by Frank McLynn
Angeles was plunged into the blackest gloom by this outcome. Now that he saw the extent of American hatred of Villa, he realised that Washington would never agree to recognise the government of national reconciliation he proposed to set up. Moreover, all his propaganda in the villages had stressed that the yanquis were on the point of intervening against Carranza on Villa's side, and now the reverse had happened. The American intervention at Juarez also undid all his patient work with Villa. Raging at this latest `betrayal', Villa told Angeles that the doveish approach had failed and from now on it would be war to the knife; gringos would be killed as and when encountered. In despair, Angeles abandoned all his dreams and told Villa he intended to return to the USA.
The two men parted as friends. Villa warned of the danger of capture by the carrancistas and provided a small escort, but for some reason Angeles did not immediately cross the border and instead wandered aimlessly around northern Mexico for motives that remain obscure. Did he fear that if he returned to the USA he would be charged with violating neutrality laws? Perhaps he aspired to leadership of the zapatistas now that Zapata was dead? The most likely explanation is that after leaving Villa he had second thoughts and could not bear to admit to himself that he had failed, but his actions were so self-destructive that, were we dealing with Obregon, we would be tempted to posit a simple wish for extinction.
One of the villistas betrayed Angeles's hiding place and he surrendered to carrancistas after receiving an express promise that he would not be shot. In Mexico City Carranza faced a dilemma. If he followed his own inclinations and had Angeles executed, this would be a public relations disaster, for he was already anathema to the international community after his treacherous slaying of Zapata. On the other hand, his prisoner was in many ways his most dangerous opponent. His moral and intellectual superior, Angeles was the one man who could unite all the factions in Mexico to unseat him. He could not allow such a man to live. Whichever he opted for, a summary execution or a protracted trial, Carranza would reap the whirlwind. Always supremely cunning, he thought of a third way that would avoid the dilemma.
Angeles was court-martialled in the Theatre of Heroes in Chihuahua City, even though he was not subject to military law as he was not a member of the federal army and in front of judges who were all his bitter enemies. Carranza aimed at a quick show trial that would not permit the delays of the normal criminal courts. Angeles made a brilliant speech in his own defence, praising Zapata, socialism and Villa, stressing redemption and love over hate. He argued that Villa, for all his excesses, was good at heart and that Carranza was to blame for the continuing turmoil in Chihuahua because he had not offered credible terms on which Villa could lay down his arms.
The speech impressed everyone and won over most of those who had been uncertain what their attitude was. Carranza realised that the longer the trial dragged on, the more support Angeles would get, so decreed that the court must publish its findings within two days. The prosecution rushed through its case and the judges in the kangaroo court, Carranza puppets to a man, sentenced Angeles to death for `rebellion'. Carranza refused to commute the sentence and denied Angeles the right of appeal, even though this was expressly allowed by Article 107 of the 1917 Constitution. Despite protest meetings, petitions and pressure from the USA, Carranza carried out the sentence. Five thousand people defied Carranza by attending Angeles's funeral, often quoting his dying words that the blood of martyrs fertilises a great cause.
Villa retaliated by attacking the garrison of Santa Rosalia and wiping it out to the last man. He then moved south and attacked Durango, but sustained a reverse as bad as the one at Ciudad Juarez. To prevent his being attacked from behind, he told his men to tear up the railway track leading to Durango City. For reasons unclear they disobeyed orders, and when Villa launched his attack, he was predictably taken in the rear, suffering disastrous defeat and the loss in battle of his favourite commander Martin Lopez. The defeats at Ciudad Juarez and Durango and the execution of Angeles had a cumulative effect, and once more an epidemic of desertion and demoralisation ran through Villa's army. Nor could he could look for anything from the peasantry. The people of Chihuahua were so alienated from him that he was reduced to taking old men hostage in every pueblo he entered, so that the villagers could not denounce him to the authorities; the old men would be released in the next village, a new set of hostages taken, and so on.
Villa was riding his luck and might well have been finished off at this point, but was suddenly rescued by dramatic events in Mexico City. In 1919 Carranza repeated Diaz's mistake and tried to perpetuate his rule. Obregon had retired from national politics, so as not to be breathing down Carranza's neck, but only on the clear tacit understanding that he would be Mexico's next president. At his ranch in Sonora he counted the days, but began to overeat, possibly in reaction to the problems of being one-armed but more likely through simple boredom. He put on weight, he looked bloated, his hair turned grey; at forty he looked like an old man. Concerned about his health, he became a hypochondriac and made frequent visits to US hospitals.
Obregon proved as good a capitalist as he was a general. His acreage increased from 18o to 3,500 hectares; he formed a chickpea collective in Sonora and Sinaloa to cartelise the product; he diversified into cattle and mining, exporting leather and meat and forming an import-export agency. In 1918 the price of chickpeas doubled and he made US$5o,o00 in that year alone; by the beginning of igig he had 1,500 men on his payroll. Obregon was very popular and he carefully cultivated a downhome `just folks' image. He dressed like a tramp, exaggerated the poverty of his origins and tried to be a Mexican Abe Lincoln, with many references in his speeches to his indigent early years and the overriding worth of the common man. Obregon was immensely self-regarding but he concealed it well by his lack of solemnity, his playing the fool and above all by his jokes.
He shared with Lincoln the genuine characteristic of being the pessimist who believes the only way you can reach people is through humour. He had an immense repertoire of jokes, was a great raconteur and a talented mimic, and had the priceless gift of being able to improvise, ad lib, and cap other people's jokes; the only gap in his humorous armoury was an inability to appreciate irony. His prodigious memory and ability to learn poems and songs by heart enabled him to catch out many a poseur and phoney. It has been suggested that in Mexican culture jokes are the obverse side of death, a sign that the joker thinks life meaningless. This would square with Obregon's death-driven psychological profile. One close oberver of him said: `Towards life Obregon was capable of anything except taking it seriously.'
In June 1919, after serving his time in the political wilderness, Obregon announced his candidacy for the presidency. Carranza should have bowed to the inevitable and given Obregon's bid his blessing, but he disliked him personally and viewed him as a representative of the military arm Carranza wanted firmly under the control of civilian bureaucrats. He therefore cast around for ways to stop him. A subtle politician, Obregon blocked Carranza's obvious stratagem by coming to terms with Pablo Gonzalez, making it impossible for the president to play off the two generals against each other. However, Carranza continued to plug away at his mantra that only a civilian should succeed him, citing Juarez's attack on `the odious banner of militarism'. Having alienated Obregon, Carranza aped Diaz by opting for a nonentity as his successor: Ignacio Bonillas, the Mexican ambassador in Washington.
This was grist to Obregon's humorous mill. At the time there was a popular song about a wandering shepherdess suffering from amnesia, who knew nothing - where she was born, who her parents were - except that her name was Flor de Te. Obregon's supporters popularised a mock slogan that ridiculed Bonillas pitilessly: Viva Bonillas! Viva Flor de Te! In November 1919 Obregon began his whistlestop tour and was equally scathing. He told his audiences that he had overcome rain, wind, Orozco, Huerta, Villa and Zapata and was not going to allow a little thing like Carranza to stand in his way. To cheers and klaxons he announced: `Before the b
earded old man can rig the election, I will rise against him.'
Soon Obregon had built a powerful coalition, uniting the military, the huge middle-class opposition to Carranza, and the working class whom Obregon had always favoured and whom Carranza had betrayed. Campaigning as the military genius of the Mexican Revolution, cultivating a populist, cracker-barrel philosophy style, Obregon drew to him the teeming masses of the disaffected - disgruntled politicians and office seekers, guerrillas, Army officers and intellectuals like Vasconcelos. Faced with this tourbillon of opposition, Carranza's famous political instincts, usually so sharp, deserted him. He knew he was battling great odds, despised as he was by the United States, by the ordinary people of Mexico for his corrupt regime, and by the generals and the young radicals for his autocracy. However, he refused to back down. First he had Congress strip Obregon of his military rank, but this absurd act of victimisation simply increased Obregon's popularity. Then he accused him of engineering a military plot and ordered his arrest. Obregon escaped by train to Guerrero, where the military chief was Fortunato Maycotte, his deputy at Celaya. Always one for playacting, when he met Maycotte Obregon snapped to attention, saluted and said: `I am your prisoner.' `No,' replied Maycotte, `you are my commander.'
When Carranza ordered Calles to use troops to end the obregonista defiance in Sonora, Obregon raised the standard of outright rebellion. On 20 April 1920 he announced that Carranza was in breach of the Constitution and called for a rising to unite behind provisional president Adolfo de la Huerta. Three days later he issued the Plan of Agua Prieta, which laid out his dreams for a new Mexico. In May, sensing the tide rising against him, Carranza left Mexico City for Veracruz, hoping to repeat his 1915 success. On his last night in Mexico City he read a biography of Belisarius, taking comfort from the story of a man who gave thirty years of brilliant service to the emperor Justinian in Constantinople but ended up blinded in prison. But Belisarius had never been a wrecker. By contrast, when Carranza left the capital, he filled sixty railway carriages with his hangers-on, arms and ammunition, government files and the entire national treasury in the form of gold bars. Accompanying him were Villa's old adversary Murguia, the absurd Bonillas, and a handful of generals and ministers. The so-called `Golden Train' carrying the president just got clear of the capital before Pablo Gonzalez and his hordes swept in.
Carranza's nomadic government started to break down immediately after leaving Mexico City. He had been encouraged by the extravagant declarations of support from Guadalupe Sanchez, a general who had devastated the isthmus, Sherman-like, in 1917 in pursuit of the felicistas. However, Sanchez immediately double-crossed him, went over to Obregon like most of the generals, and attacked the presidential train. A heavy skirmish at Villa de Guadalupe alarmed the carrancistas by the evidence it gave of the depth and persistence of obregonista support. Now every station on the line to Veracruz was a potential death-trap and every mile travelled became a white-knuckle affair. On 14 May there was a bloody shoot-out at Aljibes station with more rebels led by Guadalupe Sanchez. In the presidential car Carranza watched the gun battle in a detached and Olympian way, observing the chaos and panic as if he were a Martian. His loyal general Francisco Urquizo pleaded with him to escape, but Carranza sat impassive and poker-faced. Finally, when Murguia added his voice, he got off the train and mounted a fresh horse (his own had been killed in the skirmish two days earlier).
As the battle continued to rage, news came in that the line to Veracruz had been severed. The presidential convoy now looked like a shipwreck, but loyalists were willing to stand and fight, covering the escape of Carranza and his escort. Still calm, unruffled and stony-faced, Carranza with Murguia, generals Barragan and Mariel, and about loo troops, plunged into the wilderness. After six days of gruelling marching, on 20 May the depleted caravan crossed a river into territory controlled by Rodolfo Herrero, an ex-rebel who had accepted amnesty from Carranza. Herrero greeted his unexpected guests and acted obsequiously towards Carranza, taking him to safe quarters in the remote village of Tlaxcalantongo, where they were supposed to wait for news from General Mariel, who went north to reconnoitre.
The village was no more than a collection of huts. Carranza shared one of them with his private secretary and three other men, and bedded down with a saddle and horse blanket like a vaquero. Shortly after midnight on 21 May Herrero came to say that he was called away on an emergency: his brother had been wounded in a nearby village. Carranza was usually a man of ready sleep but this night he tossed and turned and was still awake at 3 a.m. when a message arrived from Mariel to say that the way ahead next day was clear. `Gentlemen,' said Carranza, `we can now rest.' He had scarcely lapsed into a light doze when, above the pelting of rain, gunfire could be heard.
Crawling on their bellies like snakes along the muddy ground, Herrero's sharpshooters reached the other side of the hut where Carranza was sleeping. Through the wall his snores could be heard. The snipers opened fire. Carranza cried out that his leg was broken and there were yells of `Death to Carranza!' and `Come out, you old bearded goat.' Then, according to one version, the sharpshooters entered the hut and finished him off. Some say, however, that once he realised his leg was broken, he turned his gun on himself. In this version, Carranza put on his glasses, picked up his Colt .45 revolver, steadied it between thumb and index finger, pointed the muzzle at his chest and fired two shots. Witnesses said the death rattle came before Herrero's men burst in. Carranza's body was embalmed, taken to Mexico City and buried in Dolores cemetery. Few mourned him except a gaggle of keening women accompanying the catafalque, chanting, `Our Father is dead.'
With Carranza no more, Villa had a unique opportunity to secure peace with honour. He began negotiations with all who would consent to correspond with him, sending out shoals of letters to the victors. The early responses were unpromising. Calles replied that the best course for Villa was to go into internal exile in Sonora; Villa correctly read this as the spider inviting the fly to enter his parlour. Obregon made no reply, but increased the bounty on Villa's head to ioo,ooo pesos. Ignacio Enriquez seemed diplomacy itself and agreed to meet, but Villa suspected a trap. He set up dummies around a brilliantly lit campfire and waited with his men in the shadows for Enriquez to arrive. When men came charging murderously into the camp with fixed bayonets, they were cut to ribbons by Villa's sharpshooters.
Gradually Villa concentrated most of his hopes for amnesty on provisional president de la Huerta. Along with Maytorena, de la Huerta had been one of the men who encouraged Villa to make his famous entry into Mexico with just eight men in April 1913. He had no old scores to settle with Villa and could see ways in which the Centaur could be useful to him in his own future ambitions. Accordingly he sent his envoy, General Eugenio Martinez, north for talks. On 2 July Martinez met Villa at the hacienda of Encinillas. Villa laid out his terms: he wanted a hacienda for himself and his men, which would be a kind of embryonic military colony; he would be made the commander of 50o rurales; there would be free and fair elections in Chihuahua; and the deed of amnesty and future contract would be signed by Obregon, Calles and Benjamin Hill.
These terms were conveyed to de la Huerta who made a counterproposal: Villa was to retire absolutely from public life to Canutillo hacienda with a bodyguard of fifty armed men. This seemed promising, especially when de la Huerta mentioned that Hill and Calles were prepared to sign up to this. The sticking point was Obregon, who refused to sign anything. Obregon put extreme pressure on de la Huerta, warning him in a minatory way of the `possible violent repercussions' from Mexico's generals and the outrage to be expected from the USA. De la Huerta took the broad hint and suspended all negotiations. His envoy Martinez, an honourable man, warned Villa of what was afoot, and advised that his life was in danger.
Villa decided he would have to show Obregon there was a high price to be paid for not doing a deal with him. He moved his base of operations to Coahuila, threatening to devastate the economic life of this rich and prosperous state, teem
ing with natural resources. The danger was that Obregon's image in the United States would be ruined, and Americans would withdraw their investments because of the Mexican government's failure to guarantee order. Before Villa could implement this strategy, however, he had to cross the terrible loo-mile desert, the Bolson de Mapimi, which lay between the states of Chihuahua and Coahuila, and the trek across the waterless wastes proved even more of a nightmare than the most purblind pessimist could have imagined: many died of thirst and others went mad from lack of water. Coahuila came like the promised land. Emerging from the wilderness, the villistas quickly took the town of Sabinas and Villa wired de la Huerta that he was still ready to do a deal; if not the consequences were on his own head.
