Villa and Zapata: A History of the Mexican Revolution

by Frank McLynn

  Overrating his skill and resources, Villa was now confident he could defeat Murguia. However, the Villa who faced Murguia in battle was the same Villa who had failed to think his strategy through and prepare properly at Celaya and Leon. He rejected Baudelio Uribe's plan for a night attack on the enemy rear with iooo men and quixotically sent out Nicolas Fernandez on another mission with 2,000 men while he blithely confronted Murguia head on. The result was a severe defeat. The usual unsupported cavalry charge was repulsed, and a villista rout followed when it turned out that Villa had kept no reserve.

  Retreating to Parral, where he stayed no more than twenty-four hours, Villa undid some of the damage caused by the Camargo atrocity when he invited the people of the city to a bonanza of loot. Unable to take with him vast quantities of goods and materiel he had loaded in railway cars, Villa invited the citizens to help themselves; in the free-for-all that followed the railway cars were stripped bare in a couple of hours. Villa's largesse seemed misplaced, however, when news came in that the carrancistas had seized most of the supplies Villa had cached after the taking of Chihuahua City. Temporarily disconcerted in Chihuahua, Villa divided his force in two, and ordered the two sections to rendezvous at Zacatecas in Durango state, where he hoped to build a unified command with the villista rebels already fighting there under Contreras and others.

  It was March 1917 before Villa felt ready to face Murguia again in Chihuahua. This time it was Murguia who was overconfident and once again he fell for the stratagem of the feigned retreat. Since Villa had lost the last encounter by an unsupported cavalry charge and no reserve, Murguia treated the battle as a rerun of his earlier success, unaware that Villa had posted men in the hills. When Murguia moved forward to complete the expected rout, he found himself encircled. Attacked from all sides, he took 2,500 casualties and was exceptionally lucky to escape from the field himself. Villa took 6oo prisoners and had them all executed. In a macabre and grisly act of butchery, the dorados dispatched them in groups of five, shooting a particularly powerful bullet through all five heads at once to save ammunition.

  Fortune now once more turned against Villa in the see-saw battle with Murguia. Rafael Mendoza, a major in the dorados, was captured by the federals and about to be executed when he offered them a deal they could not refuse. Mendoza was one of the few trusted aides who knew where Villa's arms dumps were hidden, and he led Murguia to a gigantic cache at Chevarria, containing tens of thousands of rifles and several million cartridges. When this catastrophic loss was reported to Villa, he was so devastated that he burst into tears. Reeling from the setback, he decided that the only way to recoup was another attack on Chihuahua City. He built huge bonfires to make Murguia think the attack would come from the south, then took his forces round to the north to attack from there, but Murguia did not take the bait. After a fierce battle, Villa's ammunition gave out. Murguia took all 200 villistas prisoner and hanged them in rows on the Avenida Colon in Chihuahua City, much as Crassus had hanged the Spartacists on the Appian way after the slaves' revolt.

  Still brooding on Mendoza's treachery, Villa decided to wreak vengeance on all who had betrayed the secret of his arms dumps and directed his steps towards Namiquipa, whose people had betrayed a cache to Pershing. When all the males in the villages fled into the mountains at his approach, he rounded up all the nubile women and let his troops gang-rape them. This was short-sighted folly, for it simply alienated villagers previously sympathetic to him, and was scored with the Camargo atrocity in the tally of war crimes and crimes against humanity charged to his account. Villa soon learned how stupid he had been to indulge his feelings of rage. Whereas previously villagers had alerted him to Murguia's approach, in disgust at the Namiquipa outrage they ceased to help him. One immediate result was that a federal attack on his headquarters at Babicora came as a complete surprise; after surrounding the hacienda, Murguia killed hundreds and Villa and 400 survivors were hard put to break out after the most desperate hand-to-hand fighting.

  As he licked his wounds, Villa's gloom was increased by the treachery of one of his dorado colonels. On a promise of pardon and payment from Murguia, he plotted to assassinate Villa, but the unusual presence of men on rooftops was noticed, and Villa sent officers ahead who were fired on. For three days Villa sulked in his camp like Achilles, full of paranoid fantasies, uncertain whom he could trust and who was loyal. A further blow came when he bestirred himself and marched to the US border at Ojinaga, where he was expecting another cache of arms from his agent in Presidio, Texas, across the river. There he was told that the arms dealers were too frightened of the wrath of their fellow-countrymen to sell arms to Villa, even at inflated prices.

  At this point the villista movement started seriously imploding. By his atrocities Villa had lost the hearts and minds of the peasantry and by now, with the betrayal of so many of his arms dumps, he was seriously short of arms and ammunition. Even formerly pro-Villa pueblos came to terms with Carranza once they realised Villa could no longer protect them. Villista propaganda no longer worked, for the idea that Carranza had sold Mexico to the gringos was refuted both by the withdrawal of the Punitive Expedition and Carranza's support for Germany, which eloquently proved there was no secret treaty between him and Wilson. All hopes of a resurrection of the Division of the North were now seen as the chimeras they were. Forced back once more on to guerrilla warfare and operating with just a few hundred men, Villa divided his strength into small units, which made hit-and-run raids on towns and garrisons; the idea was supposed to be that once the harvest was gathered in, the various units could recombine, but the snag was that Villa could exert no control over what actions the units took in his name. Nor could he explain why he went on fighting, if indeed he knew himself. It was difficult to articulate ideas and policies, for not a single intellectual remained with the villistas.

  To save himself from becoming marginalised, Villa toyed with more and more outlandish schemes. When a war of words broke out in the Chihuahua press between Murguia and Trevino, each accusing the other of cowardice, Villa tried to cut the Gordian knot by writing to a Spanishspeaking newspaper in the United States (with syndication rights in Chihuahua) challenging Murguia to a duel. When this offer was predictably met with silence, Villa became obsessed with a hare-brained scheme to go to Mexico City, kidnap Carranza, and take him down to Zapata in Morelos for a `people's trial' there. Incredibly, unaware or insouciant of the obstacles, Villa actually pressed ahead with this idea and took a unit of handpicked men south with him.

  Once south of Chihuahua, Villa got his first inkling of what he had taken on. This part of Mexico was an armed camp and every village bristled with militias, aggressive and challenging to strangers. To cover his tracks, Villa had to execute every single person he met. In Durango he fell in with twenty-seven armed villagers out on a posse in pursuit of bandits. True to his principles, he killed them all, but then found himself hounded by the Furies from a collective league of villages, determined to avenge their colleagues. In alarm Villa retreated to Aguascalientes, only to lose his way. With the nerves of his men near to cracking point, Villa was forced to call his great adventure off and return north to Chihuahua. He divided his force and threaded his way back perilously into the state, using all the byways and mountain passes. However, so low was morale in the unit he did not lead personally that there was a mutiny and the commander was murdered. When Villa caught up with the ringleaders and hanged them, the rest of the unit fled to Murguia.

  The failure of his quixotic Mexico City operation plunged Villa into profound gloom and for a time he contemplated giving up the struggle. He offered terms for surrender to Murguia, who turned them down, as Villa, like Zapata, had been declared `beyond amnesty' by Carranza. Villa was now in a box canyon of his own making: Carranza would never pardon him, and if he fled to the USA he would be put on trial and executed for the attack on Columbus. Even if he tried going into exile in Europe, like Diaz and Huerta, he would be extradited either by the Allies, eager to do
favours for Woodrow Wilson, or the Central Powers, who were friendly to Carranza. He was lucky that the carrancistas, by their stupidity in driving recruits into his arms - by describing anyone who resisted their depredations as a villista - still kept his movement alive.

  Villa could still count on the hard core of a few dozen comrades, bound to him by indissoluble ties of kinship or compadrazgo, but by the end of 1917 there were just too many unfavourable factors working against him. The impression of the atrocities and gang-rapes lived on in folk memory. The withdrawal of the Punitive Expedition cut the ground from under his feet and made his struggle against Carranza seem either meaningless or the personal pique of a man defeated by an abler politician. Without the prompting of his intellectuals, Villa did not know how to pitch an appeal to the masses and, left to himself, completely forgot about land reform. The rise of village militias or defensas sociales groups worked against him, for these armed bands saw themselves as the seeds of a new Chihuahua and fought against both Villa and Carranza.

  Increasingly Villa was being marginalised as these militia groups became the focus for struggle within the Carranza regime. Ignacio Enriquez, now civilian governor of Chihuahua, tried to build up these militias as a counterweight to Murguia and the Army. Carranza sat on the fence as his two cronies slugged it out. He could probably have finished Villa for good by giving greater power to the defensas sociales, but to do so he would have had to abandon central control via the Army. In the end the conflict reached the point where Murguia tried to assassinate Enriquez, and Carranza was forced finally to take sides. He chose Enriquez, sent him back as commander of all militias and paramilitaries, and reassigned Murguia to Tamaulipas.

  The emphasis on armed militias finally started to pay off. Everywhere Villa went he was confronted by them. He issued another manifesto, declaring that he was fighting for Chihuahua's autonomy against Carranza's despotism and threatening the militias with harsh reprisals, but no one paid him any attention. By the end of 1917 Villa even gave up harassing the Americans and allowed US companies to return, provided they paid him taxes. This they were happy to do, so the villista movement continued to limp along, still able to pay villagers for supplies with silver pesos. He was just able to survive on popular resentment against Carranza, for in 1918 the First Chief turned hard right and restored their haciendas to the Terrazas family. This was a cynical piece of calculation on Carranza's part: he wanted the elite in Chihuahua united and the confiscated estates, now totally plundered and no longer worked, were a dead weight, generating no income.

  For a lot of 1918 Villa was so weary and exhausted that he could not even be bothered to make capital out of this signal `betrayal' by Carranza. It was a doldrum period in his life: he mainly skulked in the sierras with his faithful dorados, raiding occasionally for food but attempting no major enterprises. However, he was jolted out of his apathy at the end of the year by a quite unexpected event: Felipe Angeles returned from the United States and sought him out. Angeles had lived in honest poverty at El Paso, occasionally wandering around other parts of the USA, including New York. Throughout the years 1916-18 he shared Villa's obsession with a US invasion of Mexico and, though no longer part of the struggle, continued to admire Villa, Zapata and de la 0 from afar. Angeles's greatest tragedy may have been that, brilliant captain and versatile intellect though he was, he was no politician. He was the one man capable of uniting all factions in the Revolution if Carranza could have been got rid off, but was self-confessedly clueless about how to achieve that desirable consummation. His closest friend was Maytorena, but in the end he became disillusioned with his defeatism and the way he converted the `art of the possible' into impossibilism, so that the present moment never could be the right time to take action. As Angeles gloomily noted: `The Sancho Panzas have never done anything great; whenever anything of real importance is to be done, one needs madmen like Madero or Don Quixote.'

  While Angeles was wondering whether he should cross into Mexico to offer himself as an alternative to Carranza, Villa wrote to him in the most friendly terms. This decided Angeles, who was convinced that, with the end of the war in Europe, the United States would very soon send its armies into Mexico. He crossed the Rio Grande in December 1918, and shortly afterwards there was a joyous reunion with Villa. As they talked, however, Villa realised they were still far apart in their thinking. Angeles seemed to have no idea how firmly entrenched Carranza was, and how ubiquitous his troops. How could Angeles realistically hope for a government of national reconciliation? Ironically, though Angeles had come back to talk peace, his presence spurred Villa on to make war and he decided to attack Parral. As though by magic, Angeles's mere presence seemed to have turned Villa's fortunes. Down to just 500 men by the end of 1918, new recruits boosted the numbers to 2,oo0 a few months later. It seemed that Angeles's presence really did mean something to people sick of Carranza.

  The villista army of 1919 was an entirely volunteer force; Villa had stopped pressing men when he found it so unpopular and unproductive. His supply situation was healthy, for his war chest had grown from the taxes levied on foreign-owned companies and the long lay-off from active campaigning. The arms and ammunition situation, too, was better, for corruption under Carranza had reached the point where there was a thriving black market in weapons filched from Carranza's arms factories. Now Angeles provided Villa with the political and propaganda arm he needed. Angeles toured the villages of Chihuahua, making speeches in which he stressed religious toleration and respect for foreigners and their property. Cynics said only the women and old men heard the oratory, for all the young males fled to the mountains whenever they heard Villa was approaching.

  The most important change in villista policy wrought by Angeles was a new attitude to prisoners. Angeles impressed on Villa that he could make a breakthrough if he stopped executing his captives. Villa made two points in his defence: that he had responded in kind only when Carranza started the entire vicious circle; and that if he did not kill them, the prisoners simply rejoined the federals, with or without clipped ears. Angeles urged him to try, and Villa promised to implement the new policy at Parral. The attack on Parral in March igrq was bitterly resisted both by the federal garrison and the militia. Villa managed to rout the regular troops - the militiamen accused the troops of deserting them - and the fighters of the defensas sociales withdrew to the hill of Cerro de la Cruz and fought on sturdily until at last being compelled to surrender. True to his word to Angeles, Villa let all eighty-eight surviving militiamen go free, except for the three leaders whom he executed. He had a particular reason for killing Jose de Luz Herrera and his two sons, for they were part of the Herrera family that had betrayed him; Maclovio and Luis Herrera (killed at Torreon) were the most notorious ex-villista turncoats to join Carranza.

  Villa also handed over to Angeles the federal troops he had taken prisoner; Angeles harangued them and let them go. Angeles's policy turned out to be a wise one. Once it got around that Villa did not execute prisoners, and word-of-mouth made it wholly credible, garrisons were prepared to surrender to Villa and hand over their arms and ammunition after the most token resistance. Warming to the theme, Villa also stopped executing recalcitrant gringos and instead had Angeles lecture them. There was a famous incident along these lines at the Santa Eulalia mine in April igig, when Villa himself joined in the finger-wagging. The new policy paid dividends. No longer under automatic death sentence from Villa, the militiamen began refusing to fight for Carranza, citing their `betrayal' by the Army at Parral.

  Angeles's next initiative was much less to Villa's liking: he urged him to switch from guerrilla warfare to regular campaigning. Villa protested that he neither had the manpower nor the resources; how could he pit 3,000 men against the 17,000 Carranza had stationed in Chihuahua? Patiently Angeles explained his thinking: the carrancista commanders were at daggers drawn, all of them corrupt payroll padders; the men were mainly press-ganged Indians, half-starved, ill-equipped and suffering from a shortage of ho
rses; and the militias were refusing to cooperate with them. Villa agreed to give regular campaigning a try, but had reached the end of his concessions to Angeles. Soon there was a vociferous disagreement over politics and Villa shocked Angeles by his animadversions. Madero, he said, was `dumb' to have signed the treaty of Ciudad Juarez with Diaz, and even more so for not having Felix Diaz shot after the attempted coup at Veracruz. Feelings ran high and the upshot was a genuine shouting match between Villa and Angeles. Onlookers thought Villa was sure to order his friend executed, but Villa eventually calmed down and told Angeles: `You are the first man who has not died after contradicting me.'

  Villa's next venture certainly satisfied Angeles's prescription that effective action had to be quixotic. Since Chihuahua City was too strong to capture, Villa opted for an attack on Ciudad Juarez. Partly he wished to see whether Angeles's thinking on regular warfare was correct, partly he wanted to replenish his food and stores, but most of all he wanted to sound the intentions of the yanquis. During the row over Madero, Villa had accused Angeles of going soft on the Americans and being `gringoised'. Angeles said the Americans were just waiting for an excuse to cross the border, but Villa maintained they had burned their fingers too badly over the Pershing expedition and were a paper tiger. The attack on Juarez was partly mounted to test which of them was right.

  On 15 June 1919 Villa's favourite commander Martin Lopez launched the attack at such an angle that no stray bullets would wing their way over to the American side of the border at El Paso. The assault went well. Equipped with US-made wire cutters, the villistas made short work of the barbed wire defences and within a couple of hours had taken the city. Lopez then foolishly allowed his troops to disperse, oblivious to the fact that most of the federals had withdrawn in good order to nearby Fort Hidalgo. A party of carrancistas happened to return to retrieve their standard and found the scattered villistas. Casually opening fire on such easy targets, they all unknowingly panicked the villistas, who thought themselves the victims of a surprise attack. Their panic was contagious, and soon the entire army was streaming out of the city. Unaware that his men were pulling out, Villa rode into town to dine at a favourite restaurant and came within an ace of being captured by the federals. Angrily he ordered his men to regroup and retake the town. They succeeded, driving the federals back to Fort Hidalgo once more, but this time the carrancistas had an extra shot in their locker in more senses than one. They deliberately fired across the border into El Paso, provoking the Americans to intervene. The Villa-Angeles argument was settled decisively when American troops crossed the border in strength and Villa was forced to abandon his hard-won gains.