Villa and Zapata: A History of the Mexican Revolution

by Frank McLynn

  In the thick of battle, however, Villa had taken a bad wound in the right knee. In great pain he was unable to ride and had to be carried on a litter. Realising how vulnerable he was, he decided to hole up in a mountain eyrie until he recovered, dispersing his men meanwhile into small detachments throughout Chihuahua. The journey to the mountain hideout was a nightmare. Since he had to be stretchered joltingly up mountain passes, and there was no doctor on hand, no medication and no painkillers, every step was an agony, to the point where Villa often wept with sheer pain, became delirious and lapsed in and out of consciousness. He made an interim stop at the ranch of one of his commanders halfway up the Sierra de Santa Ana, but was aware that he would be found if he tarried there too long.

  Accompanied by just two men, both of them his first cousins, he was slung on the back of a mule and taken high up the sierra to the Cozmocate cave. The cousins then raised him on ropes to the narrow, slit-like entrance. Here, like those other heroes on the run, Robert the Bruce, Bonnie Prince Charlie and Lord Byron, he lived like a hermit in a cavern, holed up for seven weeks. Each day his comrades brought water and limited food (mainly rice and sugar) to the concealed cave entrance which was masked by leaves and branches. One day from his crow's nest Villa was able to see Pershing's columns ride by in the valley below. For two months he knew nothing of what was happening in the outside world. Recovery from his wound was slow, as no doctor attended him, and the only nursing he received was a crude dressing. The knee set badly and ever afterwards his right leg was shorter than his left, so that he had to walk with a specially made shoe.

  Once he was ready to resume command, Villa tried to muster his men to a general rendezvous, but found that most of the detachments had been wiped out and most of his best officers lost. He accounted Candelario Cervantes the greatest loss. When Villa parted from him, Cervantes commanded a powerful detachment, but soon casualties and desertions had reduced his numbers to thirty. Cervantes then tried to find more recruits in his home town of Namiquipa, but found the villagers there grown sleek and fat on Yankee dollars, collaborating with Pershing and selling out the villistas and their secrets. Nothing daunted, Cervantes attacked one of Pershing's cavalry troops with his handful of followers and was killed in the fighting. Another villista detachment, led by Julio Acosta, was badly mauled by the Americans at Ojos Azules; though Acosta himself got away, he left behind forty-three villistas dead and scores of wounded.

  In two months the casualty roll of Villa's officers had been alarmingly high. Manuel Baca, another killer in the Fierro class, was butchered by enraged villagers. Pablo Lopez, the villain of the Santa Ysabel massacre, had been left behind wounded at Columbus. He somehow survived seventy-two hours without food and water before surrendering to the carrancistas. They took him to Chihuahua City and staged an exemplary execution. Before dying Lopez poured out a fund of priceless information about Villa to an Irish reporter. His words of defiance are worth quoting for the light they shed on Villa's magnetic hold over his followers:

  I am only a poor ignorant peon, Senor. My only education was gained in leading the oxen and following the plough. However, when the good Francisco Madero rose in arms against our despotic masters, I gladly answered his call. We all knew Pancho Villa - and who did not? His exploits are recounted nightly at every fireside. He was the object of worship of all who were ground under the heel of the oppressor. When the call came, I was one of the first to join him and have been his faithful follower and adoring slave ever since ... I would much prefer to die for my country in battle, but if it is decided to kill me, I will die as Pancho Villa would wish me to - with my head erect and my eyes unbandaged. History will not be able to record that Pablo Lopez flinched on the brink of eternity.

  Lopez made good his boast. He smiled on the way to the firing squad, smoked a last cigar and, when asked for his final wishes, requested all Americans present to be cleared away. He refused to have his eyes bandaged and insisted on giving the firing squad the order to fire. Lopez's bravery made a deep impression, created a martyr and was instrumental in turning Chihuahuans against Carranza, whom they now increasingly perceived through Villa's eyes as a Yankee running dog. It was significant that not even the US$5o,o0o dollars reward offered for the taking of Villa, dead or alive, could induce any traitors to lead the Americans to the cave of Cozmocate.

  With the destruction of many of the villista bands, by the end of April Wilson came under pressure to withdraw the Punitive Expedition - ironically by the selfsame Cabinet that had originally talked a reluctant president into sending it. Wilson's secretaries of state argued, now Villa was militarily neutralised, that it was undignified for a sovereign state to pursue a solitary bandit across the territory of another sovereign state. Tensions with Germany were rising, and it was clear that if the US wanted to go beyond the destruction of the villista bands to the imposition of a friendly administration in Mexico City, they would have to settle in for a conflict lasting years, involving all-out war with Carranza.

  However, Wilson obstinately - and misguidedly - refused to pull the Punitive Expedition out. His reasoning was that withdrawal now would hand all the laurels to Carranza and immensely strengthen his position, when he had made no satisfactory concessions to Washington. US business interests were pressing for Pershing to remain in Mexico as a bargaining counter until Carranza gave them the economic and financial guarantees they wanted. Wilson, arguing that if Villa was not found he might stage further raids on US territory, suggested a treaty to Carranza, whereby he would withdraw Pershing in exchange for a clause allowing the USA to re-enter Mexico at any future date without any further need to consult Mexico City.

  At this point alarm bells started to ring in Carranza's brain, as he realised the Americans intended to settle in for a long stay. He was also concerned at the growing public perception that he was the yanquis' poodle while Villa was the true national hero. From the beginning of May his attitude to the Punitive Expedition changed. He announced that Pershing would no longer be able to use the Mexican railways to resupply his forces, even under the old wink-and-nod arrangements. He also replaced Obregon, who had developed a rapport with General Hugh. Scott, with the known anti-American Luis Cabrera as his chief negotiator with Washington. Cabrera demanded immediate US withdrawal with an implicit threat of war. Carranza meanwhile let his newspapers off the leash. At first he had encouraged them not to report the expedition, but by April he could no longer restrain them, especially as so many local warlords in Chihuahua were deeply unhappy with the policy of collaboration.

  Pershing meanwhile was reporting anti-Americanism rising on a daily basis. When his troops entered Parral on 12 April, they were met by an angry stone-throwing mob, shouting defiance and screaming: `Viva Villa!' In the fighting that followed two Americans and dozens of Mexicans were killed. Pershing clamoured for the political restrictions on his campaign to be lifted, so that he could take whatever measures he saw fit. Wilson refused and ordered him to withdraw to northern Chihuahua, thus effectively ruling out the possibility that Villa could be caught. Walking the tightrope, Carranza merely issued a mild rebuke to the Americans for their `excesses' at Parral, but said the incident proved Pershing should now return to the United States.

  A four-way conflict now developed. While Carranza and Wilson were officially united in their desire to extirpate Villa, Carranza badly wanted Pershing to withdraw, and Wilson just as badly wanted Carranza to authorise joint operations by his troops and Mexican federal forces. Pershing, chafing at his situation, was already hostile to both Carranza and Wilson, wanting only the carte blanche that would enable him to go after Villa in his own way. In his dispatches to Washington he was firm yet tactful, but in private he fulminated at the absurdity of the task laid upon him; how could one wage war according to a handbook of etiquette? His officers were even more outspoken. Lieutenant George Patton, later to be the fire-eating general of the Second World War, had so far had a `good war'. When he shot dead the villista commander Julio Ca
rdenas in a skirmish, Patton recorded: `I feel about it just as I did when I got my first swordfish. Surprised at my luck.' However, in the scatological obscenities he expended on Woodrow Wilson he excelled himself. Among his more printable opinions of the president was the following: `He has not the soul of a louse nor the mind of a worm. Or the backbone of a jellyfish.'

  In May Villa cocked a snook at the Americans by ordering a second cross-border raid, at Glenn Springs, Texas, which provoked another crossing of the frontier by US troops. This time Carranza reacted fiercely and replaced diplomacy and conciliation with a peremptory note. He told Washington that any further incursion of American troops would be vigorously resisted and he reiterated his demand that Pershing be withdrawn immediately. Pershing was informed that unless he began retracing his steps to the Rio Grande, he could expect to be resisted by federal troops. General Jacinto Trevino, the carrancista commander, warned Pershing formally that he would be allowed to move his troops in just one direction - north - and that Trevino would attack any columns moving in other directions. There were huge anti-gringo demonstrations in Mexico City, Saltillo and Chihuahua City. War fever mounted: it was confidently expected on all sides that Wilson would again seize Veracruz, leaving Carranza no option but to attack Pershing with all his might, and perhaps even join Villa in a crusade against the yanquis.

  Villa was particularly enraged by Wilson's statement in June 1916, when he called for an end to the civil war in Mexico and exhorted all Mexicans to unite behind Carranza as the only credible authority. This might be thought pleasing to Carranza, but he was just as appalled as Villa by the US president's blundering and impertinent intervention. As Carranza put it: `History furnished no example in any age or country of a civil war terminating by the union of the contending parties. One or the other must triumph.' By late June 1916 the slightest spark could have ignited a general conflict, but, amazingly, no war came, even when a firebrand rather than a spark was thrown.

  On zi June there was a major clash between Pershing's men and carrancista troops. In defiance of Carranza, Pershing sent Captain Charles Boyd with a force of about ioo men on an eastward sweep. At Carrizal, fifty miles south of Ciudad Juarez, the headstrong Boyd, by all accounts another Patton, took his men into the town in defiance of an order to the contrary by the Mexican garrison commander. The Mexicans opened up with machine-guns, killed twelve and wounded twenty-three; but so accurate was American gunnery that even from their entrenched positions they inflicted thirty-three casualties. Among the dead were the impetuous Boyd and the Mexican commander. The Americans retreated, leaving several prisoners behind.

  Here, surely, was the long awaited casus belli. Yet war did not break out, mainly because neither Wilson nor Carranza wanted it. Carranza, while quite prepared to play the anti-American card for domestic consumption, did not want a full-scale war that would undo all he had won in 1915, and probably replace him on the presidential chair in the National Palace. Carranza's prime aim was to get Pershing off his territory. He was losing caste with the Mexican public through his inability to make Pershing budge, and the real beneficiary of this contretemps was Villa, who gained support as the anti-American backlash picked up momentum.

  Wilson, for his part, did not want to play Germany's game and get sucked into a protracted conflict in Mexico. He resisted all Pershing's pleas, entreaties and angry notes asking to be let off the leash. Whenever Pershing mentioned his favourite projects of occupying the whole of Chihuahua or, at the very least, the urban centres of Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua City, Wilson replied with a very firm veto. He was even chary about Pershing's project of forming quisling militias in northern Chihuahua, fearful that this would trigger further confrontation like that at Carrizal.

  Pershing did manage to get under Villa's skin in one respect, however. He captured the town of Namiquipa, from which so many of the Columbus raiders had come, and secured the cooperation of the villagers, whether by threats or bribery is not clear. Villa never forgot this `treachery', which to him seemed all the more bizarre as the gringos had recently treated other Namiquipans with great cruelty. Pershing captured a score of those who had taken part in the Columbus raid and sent them back for trial in the United States. Taken to Luna County, New Mexico, and given the merest semblance of a trial before a kangaroo court and a hanging judge, the six `ringleaders' experienced frontier lynch-law justice at its toughest ('we'll give them a fair trial and then we'll hang them'). Once the six had been hanged, American `peace officers' turned on the others, who had been sentenced to eighty years' imprisonment. In Silver City sadistic prison guards starved and abused the Namiquipans, to the point where two of them died. The others were put to a regime of hard labour and pardoned only in 1921, when passions over the Columbus raid finally cooled.

  Carranza meanwhile made soothing noises, muzzled his jingoistic press, promised to return all American prisoners of war and proposed mediation by the Latin American countries. However, eventual withdrawal of the Pershing expedition took time and was not accomplished until early 1917. Negotiations, which took place in Connecticut, repeatedly stalled over Wilson's desire to control events in Mexico and to secure guarantees and concessions in return for pulling Pershing out. Wilson was clearly being disingenuous, given the original reasons for sending the Punitive Expedition, but he found the obdurate Carranza a stone in his shoe and decided to be just as obstinate in turn. Also, it was a temperamental fault with Wilson, as he demonstrated at Versailles in i9i9, that he found others wilfully blind to truths he accepted as selfevident.

  Carranza doggedly insisted he would not agree to a joint US-Mexico Commission, to act as a forum for a general review of relations between the two countries, and was adamant that it be limited to the sole question of Pershing's withdrawal. He calculated that American public opinion, already tired of the wild-goose chase, would not allow Wilson to go to war over unclear objectives in Mexico, and that this drift in opinion would strengthen as the months went on. So, Carranza played for time. By the end of 1916 it was clear that Washington could secure no quid pro quo for withdrawal of Pershing, and finally Wilson accepted the inevitable. At the end of January 1917 the moribund Punitive Expedition broke camp, and on 5 February the last American soldier left Mexican soil. Carranza had won a great diplomatic victory. His triumph over Wilson in the duel of wills was the one event in his career that went some way to justifying his narcissistic view of himself as Mexico's saviour.

  However, the embittered Americans refused to give up in their quest for Villa. Baulked on the campaign trail and the battlefield, they turned to espionage and dirty tricks. The US intelligence community got in on the act and, in an uncanny pre-echo of the CIA's vendetta against Castro of Cuba in the early Ig6os, hired assassins and hitmen to dispose of the elusive Villa. Some Japanese-Americans, posing as Tokyo-based agents, managed to worm their way into his confidence and actually poisoned his coffee, but Villa survived. He had been on his guard against poisoning for some time and always got one of his men to drink the first half of any beverage prepared for him. When all the assassination attempts failed, the US authorities tried to bury the evidence of their endeavours in closed archives.

  It is generally considered that the Punitive Expedition was one of the United States's great humiliations. It became orthodoxy on the American Left that the Columbus affair had been a conspiracy involving US business interests, with Villa a conscious or unconscious partner. Germany concluded that it need not fear a US declaration of war, since the US Army was ineffective - it could not even capture a single Mexican bandit. Berlin therefore ordered unrestricted U-boat warfare - which was precisely the factor that brought the United States into the First World War. Wilson took his revenge by embargoing food, arms and (later) even gold and credit to Carranza - measures which seriously impeded the First Chief in his bid to wipe out Villa and Zapata. However, some revisionist historians have argued that the long-term consequences of the Punitive Expedition were beneficial, in that the mobilisation as a result
of the tension with Mexico helped train GIs and convinced public opinion of the need for military spending.

  The most famous consequence of all was the affair of the Zimmermann telegram. In February 1917 the German foreign secretary Arthur Zimmermann sent a cable in code to his ambassador in Mexico City, informing him of the beginning of unrestricted submarine warfare. In order to keep the United States preoccupied and neutral, Zimmermann proposed to offer Mexico an alliance: if Carranza attacked the United States, triggering a full-scale war in the western hemisphere, Germany would support Mexico both financially and militarily and would help her to reconquer the territories lost to the Americans after the war of i 846-8 - Texas, Arizona and New Mexico. Zimmermann ended his message by proposing a tripartite alliance between Germany, Mexico and Japan. The British broke the German code and contrived to pass on the telegram to Washington in such a way as to suggest that it had been leaked in Mexico City. When it was made public, Zimmermann did not even bother to deny that he was the author. Publication caused a sensation and meant that Woodrow Wilson did not even have to prepare US public opinion for his declaration of war on Germany.

  If Carranza and Wilson had both gained in their different ways from the Punitive Expedition, the real beneficiary was Villa. The presence of Pershing and the American troops in Mexico seemed to prove the truth of everything Villa had ever said about the gringos, and Carranza further alienated Chihuahua by his military dispositions in the state. The army he sent to combat Villa and, if necessary, Pershing, was a severe strain on Chihuahua's resources. The commander, Jacinto Trevino, was a martinet who secured the dismissal of Enriquez as governor and his replacement by a more biddable figurehead. Encouraged by the apparent nod from Carranza, Trevino then manoeuvred to get rid of the carrancista machine politician Luis Herrera. This time Carranza put his foot down, for Herrera was a loyal placeman.