by Frank McLynn
However, Carranza foolishly let Trevino have the run of Chihuahua, and Trevino soon alienated Chihuahuans by the thousand. Venal, autocratic, complaisant towards banditry, Trevino made himself a bogeyman of the middle class by refusing to allow his soldiers to be charged in shops, restaurants and bars. If anyone objected, they were taken out and shot. The lazy Trevino delegated much power to his lieutenants, who surpassed him in extortion, adding mayhem and murder to their list of crimes. The most spectacular scandal occurred when it was discovered that Trevino was profiteering by exporting food from Chihuahua City even while the townspeople were starving.
Villa gained great kudos in the first half of 1916 for having thumbed his nose at Pershing, for the myth-making stories of his concealment in the cave, and for having apparently been proved right about Carranza. Resentment towards the American invaders was compounded by hatred of Trevino and the exactions and depredations of his hyenas. The villagers forgot their earlier disenchantment with Villa, who was now remembered through a golden nimbus. The time was right for a revival of the villista movement, and in the second half of 1916 Villa came roaring back to life as a guerrilla leader, almost as though his career had not missed a beat and there had never been a Punitive Expedition.
THE TWILIGHT OF ZAPATISMO
Expelled from their Eden, the zapatistas at first could only watch helplessly as the serpent destroyed paradise. Pablo Gonzalez was the latest, and most terrible, of the scourges of Morelos. Ambitious, bloodthirsty, brooding on ancient wrongs, Gonzalez was another of those men propelled from obscurity into the limelight by the Revolution, a kind of Bernadotte of Mexico. Orphaned at six, a peddlar at fourteen, failed immigrant to the USA, quondam merchant and small-time politician in Coahuila, Gonzalez was above all an opportunist who believed only in Gonzalez. First a maderista, then a fence-sitter, and finally a carrancista, Gonzalez enjoyed the dubious reputation of being the only general never to have won a battle. He aped Huerta's smoked glasses and was generally despised as a prize stupidus, with ambition far outrunning his abilities. Most of all, he was Carranza's creature, an overpromoted nonentity, deliberately built up by Carranza as a counterweight to Obregon, who was beyond his control. An unscrupulous sycophant with an eye to the main chance, Gonzalez was prepared to try anything, do anything, go anywhere in order to climb to the top of the greasy pole.
His first step in Morelos was to obliterate all traces of the Convention and to destroy Palafox's agrarian reforms. He used the methods of Huerta and Robles, burning, looting, executing by the score and deporting by the hundred, but he added a new refinement of his own: the deliberate destruction of food and property to impoverish and starve out the people who had sustained Zapata over six years. If ever there was a true Attila of the South, it was Gonzalez. Everything was swept into the maw of this all-consuming Moloch: sugar, subsistence crops, cattle, mills, farm machinery, military materiel, boxcars, cannon, ammunition, coal, sulphur, gunpowder, dynamite, nitroglycerine, sulphur, copper, hides, printing presses. Gonzalez and his henchmen made a fortune selling off food and surplus goods to Mexico City middlemen and he justified his vandalism as depriving Zapata of the sinews even of guerrilla war.
From his new headquarters at Tochimilco at the foot of the Popocatepetl volcano, Zapata prepared to strike back. He now operated with detached units of a maximum size of aoo apiece, easier to feed and harder to trace. In July 1916 he made his presence felt. He wiped out two federal garrisons at Santa Catarina and Tepoztlan, raided the Federal District and then fought a seven-hour running battle with Gonzalez's troops at Tlayacapan, as well as making two different assaults in force on the garrison at Tlaltizapan. Gonzalez's claim that he had pacified Morelos was revealed as a hollow boast.
Zapata directed a complex cell-like structure of command with at least seven major bands in the field, in the four corners of Morelos, on the border of Morelos and Mexico State, in Guerrero and the Federal District. Altogether he had 5,000 men on active operations at any one time, with another 3,000 held in reserve. Before going over to the offensive, he had to be sure of morale and support, for it was evident that not all Zapata's old chieftains wanted to fight. In a proclamation in August he denounced these fainthearts as time-serving cowards and egotists, interested only in feathering their own nests. Among those singled out for denunciation was Lorenzo Vasquez, formerly a most trusted aide but since then one of those, like Montano and Pacheco, who favoured doing a deal with Carranza. Zapata announced that Vasquez had been discharged for `notorious cowardice' and warned that he would visit the same penalty on all who came to terms with the enemy.
In October Zapata felt secure enough to mount an offensive. To blunt Gonzalez's policy of destruction and deportation, he felt that the best tactic was to target politically sensitive objectives, whose seizure would impair the credibility of the Carranza regime. Accordingly, on 4 October, after a ferocious battle, he seized the pumping station at Xochimilco, which supplied Mexico City with all its water. A week later he sacked the suburb of San Angel, just eight miles from the Zocalo, and destroyed the streetcar station. Zapata's new policy was to avoid attacking garrisons but to pick on targets - railways, factories, mills - whose destruction would impress foreign consuls and diplomats; cynically he had come to see that foreigners were always more impressed by the annihilation of property than the killing of human beings.
There followed a wave of raids across a broad swathe of territory, all aimed at sensitive plant, installations and buildings - in Oaxaca, Guerrero, Michoacan, Puebla, Tlaxcala, Mexico State and southern Hidalgo. The scale of the operations took Carranza aback. Not only had he wrongly concluded that Zapata was finished, but he had noted that in the great rising in Oaxaca in 1914-15 the tiger of Morelos had played no part; yet now a more sophisticated political consciousness seemed in evidence. Zapata made a point of sending his raiders two or three times a week into the Federal District to keep the citizens in the capital in a permanent state of nervousness, and by a system of political commissars, he took great care that none of his guerrillas alienated the villages and that there were no feuds within or between the pueblos.
Pablo Gonzalez reacted with all the wounded fury of a mendacious moron whose lies have been detected by the boss. He announced that if even one villager was found to have aided Zapata, the entire village would be destroyed and all the males put to death. Anyone straying out of village bounds or caught travelling without a pass was shot on sight. He stepped up the rate of deportation and of looting, with more and more portable property removed to Mexico City by his minions. Then, with his casualties running at the rate of ioo a week, he finally lost patience and resumed mass executions. At Tlaltizapan, chosen for its symbolism in the zapatista movement, he consigned i 8o men, women and children to the firing squad.
This savagery merely prompted an escalation of the violence. On 7 November, near Joco station in the Federal District, the zapatistas blew up a crowded train on the Mexico City-Cuernavaca line. Four hundred passengers and troops died in the carnage. The embarrassment was particularly acute for Gonzalez, as he happened to be in the capital, conferring with Carranza, when the news came in. His only thought was for more repression. When he returned to Cuernavaca on I I November, he announced draconian extensions to his pass laws: henceforth anyone found near a railway without official authorisation, with or without a highway pass, would be executed on the spot, as would anyone dishonestly vouching for another so as to get a safe-conduct pass, or anyone who gave his safe-conduct pass to another. Gonzalez also gave his troops a virtual licence to kill, by issuing a new decree that anyone even suspected of being a zapatista would be executed without trial. Zapata's response was to blow up another train, not far from the first one; deaths were well over 300.
As Zapata had hoped, US envoys reported to Washington that Carranza's grip on the country was uncertain, that Mexico was sliding towards anarchy. In desperation Gonzalez ordered a Soo-yard section of no-man's land to be cleared on either side of the railway track f
rom the capital to Cuernavaca. He ranted and raged to Carranza that Zapata would not fight fair, complained that Obregon was sabotaging him in the background, and asked for even more troops. Carranza bluntly told him that if he could not manage with 30,000, a few thousand more would make no difference. Besides, there were no more to be had. Three large armies were already deployed elsewhere, one to deal with Villa, one to conduct surveillance on Pershing, and another to deal with a fresh rebellion in Oaxaca under Felix Diaz. The last straw was when Gonzalez's troops in Morelos started succumbing in their hundreds to disease: first malaria and dysentery, later typhoid. By December 1916, 7,000 of the 30,000 were dead, or were in military hospitals where many more expired since medical supplies did not reach them; quinine and morphine sent for their relief were seized by black marketeers in league with corrupt officers in the commissariat, and the febrifuge drugs were then sold on the black market in Mexico City. Throughout Morelos sick and dying soldiers could be seen lying in huts and boxcars and even supine in the streets.
Realising that the time had come for a final push, Zapata showed his contempt for Gonzalez by returning to his old headquarters at Tlaltizapan, from where he launched simultaneous attacks on ten cities and towns: Cuernavaca, Puebla, Yautepec, Jojutla, Jonacatepec, Axochiapan, Paso del Mundo, Izucar de Matamoros, Chietla and Atlixco. The demoralised federals buckled beneath these coordinated attacks. On the first day of the offensive alone, the zapatistas killed or captured 500 of the enemy and Gonzalez ordered a general withdrawal. On New Year's Day 1917 the zapatistas triumphantly re-entered the major towns of Morelos.
Zapata was disgusted by what he saw when he went down to Cuernavaca. The city was a combination of ghost town and bombsite, with just three families in concealed residence; the rest had either fled or been deported. Levels of vandalism by Gonzalez's men were unspeakable: most of the houses had their front doors ripped off, the sanitation system had been deliberately wrecked so that the feculent streets were like open sewers, churches had been despoiled and images and statues of the saints defaced and desecrated.
In the victorious euphoria of the moment, some zapatista leaders lost their heads and talked wildly of pressing on to Mexico City; others imagined themselves back in 1914 and talked in all seriousness of the importance of getting to the capital before Villa. However, Zapata knew that it was one thing for Gonzalez to cut and run in Morelos, quite another to think Carranza would do likewise in the capital. For a while there would be stalemate, allowing Zapata to resume the task of agrarian reform, but in the end, as Zapata knew, there would be another reckoning.
Carranza was unable to deal effectively with Zapata in 1916-17 as he had a host of other problems occupying his attention, diplomatic, military, social and economic. After six years of virtually non-stop warfare, Mexico was in chaos. Crops were unharvested, cattle had been exported to buy arms, mines and factories closed. In the cities banks failed, capitalists hoarded their assets, black markets flourished. Everywhere there were shortages of food, water, coal and other basics. Agriculture was in crisis as subsistence crops failed and there was no money with which to import grain. Peasants were reduced to eating bran mixed with sawdust or even earth. Deprived of their cattle, they overcame a great Mexican cultural taboo and killed and ate horses. Famine stalked the land, and in its wake came disease and pestilence. The countryside was a wasteland of bent and twisted railway tracks, gutted buildings, burned bridges, dynamited factories, carcasses of dead horses or makeshift mass graves for the human fallen. Even in the parched deserts an endless vista of devastation could be descried, particularly with the detritus and abandoned vehicles of the Pershing expedition. In the cities and towns indigence and destitution were widespread, and hundreds of cripples, limbless men, mutilated veterans and gravely wounded walking hospital cases thronged the streets.
The once proud Mexican railways were a mockery of the very idea of infrastructure. All of the great political factions had their particular specialisation in train wrecking. Carranza liked to rip up track, Villa to use mkquinas locas as improvised missiles, and Zapata to blow up trains - a technique that T. E. Lawrence would start to use in Arabia later in 1917. On the northern plains, alongside the bones of cattle and the charnel-house of human corpses, were dynamited and derailed locomotives and rolling stock - more than 50,000 tons of steel and scrap iron awaiting salvage. The line from Saltillo to Mexico City was in an especially bad state of repair, with rusty spikes, bent nails and decayed sleepers. The Veracruz line had been reduced to just twenty-seven locomotives with roofless cars and the woodwork rotting away in the rolling stock. For lack of coal and oil, all trains ran slowly with frequent stops, because they had to consume wood; a zoo-mile rail trip in the interior could take as long as the scheduled railway run from Mexico City to New York, even assuming the hazards of bandits and derailments were avoided. Although the deficiencies in the railway system harmed all aspects of the export and import economies, it was the impact on food supplies that was most keenly felt. For much of igi6-ig Mexico was a hungry land.
Perhaps the worst aspect of the general chaos was financial. All sides in the Revolution had simply printed money and forced people to accept it; the result was a plethora of banknotes and hyperinflation to rival the later astounding phenomenon in Germany in 1923. By the end of 1916 Mexico was switching to barter, while Carranza seized the bullion holdings of the major banks and decreed that only gold, silver and the US dollar would be acceptable as media of exchange. In 1917 he introduced a new metallic currency, fixed all wages and prices in terms of gold and silver, and made the US dollar the only paper currency that was legal tender. The wonder is that there was not even more unrest in the cities during the Carranza years, but he was able to buy off urban malcontents as a result of the huge surge in commodity prices consequent on the First World War. The US price of silver doubled in 1915-18, that of copper rose by two-thirds while the price of henequen actually tripled.
It is a backhanded tribute to Carranza to say that, even when faced with chaos on this scale, he did not put his political programme on hold, heave to and wait for the storm to abate, but pressed ahead as if he presided over a booming peacetime economy. A centralising control freak, he proved much tougher than Diaz, far more able than Huerta and infinitely more skilled as a politician than Madero. He eliminated the huertista old guard, rigidly controlled all newspapers, purged the civil service and diplomatic corps, took personal control of the railways, forced loans and taxes on all areas deemed hostile, persecuted Spaniards, and used execution as a reflex action. Carranza regarded anyone who would not come to heel as an enemy to be hunted down without pity. Whereas Juarez had decreed a general amnesty in 1867, his so-called follower was implacable, merciless and bloodthirsty.
Carranza was determined to make his writ run in every corner of Mexico. Where Villa, if successful, would have been content with a loose federalism and a strong assertion of states' rights, Carranza wanted rigid, bureaucratic control from the centre. He pursued a ruthless policy of purging all opposition, whether ex-porfiristas, ex-huertistas, ex-villistas, ex- zapatistas and even ex-maderistas, in favour of a narrow clique of northern apparatchiks, and was particularly efficient in weeding out potentially disaffected officers in the Army. Intransigence and hostility to compromise became badges of honour and loyalty tests in the eyes of the Carranza political machine.
It was a rich irony that a movement that began life in favour of local autonomy ended by imposing more rigid centralising policies than Diaz or Huerta ever had. Even minor officials were hounded with questionnaires and investigations into their past. Carranza's political machine was Stalinism avant la lettre, with spies and informers everywhere. Naturally, those with their hands on the levers of power used accusations of `disloyalty' to settle private disputes and ordered seizures of land, not for redistribution, but to punish rivals as well as recalcitrants.
Carranza believed in replacing even minor officials in distant places with loyal placemen, but in southern M
exico an additional motivation was at work. Just as Zapata despised the city as the fount of corruption, Carranza despised the south as the home of decadence and hoped to redeem it. He had the same sort of contempt for southern regions as the northern abolitionists had for the ante-bellum South in 186o, or the northern European members of the EU have for their Mediterranean brethren today. In all cases, the suspicion is of a corrupt, brutal, criminal, hedonistic dolce far niente mentality. Hence Carranza's classic `carpetbagging' in the `deep south' of Tabasco, Oaxaca, Chiapas and Yucatan, when he sent his `proconsuls' to secure those territories for him in 1914-15, before Villa was defeated. It has also been speculated that Carranza viewed the south as perfect territory for an `eagle's nest' last-stand redoubt in case Villa was victorious, which was why he had urged a southern strategy on Obregon.
Carranza differed from Villa in that he wanted real control of an area, not just token fealty, obeisance and loyalty from local caudillos and warlords. This was why he laid so much emphasis on the character and personality of his warlords, of whom three predominated: Francisco Mugica, Jesus Agustin Castro and Salvador Alvarado, governors respectively of Tabasco, Oaxaca and Chiapas and Yucatan. However, Carranza's centralising tendencies usually generated a three-way conflict in the remoter states: between the carrancistas and the old class of hacendados who wanted to run things the old way and resented being ordered by Mexico City to abolish debt peonage; and within the Carranza movement between the local carrancista apparatchiks and lukewarm supporters and the new favourites sent down as governors and proconsuls - a classic struggle of `ins' and `outs' or Court and Country.
