by Frank McLynn
What Villa did not tell Obregon was that earlier that day he had called another emergency meeting to discuss what to do about him. This time it seemed clear that Villa was inclining to the side of Fierro and Urbina. Angeles and Raul Madero replied with an explicit threat to leave the movement. Villa persisted and his instinct, however murderous, was pragmatically correct. He accurately predicted the future: `Obregon will cause far more bloodshed to our republic than Pascual Orozco; in fact he will cause more harm than Victoriano Huerta.' After much heartsearching, Villa decided to proceed with the execution, though not in Chihuahua. He ordered General Mateo Almanza to stop Obregon's train and kill him, concerting the measure with his colleague General Roque Gonzalez Garza, who was accompanying Obregon to Mexico City.
However, Villa had chosen two generals who agreed with Angeles and Raul Madero and both ignored the orders given them. Almanza, who was supposed to intercept the train, let it steam right past him. Garza, frantically cabled by Villa to stop the train so that Almanza's firing squad could catch up, ordered the engine driver to open up the throttle and steam ahead at top speed. An increasingly furious Villa then cabled a second execution squad to intercept Obregon's train at Gomez Palacio, but this time he gave the orders to the very generals Obregon had talked round in Chihuahua City: Eugenio Benavides and Jose Isabel Robles. They did indeed go north and intercept the train, but removed Obregon from Garza's charge and took him overland to Carranza-held Aguascalientes. It is difficult to overestimate the psychological boost this narrow escape from death gave Obregon. His tactic of fomenting dissension in the Army of the North had worked; perhaps he could still eliminate both Villa and Carranza. His laconic remark when he arrived in Aguascalientes was typical. Asked what he intended to do, he replied: `Die killing.'
The breach between Villa and Carranza was now overt, and Villa occupied Durango City in preparation for the coming campaign, but first a period of phoney war ensued. Mexico was sick of war and the necessity for a fresh bout of civil conflict had not been explained to the Mexican people; the propagandists and manipulators would first have to be given their heads and, in particular, the generals on both sides needed convincing that they should risk their necks in a personality clash between Villa and Carranza. The uncertainty about US intentions was also a paramount factor, for Wilson's support would be decisive. Much would depend on which side could occupy the moral high ground and pose as the true `Constitutionalists'. In this sense, two constitutional conventions, at Mexico City and Aguascalientes, were crucial.
Carranza's Mexico City conference, held on 1-5 October, was the brainchild of a man obsessed with control, yet was a dismal failure since everyone but die-hard carrancistas boycotted it. Packed with Carranza's stooges and yes-men, the absurd conference was a farce stage-managed by a classical machine politician. Sycophantic resolutions eulogising the First Chief were adopted unanimously and a spurious `rejection' of Carranza's tendered resignation was bulldozed through. However, after animated debate, the placemen felt obliged, for fear of the military, to endorse the Torreon proviso that the Aguascalientes meeting should be for the military alone. Even Carranza's military supporters regarded the Mexico City proceedings with contempt; the generals on both sides wanted a peaceful settlement. The military junta, meeting under Obregon's aegis at Zacatecas, made it clear that all decisions taken at Mexico City had no validity unless ratified by the more representative convention due to meet a week later at Aguascalientes. Carranza thundered that he would never step aside as presidential candidate and would not be dictated to by a junta of generals, however powerful.
On io October the groundbreaking Aguascalientes Convention opened, attended by fifty-seven generals and ninety-five officers. Independents predominated and there was but a handful of carrancistas. The villistas, only thirty-nine in number, were notable for the moderation of their attitudes and demands and their complaisance towards the `payroll padding' swathe of carrancista officers who represented nobody but Carranza. When twenty-six zapatista delegates were added later, the convention was a genuine cross-section of participants in the Revolution - precisely what so infuriated Carranza. The British Minister, taking his cue from the snobbish First Chief in the capital, uncritically reported that the convention `appears closely to resemble the parliament of monkeys depicted by Mr Kipling in The _7ungle Book'.
Four main groupings can be identified at Aguascalientes: the villistas, the handful of Carranza men, the independents and, later, the zapatistas. In the beginning, the villistas were the most important, but they were always an uneasy coalition of disparate and fissiparous elements. Many so-called villistas were so only in the sense that their rivals in the various states were pro-Carranza. Jose Maytorena of Sonora was the classic example. Interested only in feathering his own nest, he returned confiscated estates to their former owners in flat defiance of Villa's official policy, while failing to return their traditional lands to the Yaquis, who were supposed to be his main allies. A similar conservative and reactionary stance was adopted by Felipe Riveros, governor of Sinaloa and by the strongman in Tepic, Rafael Bulna. Despite his reverence for Madero, and his express exclusion of their properties from expropriation orders, Villa could not even count on the support of the extended Madero family, which was split, with some members pro-Carranza.
Villa was not prepared to countenance an alliance with former huertistas who put out feelers to him, though, short of good officers himself, he saw the point of admitting those who held federal commissions into his ranks. Far more of these joined Villa than Carranza; scholars speculate that Carranza's army was already so professionalised and homogeneous that it could not stand the strain of integrating ex-federals. The most reactionary officers, who had been identified as such, could not find takers either with Villa or Carranza and had to join right-wing forces in Veracruz, Oaxaca and Chiapas if they wanted to continue a military career.
Villa did, however, build bridges to the Catholic Church, rebuffed as it was by Carranza's strident anticlericalism. Villa's attitude to the Church was always ambivalent: he approved in principle of religion and Catholicism, but hated the reality of priestcraft; the clergy he considered thieves, humbugs and exploiters, battening on a credulous and impoverished faithful. Villa once had a stormy scene with Luz Corral because she built a secret chapel in their house; he had it dismantled but Luz had the last word by saying that she would continue to pray for him even though the chapel was no more.
The striking thing about the villistas was their willingness to compromise. They were prepared to divide the country into spheres of influence on an `as is' basis, whereas Carranza insisted on total national domination; they were prepared to have a carrancista as president but not Carranza himself, whereas the opposition insisted it had to be the bearded one in person; villista proposals formed the basis for credible compromise, whereas Carranza's demands entailed civil war. Most of all, the villistas were genuinely trying to find solutions, while Carranza's men attended only to impress gullible observers from the USA. The carrancistas at Aguascalientes were a tawdry lot: greedy and venal bourgeois `proconsuls' who were even more ruthless in their pursuit of wealth than Urbina or Hipolito Villa. Their propaganda for Carranza was confused and self-contradictory: at one moment he was to be the new strongman, though presumably Mexico had had enough of Huertas by now; at another he was supposed to represent `civilisation' versus barbarism; then, he was alleged to be the only one who could stand up to Washington.
The insincerity and grasping ambition of Carranza was obvious to everyone at Aguascalientes except his cronies. Villa, by contrast, was totally sincere in his desire neither to be president of Mexico nor to impose anyone else, though he did hope that Felipe Angeles would `emerge' once the delegates had time to appreciate his qualities. Villa even offered to resign in favour of Obregon's candidate Eulalio Gutierrez, provided Carranza did the same; in `joking but serious' mode he even suggested that both he and Carranza be shot to solve the nation's problems. Needless to say, neith
er solution commended itself to Carranza. Sensing that opinion in the capital was turning against him, he suddenly decamped to Puebla, which was commanded by his most loyal general. Feeling secure there, Carranza behaved defiantly towards the Convention, claiming that Villa had not resigned his candidacy as president and proposing machiavellian schemes for the simultaneous withdrawal of himself and Villa, all ingeniously structured so that he would retain all the cards and Villa emerge powerless.
The villista faction at Aguascalientes was led by Felipe Angeles and Roque Gonzalez Garza, the man who had saved Obregon the month before. Angeles was the key figure, aiming to build an alliance with Zapata; Garza, on the other hand, more and more inclined to Obregon. If anything, the autonomous power of the villistas gradually dwindled during the month's deliberations at Aguascalientes while that of the independent grouping grew. The leaders of the independents were Eulalio Gutierrez, the acting president of the republic and General Lucio Blanco, the brilliant, left-leaning cavalry officer who had been shabbily treated by Carranza. The independent group gradually made more and more inroads on Villa's partisans, attracting away from him the intellectuals who had hoped for high Cabinet position in a Villa administration: Jose Vasconcelos, Eugenio Aguirre Benavides and Jose Isabel Robles.
The real star of the Convention was Obregon, the only one of the `big four' to attend in person. Obregon's oratory, wit and charm and his patent reasonableness made a great hit and convinced many waverers that the future lay with him rather than Villa. Both Zapata and Villa made a bad psychological error in not attending the Convention. The zapatistas had originally not been invited, but on 12 October Angeles proposed that their presence was necessary to make this a truly national gathering. The Convention approved a motion inviting them, and to Angeles himself was delegated the task of persuading the notoriously unpredictable and crossgrained Zapata to take part. Angeles hoped that Zapata might respect him because of his social origins and the honourable way he had fought the zapatistas in earlier campaigns. He took the precaution of including peasant leaders in his delegation, to point up the contrast with Carranza, who in his September overtures had sent merely generals and bureaucrats to Morelos.
All Angeles's best hopes were fulfilled when he and his delegation met Zapata in Cuernavaca on 18 October. Zapata greeted Angeles cordially: `General, you do not know how glad I am to see you. You were the only one who fought honestly against me and by your acts of justice you succeeded in gaining the goodwill of the people of Morelos and even the sympathy of my men.' He was equally affable with Calixto Contreras: `I am also happy to see you in Morelos, General, since, as a son of the poor and a fighter for land, you are the revolutionary in the north who inspires the greatest confidence in me.' Even so, he told Angeles that he could not simply order his delegates to go to Aguascalientes as requested; first he would have to consult the various zapatista chiefs. Angeles urged him to send delegates as a matter or urgency, arguing somewhat speciously that unless the zapatistas were seen to be present at Aguascalientes as part of a genuinely national Convention, Woodrow Wilson might finally lose patience and order an invasion.
In reality Zapata was in a bind, pulled this way and that by conflicting impulses. On the one hand, having accepted overlordship of his movement twice before, by Madero and Orozco, with disastrous results, he would never again consent to abdicate as leader. On the other, he wanted an alliance with Villa - indeed his entire diplomacy since November 1913 had been geared to that end - and he could scarcely refuse to take part in the Aguascalientes Convention without snubbing Villa. Moreover, he was in a chicken-and-egg dilemma: he could not recognise the Convention until it accepted the Plan of Ayala, but how could it do so if he did not send delegates north to persuade them, which in turn meant de facto recognition of the Convention? He solved the conundrum by legerdemain. The men he sent north would be `commissioners' who could become official delegates once the Convention endorsed the Plan of Ayala. To leave his options open, he appointed his intellectual advisers rather than the peasant leaders as the commissioners. This action was unanimously backed by the other zapatista leaders. As John Womack puts it: `Afraid, like Zapata, of betraying their people, they turned over the chances of doing so to the intellectuals they had always at heart despised.'
Twenty-six commissioners, led by Paulino Martinez, prepared to make the journey north. However, it very soon became clear that Zapata aimed primarily at a political alliance with Villa and thought the Convention a mere talking shop, for on 26 October the train carrying the zapatistas steamed straight through Aguascalientes, and deposited the commissioners at Villa's headquarters at Guadalupe. This action marked the effective beginning of the Villa-Zapata alliance. Paulino Martinez made a speech praising Villa and Zapata as `the genuine representatives ... of this Homeric struggle ... Indians both of them'. Martinez and Angeles agreed that the alliance strategy at the Convention must be to force Carranza to reveal himself in his true autocratic colours and to promote Villa as Mexico's next president.
If Paulino Martinez was the zapatista doyen of quiet diplomacy, when the commissioners finally took their seats at Aguascalientes, it was the firecracker oratory of Soto y Gama that attracted most attention. Aguascalientes was this man's true metier, for in Morelos he was always under the shadow of Palafox. Promoted to `colonel' in order to meet the requirement that all delegates had to be from the military, and dressing in the white peasant clothes of Morelos as if he had spent a lifetime toiling in the fields, Soto y Gama impressed some as an orator while appearing to others as a charlatan. In his speech to the assembly he began by ripping up the Mexican flag, declaring himself an anarchist who, following Kropotkin, had to destroy all abstractions that oppressed the masses. This act of secular sacrilege had some of the generals in the audience reaching for their revolvers, while others tried to rush the platform.
When order was restored, Soto y Gama treated those who remained and had not walked out in protest to a seminar on Russian anarchism. He seemed to take a delight in alienating all factions present, whether they were followers of Magon, Carranza or Villa. He pointed out that Tierra y Libertad, the revolutionary slogan taken over from the magonistas also came from Russia: Ricardo Flores Magon had simply stolen it from Alexander Herzen. He created a sensation by an intemperate and splenetic attack on Carranza. He then told the villista delegates they could not hope to understand the Indians in the south, before launching into a synthesis of world history, which featured Zapata as a kind of grand fusion of Buddha, Marx and Francis of Assisi. Despite attempts by enraged carrancistas to interrupt the speech or rush the platform, Soto y Gama secured a standing ovation for his final words: `Viva Villa! Viva Zapata!'
Despite the immediate applause, most delegates on reflection considered that Soto y Gama was a suitable case for instant medical certification. Yet there was method in his madness. His role was to whip up emotion while Angeles worked behind the scenes to cement a VillaZapata alliance. Both Angeles and Soto y Gama agreed that the core weakness in the zapatista movement was that it was a local movement not a national one, and that the best way to make Zapata face his national responsibilities was to put him in a position of power where he had no choice. To an extent the smokescreen tactics worked. Other speakers arose to denounce Soto y Gama as a purely verbal socialist, but got sucked into the intellectual quicksands as the debate became more and more precious and rarefied. In the end, with speakers citing Pliny, Voltaire, Rousseau, Spencer, Darwin and Nietzsche, the spiritual paraffin of academe was overpowering in its odour.
On paper the zapatistas scored a great victory at Aguascalientes. After a lot of horse-trading, the Convention agreed to sign up to the Plan of Ayala `in principle' and accepted Articles 4, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 12 as the basis for any future constitution. This showed how far the Revolution had already travelled in the direction of real socio-economic change. For the first time in Mexican history a sovereign body had committed itself to large-scale agrarian reform; the immense influence of Zapata on th
e Mexican Revolution was clear for all to see. Zapata responded by recognising the Convention's sovereignty de facto, but he made it clear that complete de jure recognition would follow only when the body had dealt decisively with Carranza and removed him as First Chief. On 30 October Obregon and Angeles colluded to pass a resolution in closed session which voted by 112 to z I to dismiss Carranza.
Doubtless Carranza, who pulled the last of his forces out of Mexico City on 4 November, was alarmed by the size of the vote against him, but through his intransigence he had only himself to blame. He replied to the request for his immediate resignation by stalling. He cabled Aguascalientes to say that before he resigned he needed to see the shape of the interim regime that would draw up the new constitution; also, Villa and Zapata must resign their commands and go into exile. Clearly these were impossible demands made by a man with not the slightest intention of resigning. Carranza claimed that his study of French history had left him with a contempt for the `assemblyism' of the French Revolution. It had obviously not left him with a similar contempt for Napoleonic autocracy, for his every word, every gesture even, conveyed the message that he, and only he, could channel the Revolution into its correct conduits.
Amazingly, the Convention agreed to the three conditions and again asked for Carranza's resignation. The moderate attitude of the Convention was the result of the emergence of a `third force' under Obregon and the election as provisional president on 2 November of Eulalio Gutierrez. Obregon, working hard to prevent the villistas and zapatistas from steamrollering the Convention, was the agency behind Gutierrez's election. After getting Angeles to agree that Villa should resign, so as to cut the ground from under Carranza's feet, Obregon surprisingly lobbied for the election of Gutierrez, an ex-miner and political nonentity. Obregon had been widely expected to support Juan Cabral of Sonora for the post, but Cabral had alienated Obregon by his commitment to radical land reform and through being too much his own man.
