by Frank McLynn
As Huerta now faced an inevitable exit, tensions between Carranza and Villa increased. Immediately after the victory at Zacatecas, the ingrate Carranza embargoed all shipments of coal to the Division of the North. Since Carranza controlled the coal mines of Coahuila, Villa was unable to fuel his trains for the final drive on Mexico City. At the same time, Villa was hit by a shortage of ammunition consequent on the reinstated US arms embargo after Veracruz. Again Villa felt stabbed in the back, especially since he saw Carranza's anti-Americanism as the root cause of trouble with Washington. He was puzzled and hurt by Wilson's attitude. Since he, Pancho Villa, had always been a friend of the Americans and had not even denounced the Veracruz intervention, why was the arms embargo being extended to him? If anything, the gringos were favouring Carranza, for they inexplicably allowed arms to be imported via Carranza-held Tampico while sealing the border with Chihuahua. Villa was not to know that this bizarre policy was all part of a `divide and rule' tactic by Wilson, concerned that no one faction in Mexico should grow too powerful.
What Wilson really wanted was the disappearance of Huerta followed by an armistice and a communal form of government, possibly a president with limited powers (neither Villa nor Carranza) overseen by a troika of trustees, one of whom would be a conservative figure acceptable to Washington. Carranza, however, wanted none of this: he insisted on unconditional surrender of the federal army to him and him alone. Huerta tried to buy time by offering bait to the zapatistas, by this time busily occupying the villages on the sierras outside Mexico City, having isolated and bypassed the garrison at Cuernavaca. Huerta offered generous terms to Zapata to detach him from the Constitutionalist cause, but he did not know his man. Zapata contemptuously refused the offer of an alliance that would have allowed him to enter the capital in triumph.
Carranza continued his machiavellian project of weakening Villa even as he dealt the coup de grace to Huerta. Emissaries from the First Chief and Villa met at Torreon on 5-6 July and dickered over restoration of coal supplies and the recognition of Carranza as the future chief executive. Only one concrete proposal was accepted: that a constitutional convention would meet in Mexico City, once Huerta was ousted, to decide the future course of the Revolution; there would be a civilian as interim president and military leaders could choose one delegate to the convention for every i,ooo soldiers they commanded. The two sides agreed to differ about the political future in Sonora, but drew up detailed blueprints for abolishing the old federal army, curtailing the power of the Catholic Church and giving benefits to industrial workers.
Carranza was simply stalling for time and playing his usual underhand game. He had agreed that emissaries should go to the talks at Torreon, but only on the understanding that they were not official envoys and that he would not be bound by any agreement that did not please him. Much pointless talk could have been saved if Carranza had put all his cards on the table. His aims were what they had always been: he himself, not a convention, to decide the future of Mexico; he and only he to pronounce on land reform, which meant no land reform at all; and an utter refusal to restore coal to the Army of the North.
At last, seeing his position was hopeless, Huerta resigned on i 5 July. He then went to his favourite drinking den, swigged a bumper of his favourite brandy and told onlookers: This will be my last glass here. I drink to the new president of Mexico.' He then sought refuge on the German battlecruiser Dresden which took him to Jamaica; thence he and his family proceeded to exile in Barcelona. The new president was his stooge Francisco Carbajal, who tried to dupe Carranza with a transfer-ofpower offer of the kind with which Diaz had gulled Madero. When this offer was predictably rejected, Carbajal put out feelers to Villa, proposing to surrender the federal army to him, provided that the lives of all officers were spared and they were allowed to serve under Felipe Angeles.
This was a tempting offer, for the Division of the North was temporarily paralysed by Carranza's coal embargo. Villa spent long hours with Angeles and others trying to decide what to do next. Should they withdraw to Chihuahua and convert it into an impregnable fortress? No, advised Angeles: that would leave Carranza in possession of the whole of the rest of Mexico and would make him too powerful. More promising was a formal alliance with Zapata or a rapid campaign against Sonora while Obregon was away in the south. In the end, Villa proved incapable of Carranza's machiavellianism. He told his officers that to accept Carbajal's terms would be a betrayal of the Revolution. In any case, to accept the surrender of the federal army, he would have to fight his way past Obregon and into a hostile Mexico City, when he had no clear indication of what Zapata's reaction would be.
Zapata was still more interested in ideological purity than in building alliances. On tq July he republished the Plan of Ayala, declaring that it was his aim to have it enshrined in the new constitution that would be drawn up after Huerta's fall. He then took the town of Milpa Alta, a suburb of Mexico City, after a ferocious two-day battle. Baulked with Carranza and Villa, Carbajal thought he saw a glimmer of a chance with Zapata. He offered to accept the Plan of Ayala as part of a general deal, but Zapata replied that, with 20,000 men, he was now strong enough to take Mexico City on his own and needed no deals. Carbajal turned to Obregon as his last chance. Fortunately for him, Obregon was a pragmatist who lacked Carranza's unyielding character. He saw a chance to scupper Zapata and took it.
Having secured a deal with Obregon whereby the federal army would defend the capital against the zapatistas until he arrived, Carbajal and the rest of the Huerta faction fled the country on 12 August. Promoted to major-general by Carranza, Obregon swept on to Mexico City, arriving at Teoloyucan on i i August, where he signed the documents ending huertista rule. The governor of the Federal District, left as the only authority in the capital, went out to meet Obregon on the outskirts and signed the instruments of unconditional surrender. There was general relief among a war-weary population, well expressed in words spoken earlier by an old peasant to John Reed: `First it was the maderistas, then the orozquistas and now the - what did you call them? - the Constitutionalists. I am very old and I have not long to live, but this war - it seems to me that all it accomplishes is to let us go hungry.'
On i6 August Obregon made his triumphal entry. Five thousand men of the vanguard accompanied him, creating a sensation by their mixed appearance. Ex-ranchers and miners trooped in, dressed in felt hats, khaki trousers and brown leather leggings, all with Winchester 30/30 rifles and bandoleros. Alongside them were the Yaquis, still wearing the clothes in which they had enlisted in Sonora - cotton trousers and embroidered shirts, marching boots, ten-gallon hats. Seeing their long hair tied back in ribbons and the fearsome armoury of bows and arrows, blowguns and slings, the burghers of Mexico City suddenly felt a shiver of apprehension. They now wondered if they had made the right bargain, having delivered themselves into the hands of `barbarians' on the basis that Obregon, `the new Cortes', was preferable to Zapata, `the Attila of the South'. They would soon learn that their forebodings were well founded.
THE CONVENTION OF AGUASCALIENTES
Into Mexico City, hard on the heels of Obregon, now came Carranza. Stage-managing his entry into the capital so as to ape Juarez's approach on ii January 1861 after his final defeat of the Conservatives, on 20 August 1914 Carranza began his journey at Tlalnepantla, seven miles from the National Palace, so that he could traverse as much of the capital as possible and receive the plaudits of a huge crowd. This aspect of image-building worked well: 300,000 people lined the route, as against the ioo,ooo who had greeted Madero in 1911. However, the honeymoon did not long endure. Carranza made a speech warning Mexico City that it could expect no favours. He immediately confirmed Obregon's decree putting the city under martial law and announced tough measures to deal with crime. Throughout 1914-15 burglary was at epidemic levels in the capital, often the work of the notorious Grey Automobile Gang, who specialised in impersonating police officers to gain access to the houses of the rich with phoney search warrants, mak
ing their getaway after the burglaries in distinctive grey cars.
Both Carranza and Obregon felt that the citizens of Mexico City were overprivileged, had been protected from the rigours of war and had not pulled their weight in the Revolution - Obregon was heard to remark that the capital needed a good long dose of military rule to put it in its place, before elections let lily-livered Congressmen back in on the act. However, where Carranza was concerned to teach the lesson that the cosy arrangements Madero had made with the old guard were a thing of the past, Obregon's attitude was harsher and more vindictive. Carranza was not pleased to hear Obregon talk of vengeance as true patriotism, since to him patriotism meant the recognition of necessity - which he construed to mean a sense of the nation's destiny such as had animated Juarez, and which therefore implied his own personal rule. It seemed to him that Obregon was dangerously close to a view of the Revolution as a selfjustifying and self-sustaining `thing in itself' - a waltz of death featuring just four men: Obregon, Carranza, Villa and Zapata.
Obregon was never one to be overimpressed by the posturings of the First Chief. Three days after arriving in the capital, he went to the French cemetery to pay his respects to Madero. Accompanying him were many of the `notables' who had looked the other way when Huerta murdered Madero. With his love of the histrionic, Obregon handed his pistol to Maria Arias - a woman who had denounced Huerta publicly in 1913 - and said: `I give my pistol to Maria Arias, the only man to be found in Mexico City at the time of Huerta's coup.' Some historians have found Obregon's hostility to Mexico City puzzling, and have speculated that he punished the capital for his own guilt in not having joined the Revolution with Madero in Igio.
Certainly, his early measures were tough and uncompromising. In the mistaken view that the Catholic Church had supported Huerta - in fact Huerta had attacked it viciously - Obregon imposed a fine of half a million pesos, expelled the Vicar-General and sixty-seven other priests from the city, and delighted in humiliating the Church by subjecting priests to medical examinations, which revealed that many of them were suffering from venereal disease. He then attacked all businessmen who had supported Huerta, even if only tacitly, by levying swingeing taxes on capital, real estate, mortgages, carriages, automobiles and even water, sewers and pavements. Those who traded in staples such as corn, beans, oil, lard, tallow and coal were given forty-eight hours to disgorge io per cent of their wealth or face total confiscation. When Obregon imposed special taxes on foreigners, they protested, thinking Carranza would not seek confrontation with their governments, but Obregon went in person with an armed guard to the protest meeting in the Hidalgo theatre and broke it up, browbeating the demonstrators with a display of military might, namely a triple row of soldiers with guns pointing directly at the protestors' hearts. To purge their `contumacity' Obregon imposed a `moral tax' - forcing the foreigners to sweep the streets.
While Obregon and Carranza made it clear to Mexico City that the halcyon days were over, they turned to face the overriding political imperative: the coming conflict with Villa. Only war-weariness and wariness about the possible response from Washington prevented an immediate outbreak of hostilities. Besides, Carranza reasoned that public opinion had to be brought along gently, otherwise people would see warfare between two factions not divided by ideology as simply a war for the personal ambitions of Villa and Carranza. There had to he a lot of talk before there could be further bloodshed. In the meantime the prime aim was to prevent an alliance between Villa and Zapata.
So far, in all contacts between the two great popular leaders, Zapata had made most of the running. The first envoy he sent north in autumn 1913 was Gildardo Magana, who had been with Villa in prison in Mexico City in 1912 and taught him the rudiments of the Plan of Ayala. Making one of those circuitous itineraries that all Mexicans during the Revolution seemed always to make, he travelled to Nuevo Leon via Veracruz, Havana, New Orleans and Matamoros. In Nuevo Leon the commanding general was Lucio Blanco, a man of liberal sympathies who had often expressed support for agrarian reform and whose secretary (Francisco Mugica) was Magana's childhood friend. Magana finally ran Villa to earth in November at Ciudad Juarez. In the interview Villa showed sympathy for land reform and spoke with pride of his `leftist' commanders like Calixto Contreras and Orestes Pereyra in Durango. Villa began corresponding with Zapata and from March 1914 villista envoys to Morelos were received with particular marks of favour.
Carranza's advisers could see the dangers of a Villa-Zapata alliance, especially if masterminded by Felipe Angeles, but for a long time the First Chief was deaf to their advice. Although he appreciated the power of Villa, he bracketed Zapata as `rabble' along with the orozquistas or the followers of Emilio Vasquez in 1912. The carrancistas were reduced to putting out feelers behind their chief's back. They were over-sanguine, misled by Zapata's apparent reluctance to enter a formal alliance with Villa. They did not understand that Zapata was hyper-cautious, that he required Villa to give him abundant evidence of sincerity before putting his name to a deal. Zapata suspected all other leaders of heading temporary, ramshackle and evanescent movements. `Revolutions will come and revolutions will go,' he said, `but I will continue with mine in my own way.' Whereas the pragmatic Villa could accept such an approach, the dogmatic martinet Carranza could not.
As Obregon and Carranza moved in on Mexico City, the flurry of peace approaches to Zapata quickened. One zapatista agent even interviewed Carranza before his ride into the capital, suggesting a face-toface meeting at a venue of Zapata's choice. Lucio Blanco and some other carrancista generals pressed hard for an entente with Zapata, and sent their own secret agents to negotiate with him. One of them took a personal gift from Blanco to Zapata of a gold-lined .44 Colt revolver, and another suggested a Zapata-Blanco conference. The stumbling block to any meaningful talks was always Carranza's ambition to be Mexico's chief executive - and Carranza anyway thought that all these overtures to Morelos were a waste of time. When one of Genovevo de la O's envoys interviewed him, Carranza declared petulantly: `This business of dividing up the land is ridiculous.'
Carranza's dogmatic and inflexible hard line infuriated his advisers. What could they offer Zapata when the First Chief continued to insist that the zapatistas were no more than rustic brigands, a mere rabble; that they were weathercocks who had earlier fought for Madero and Orozco; that if they would not disarm he would do to them what Huerta and Robles had done; and that any land reform must be entirely at his say-so? However, the irrestible force that was Carranza met the immovable object that was Zapata, and found a man just as stubborn. Zapata had only two demands, and they were non-negotiable: Carranza had to retire so that there could be genuinely representative interim government and then genuinely free elections; and the new regime must conform to the Plan of Ayala which, among other things, in Article 3 declared Zapata to be the supreme head of the Mexican Revolution and in Article 12 specified the composition of the peacetime junta that would replace him. So here were two granite-like men, both refusing to compromise or even to talk until their initial demands were met in full.
While insisting that he could not give way on the Plan of Ayala, Zapata wrote to Carranza to suggest meeting at Yautepec in Morelos, but he made the offer almost impossible to take up by disowning everything that had been said to Carranza to date by any of his agents. He made his true feelings plain over and over again: in a public speech he warned that 70,000 men with Mausers would oppose any Carranza presidency; at a council of his chiefs, he said that Carranza was no more than a corrupt cabrbn surrounded by shyster lawyers; in a letter to Villa he warned that Carranza's ambitions and greed were supremely dangerous; and in a missive to Woodrow Wilson he denounced Carranza as simply another in Mexico's long line of machine politicians. In table talk with his intimates he warned that the coming war with Carranza would be protracted; it would take Obregon and other ambitious generals years to realise that Carranza was really a fetter on their desires.
Carranza, however, saw the point of
trying to neutralise Zapata during the coming war with Villa and used a multiplicity of agents to try to stall him. An agent of the American Red Cross interviewed Zapata on Carranza's behalf on 25 August, but came away discouraged by Zapata's unflattering remarks about the First Chief. Carranza was playing a crafty game, conciliating Woodrow Wilson by pretending to be a peacemaker and appearing to want to use the USA as an intermediary between him and Zapata. He revealed his true posture by consistently refusing to meet Zapata in Yautepec, insisting that any such interview had to take place in Mexico City. From his real agent Juan Sarabia he was receiving reports reinforcing his `rabble' perception; Sarabia claimed the true number of zapatista effectives was no more than 15,ooo and that all were poorly armed and trained. As for Zapata personally, he was an uneducated man of staggering political naivete, sustained only by an overweening pride, while his eminence grise Manuel Palafox was a mere nonentity.
The skill of Sarabia as an agent was that, while making damning reports to Carranza, he was also acting as go-between for the phalanx of `middle of the roaders' that included General Lucio Blanco and the reforming governor of Nuevo Leon, Antonio Villareal. Zapata was keen to meet these men in Cuernavaca and Sarabia advised Carranza that there would be no harm in such contacts, which he would monitor. Still with one eye on Washington, Carranza pretended to go along with this, but prevented Blanco from going; he allowed Villareal to proceed but forbade him to make any concessions. Villareal and other envoys accordingly travelled down to Cuernavaca. Among the party was Alfredo Serratos, a freelance, self-serving `troubleshooter', who claimed to each of Carranza and Zapata that he was the other's plenipotentiary. His true role may have been as Villa's agent, charged with making sure Zapata and Carranza never reached an agreement.
