sanctions to use against him. He therefore refused to convene the diplomatic corps to present
a united warning to Huerta not to harm his prisoners.

  By now fearing the worst, Madero's wife went to see Wilson on the afternoon of zo February to beg him to intervene. Wilson received her with glacial hauteur and said he could not intervene in the internal affairs of a sovereign nation. He added: `I will be frank with you, madam. Your husband's downfall is due to the fact that he never wanted to consult with me.' Desperate, Sara Perez de Madero then asked what was to happen to Pino Suarez. Wilson was then even more boorish: `Pino Suarez is a very bad man. I cannot give any assurances for his safety. He is to blame for most of your husband's troubles.' Wilson revealed his true colours by toasting the new regime with his fellow-drunk Huerta at a reception at the US embassy the following evening.

  Francisco Madero's last day on earth was 21 February 1913. That afternoon Huerta's henchmen cruelly raised the hopes of their wretched captives by installing three camp beds with mattresses in the cell shared by Madero and Pino Suarez in the National Palace, deceiving them into believing they would be in this jail for some time. By now Madero had heard of his brother's death and was depressed and grief-stricken. He was less concerned with his own safety for, as he had written to a friend on the loth: `Will they have the stupidity to kill us? You know, they would gain nothing, for we would be greater in death than we are today in life.' He soon had his answer. No sooner had the lights gone out at the usual time of to p.m. than a major Francisco Cardenas arrived with another officer and told the prisoners they were being transferred to the Federal District Penitentiary for their greater security. Unknown to Madero, Cardenas was a die-hard porfirista of fanatical stripe.

  After some time packing effects, Cardenas and his party took the prisoners outside the National Palace to a waiting car and ushered them inside. It was about i i p.m. The car with Madero and Pino Suarez in it was accompanied by a second car, full of rurales. The two vehicles careered along a winding road to the penitentiary, drove past the main entrance and skidded to a halt at the farthest end of the complex of buildings. Cardenas ordered the prisoners from the car and, as soon as Madero stepped out, executed him with a single shot to the neck from a .38 pistol. Pino Suarez received a more formal death, being put up against the penitentiary wall and shot there. Both cars were then riddled with bullets to aid the transparent fiction that the two men had been killed in crossfire when maderistas tried to rescue them.

  No clear documentary evidence was found to link Huerta with the assassination, but everyone without exception knew he had ordered it. Huerta's supporters, on the rare occasions they admitted that Madero had been murdered by their side, laid a trail of obfuscation, stressing the complex chain of command that bound Cardenas to Ocon and Blanquet and through them to Huerta; but only a fool imagined that Cardenas would have acted as he did without orders or tacit consent from Huerta. The foreign press reacted to Huerta and his official communiques with horrified disbelief, and almost the first action of Woodrow Wilson, on taking over as president of the United States, was to dismiss his odious namesake in Mexico City. Huerta had his moment of triumph, but he soon realised he had made a grave mistake. Not only had he alienated international opinion, but he had created the Revolution's first martyr, a man in whose name unconquerable legions would now arise to fight Huerta and the Army to the death.

  THE REVOLT AGAINST HUERTA

  Huerta's regime hardly enjoyed a moment's respite, for even as the war with Zapata continued in the south, there came a potentially yet more formidable challenge from the north; 1913 marked the emergence of Venustiano Carranza, governor of Coahuila, as a national figure. Together with Villa, Zapata and Alvaro Obregon he would make up the `big four' of the Mexican Revolution. An aristocrat and landowner, the tall, bearded, ruddy-cheeked Carranza, rarely seen without his dark smoked glasses, was in his own way an intransigent autocrat fully the equal of Huerta. Humourless and monumental, this hirsute 6 feet 4 inches giant (who always seemed to those who met him to be fully seven feet tall), was dubbed by John Reed, who also called him `a vast, inert body, a statue', the Lafayette of the Mexican Revolution. However, Carranza himself always had another model in mind. If Felix Diaz was a latter-day Santa Anna, Carranza aspired to be the second Benito Juarez.

  Venustiano Carranza was born on 29 December 1859, the second son and eleventh child of Jesus Carranza Neira, a veteran of the Indian wars and a juarista liberal during the War of Reform and the struggle against Maximilian and the French. A muledriver and rancher, Jesus Carranza was the intelligence mastermind behind the juarista forces in Coahuila, and in 1866 gave Juarez an interest-free loan to support his crusade. When Juarez emerged triumphant from the French war, Jesus, now a patriarch with fifteen children, obtained a huge grant of land in Coahuila that was the foundation of his personal fortune. Educated at the Fuente Atheneum school in Saltillo and later (1874) at the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria, from an early age the young Venustiano hero-worshipped Juarez. He originally intended to be a doctor but was prevented by poor eyesight, so returned to Coahuila to raise cattle. In 1882 he married Virginia Salinas and begat two daughters; decades later he would remarry and sire four sons.

  He entered politics at the age of twenty-eight, being elected in 1887 to the office of municipal president of Cuatro Cienegas. In 1893 he drew Porfirio Diaz's attention by taking part, together with his brother Emilio, in an armed protest by 300 Coahuilan ranchers at the imposed `reelection' of one of Diaz's governors. Diaz, suspecting that the hidden hand behind the Coahuilan ranchers was Evaristo Madero - grandfather of the future president - turned the problem over to his henchman Bernardo Reyes. With Reyes as intermediary, Carranza met Diaz and explained the issue, namely that the reimposition of an unpopular governor was widely perceived in Coahuila as an affront to local traditions of autonomy. Diaz took the point and sacrificed his puppet governor, explaining to Reyes: `Let us not risk losing them [the Coahuilans], because sooner or later civil war is bound to break out in that state ... and we must cultivate the little we have going among them.'

  The affair brought Carranza and Reyes together. Under the older man's aegis Carranza again filled the office of municipal president of Cuatro Cienegas in 1894-8, and Reyes proposed him to Diaz as a national senator in 1904. Although a critic of Diaz and the cientificos, Carranza showed no interest in supporting Madero's new political party in 1909. What swung him against Diaz was self-interest. Despite the universal desire in the state - by incumbent governor Miguel Cardenas, by Reyes and by Evaristo Madero - that Carranza should be the new governor of Coahuila, Diaz used his patronage to get his own stooge imposed. At this point Carranza joined Francisco Madero, though there was never any warmth or rapport between the two men. While the armed struggle against Diaz was in its early stages and Madero still in the USA, Madero met Carranza in San Antonio, Texas (January 1911), and made him provisional governor and commander-in-chief in Coahuila, Nuevo Leon and Tamaulipas. However, when Madero crossed the Rio Grande in February 1911, the circumspect Carranza crossed it in the opposite direction and stayed out of the fray in San Antonio, until it was clear that Madero was going to win.

  He then reappeared in Mexico, playing the role of anti-Diaz hawk. Madero showed him further favour by appointing Carranza his minister of war, even though his performance to date had been lacklustre, slow and ponderous; some even hinted that Madero was really a Reyes supporter still and was simply waiting to see how events would turn out. Without any military experience, Carranza was still allowed to conduct the negotiations with Diaz at Ciudad Juarez in May 1911, which ended the Porfiriato. However, he did warn Madero prophetically that simply to accept Diaz's resignation without dismantling his system was a bad mistake, as it would recognise the legitimacy of the Porfiriato and leave Diaz's cronies in place, ready to strike back at the Revolution.

  Hoping at first to become Madero's minister of the interior, a disappointed Carranza returned home, acted as provisional governor of Coahuila for two months from June 1911, then resigned to seek the verdict of the electorate. Elected gover
nor, he promoted the idea of `small is beautiful', encouraging municipal autonomy and democracy from the grassroots up; he managed to improve the state's educational facilities, but ran up against the brick wall of foreign mining interests when he tried to improve labour conditions in the mines. From this contretemps grew the conviction that Coahuila's problems could really be dealt with only at the national level.

  Increasing ambition brought him into conflict with Madero, who correctly sensed that Carranza'a approach to politics was patriarchal and paternalistic. Carranza accused Madero of having made all the mistakes he predicted at Ciudad Juarez, and of caring nothing for local autonomy; Madero hit back by describing Carranza as `vindictive, spiteful and authoritarian ... a phlegmatic old man who asks one foot for permission to drag the other'. A particular bone of contention during the Orozco rising was the role of Coahuila: Madero wanted the state's forces under federal control, but Carranza held out for local autonomy. What he really wanted was for Madero to pay for his state troops while, he, Carranza, had complete authority over them; this was typical of the man and his way of proceeding. However, he was hit by scandal when it was alleged that he had been `payroll padding' and billing the federal government for non-existent troops. Carranza went up to Mexico City to fight his corner, but Madero won this battle: General Pablo Gonzalez was foisted on him as the military commander in Coahuila.