Villa and Zapata: A History of the Mexican Revolution

by Frank McLynn

  When Emiliano was sixteen, both his parents died, within a year of each other; the head of the family was now his brother Eufemio, five years his senior. Eufemio was always Emiliano's moral and intellectual inferior, and without his famous brother would have disappeared unknown into the mists of history. In 1892, at the age of eighteen, he had revealed his basic conformism by enrolling in a local porfirista club. Joseph to Zapata's Napoleon, Eufemio early revealed his deep character as a drunkard, lecher and no-good but Emiliano usually revered him and deferred to him, at any rate in these years. For all his qualities, Emiliano never transcended the limitations of the narrow Morelos village culture, and so never entered a room where Eufemio was without kissing his brother's hand. Of his relations with his two surviving sisters, Maria de Jesus and Maria de Luz we know little, but as a typical male chauvinist Mexican macho Emiliano would have expected to command their automatic deference.

  Neither of the brothers had ever been paupers: they had always lived in a stone and adobe house, not a hut, and the family owned land. Now, with their inheritance, they went their separate ways. Eufemio became an entrepreneur and salesman in Veracruz state but was notably unsuccessful and, his patrimony spent, crept back to Morelos to shelter under the aegis of his more successful brother. Emiliano meanwhile bought a team of ten mules and used them to carry corn from farms to the towns, then he diversified into hauling bricks and lime for construction work on the Chinameca hacienda - like the Hospital hacienda this was a name that would recur in his career. Zapata was never the anti-capitalist his socialist champions would like him to have been and was proud of his talents as entrepreneur and his versatility as farmer and muledriver. `One of the happiest days of my life,' he later recalled, `was when I made around five or six hundred pesos from a crop of watermelons I raised all on my own.'

  Unlike Eufemio, whose reflex action was to go where the power was, Emiliano was from a very early age a passionate opponent of the hacienda system and its enclosure of village lands. Youthful rebellion landed him in trouble in his late teens, though at this stage his opposition to the status quo did not go beyond abstract advocacy; none the less, he was compelled to flee Morelos and hide out for a long time on the ranch of a friend of the family in Puebla. When the dust settled, he returned to Anenecuilco and continued his moderately successful business career, working his own lands, sharecropping intermittently from a local hacienda and building up his reputation as teamster and muledriver. Already his renown as a dandy was part of Anenecuilco folk lore: he loved silver ornaments and elaborately caparisoned horses. Normally these traits would have alienated Morelians but they tolerated them in Emiliano.

  His political education continued. In the years 1902-5 he learned the art of local politics by observing the dispute between his own village and the pueblo of Yautepec on the one hand and the Altihuayan hacienda on the other. Jovito Serrano, the headman of the Yautepec village, organised a delegation that went up to Mexico City to petition Diaz in person, and Zapata was one of the Anenecuilco delegates. We may take leave to doubt the legendary story that Zapata was the prime mover in an angry confrontation with Diaz and that Diaz marked him down as `one to note'. It was too early for that and, in any case, Diaz had Jovito Serrano deported out of Morelos immediately afterwards for daring to put his case forcefully in person. If Zapata had spoken out on this occasion, he would have suffered the same fate. Nevertheless, he listened, observed and drew the obvious conclusions about Diaz, the so-called `father of the nation'.

  The year 19o6 was a turning point for Emiliano. A schoolteacher named Pablo Torres Burgos settled in Anencuilco, eking out a living by running a market stall and selling second-hand books. Zapata made friends with him and began a crash programme of reading the books in Torres Burgos's library and also the current newspapers, especially the anti-Diaz anarchist organ Regeneracion. Soon yet another mentor appeared in the shape of an even more sophisticated and politically conscious schoolteacher, Otilio Montano, an admirer of the Russian anarchist Kropotkin. Zapata listened to Montano's passionately committed firebrand public lectures and was so taken with him that he invited him to be his compadre. This was the highest tribute one friend could pay another, for in Mexican culture the fictional kinship tie of compadrazgo (literally co-god-parentage) was the supreme male value.

  In some ways Zapata received the classical training prescribed by Marx for a revolutionary, for at the very time he was imbibing Kropotkin and anarchism from Torres Burgos and Montano, the daily political struggle was in itself raising his political consciousness. The struggle between the villages and the sugar planters of Morelos had moved up a gear, for the hacendados in the first decade of the twentieth century perceived themselves to be engaged in a life-or-death struggle with two different enemies: other Mexican producers of sugar cane, and the world's producers of sugar beet. The years igoo-io saw US capitalists, investing heavily in Mexican sugar, instal the latest productivity-enhancing technologies in the states of Sinaloa, Tepic, Puebla, Michoacan, Jalisco and, especially, Veracruz where productivity was 30 per cent up on Morelos levels. An even worse menace was the introduction of sugar beet into the northern state of Sonora at the very time domestic demand for sugar had already reached saturation point. The plantocracy of Morelos lacked the capital to invest in new technologies and decided to squeeze the villages instead, despite widely voiced fears that soil erosion in Morelos might soon exhaust the land itself.

  To win this titanic battle the Morelian hacendados had to destroy both internal and external competition. The external threat they dealt with by lobbying and politicking in Mexico City. In 19o8, Diaz, by doubling the import duty on foreign sugar, removed the menace from foreign sugar beet, so that by 1910 Morelos regained its position as the world's thirdranked supplier of sugar, behind Hawaii and Puerto Rico, but they were still in danger of being overhauled by the new mills in Veracruz and elsewhere. They desperately needed technological retooling: modern milling machines, access to fresh markets via new railways and, above all, more land, water and cheap labour in Morelos. Peaceful coexistence with the villages was no longer possible; in the planters' minds village lands had to be ploughed under and independent farmers extirpated. The hacendados began this new phase of the struggle by seizing all unguarded village lands and trying to make Morelos approximate to the pure debt peonage plantation system of south-east Mexico. New haciendas appeared, creating self-contained economic communities, together with all the familiar by-products such as company doctors and company stores. The aim was to strangle the villages, and to make everyone see that the independent pueblos were backward, anachronistic obstacles to the economic programmes Diaz wanted; it was the cientifico project in deadly action.

  A new ruthlessness was abroad. Hacendados fenced off former communal pasture land and, when cattle used to grazing there knocked down the fence to get to a favourite munching spot, the hacienda guards impounded them and released them to the villagers only on payment of a fine. If the villagers took their case to the local courts, the judges, in the palm of the planters, would rule against them; if the villagers continued to insist on their rights, beatings or even murder would be the next step. Increasingly, the Morelos villages found themselves squeezed from two directions. Deprived of economic spin-offs from the sugar plantations (less and less day labour) while having more and more of their lands stolen, many Indian communities died and disappeared, became ghost towns or the Mexican equivalent of Goldsmith's deserted village. More and more villagers, finding their debts mounting, tried to hire themselves out to the plantations as sharecroppers or day labourers. A vicious circle was created: neglecting their own lands, they found their villages effectively taken over and themselves reduced to resident labour on the plantations - the dreaded fate of debt peonage.

  The crisis year for Morelos was 19o8. Suddenly Diaz faced a local version of his national re-election crisis just when he thought he had settled Morelos for the foreseeable future. His tame governor Manuel Alarcon had held the ring very
effectively there for a dozen years, always basically on the side of the planters but clever and machiavellian enough to throw the occasional bone to the villagers. He liked to play the bogus role of conciliator, as in 19o6 when the men of Anenecuilco, armed with their title deeds, petitioned him for justice. With much phoney rhetoric about `my children', Alarcon called an utterly pointless meeting, attended by the villagers and the managers of the Hospital hacienda; eloquent words were spoken but nothing whatever was done about the problems. When the villagers finally saw through Alarcon's mask of impartiality, they went over his head to Diaz. Taking advantage of a visit by don Porfirio to his son-in-law Ignacio de la Torre, who had a hacienda in Morelos, they waylaid the president with their petition. He promised to intercede, but the only action he took was to identify the -'ringleaders' of this act of `sedition' and have them transported to the labour camps of Quintana Roo.

  In December 1908 Alarcon, aged fifty-seven, unexpectedly dropped dead of a heart attack, having just been elected (in August) for the fourth time in a row. The state's elite of planters met Diaz in Mexico City to decide a suitable successor, but were in considerable disarray for Alarcon had been a consummate fixer, a master of apparent compromise, verbal obfuscation and political camouflage, whose skills had defused an explosive situation for a decade. His would be a hard act to follow, and at first the Morelos hacendados were stupefied when Diaz suggested his chief of staff Pablo Escandon as Alarcon's successor. A Stonyhurst-educated effete playboy, forever at the centre of minor corruption scandals, Escandon's only connection with Morelos was that his wealthy family owned sugar plantations there. Then the planters had second thoughts. They were desperately short of land, since there were no more public hectares to buy and the villages would not sell their farms, whatever price they were offered. With this sports-playing, woman-chasing nonentity in the governor's chair at Cuernavaca, the planters would be able to manipulate events to their hearts' content; Escandon would surely look the other way while they stole farms, browbeat judges and exerted political leverage and (at the limit) brute force to get their hands on the villagers' lands.

  Diaz set his political machine in motion to make sure that Escandon was imposed as governor, but the nomination triggered a huge wave of resistance in the state. The political opposition turned to the Grand Old Man of Morelos politics, a hero of the war against the French, General Francisco Leyva, now in his seventies. Though long since marginalised by Diaz, Leyva commanded the respect of all factions in the state and he immediately agreed that his sons should run in the election to prevent an Escandon walkover. In February i gog Patricio Leyva, the general's eldest son, put his name forward as opposition candidate.

  Diaz and the jefes politicos were seriously alarmed at the prospect of a genuinely free contest in Morelos. After the Creelman interview, with new presidential hopefuls setting out their stalls in Mexico City, it seemed plausible for provincial dissidents to cock a snook at Diaz and his system by building links with these would-be national politicians. The Morelos opposition pinned its hopes on a newly formed party headed by Sanchez Alcona, which in turn wanted to back Bernardo Reyes for the presidency in 19io. The result was a bitter struggle between Escandon and Leyva in 1909, a struggle exacerbated by realisation of the national implications.

  Rising aspirations by the `out' groups and increased exasperation at the scandal of Escandon's imposition by the Diaz machine led to a serious riot in the town of Cuautla in February agog. The jefe politico there used his powers to browbeat, obstruct and threaten the leyvistas, using all the usual dodges such as withdrawing police permission for political meetings and then using thugs to break up any demonstrations that took place. At one of Escandon's ill-attended campaign rallies, leyvista heckling escalated to stone-throwing, which provoked the bloody intervention of the rurales. The jefe politico put up posters declaring that any shouting of leyvista slogans was ipso facto a breach of the peace and ordered mass arrests. The resulting riots, in which fortunately there was no serious bloodshed, scared the Morelos elite and even the leyvistas, for they saw the spectre of class war forming.

  Repression, intimidation, hostage-taking, police brutality, rigged ballots, improper distribution of voting slips, packing local polling commissions with `safe' members: these were only some of the ways the jefes politicos secured the foregone conclusion of Escandon's victory. Even after all the fiddling, gerrymandering and vote-spoiling, the leyvistas still secured one-third of the vote, so there had to be a second wave of figuremassaging before Escandon could be declared the victor with a `landslide'. On 15 March 1909 the playboy was sworn in as the new governor, but proved to be an almost permanent absentee, away in Mexico City visiting the fleshpots. With no strong hand on the tiller, the local bosses did exactly as they pleased, with consequent anarchy and decay in the state's services and infrastructure.

  On the rare occasions when he put in an appearance, Escandon stupidly fired all the experienced Alarcon bureaucrats and gave their jobs to incompetent placemen of his own. Meanwhile he connived at the local bosses' petty, and not so petty, persecution of known leyvistas. If these were minor faults, his failures in macropolitics were more serious. Escandon openly, blatantly and bigotedly favoured the planters against the villagers; there was none of Alarcon's obfuscation and camouflage, none of his deals in smoke-filled rooms. The owners of the sugar plantations were now free to declare open season on the villages. The most militant village leader, Genovevo de la 0 of Santa Maria, later to be one of the great names in the Zapata story, very early decided that prospects of reform from within the Diaz regime were now hopeless and went into hiding, preparatory to emergence as a guerrilla leader.

  Escandon's stupid and brutal actions sharpened and aggravated the already vicious social conflict in Morelos. In 1909 more and more villages were deprived of water, their cattle stolen, their lands fenced off, and all appeals to political or judicial authorities were ignored. It was now clear that Escandon aimed to break the pueblos as institutions, leaving an almost Marxian division between the plantocracy and a vast body of dispossessed ex-villagers who had only their labour to sell. He introduced a new valuation of the haciendas for tax purposes, grossly undervaluing them and thus allowing tax evasion by the planters to become legal tax avoidance. In June r9o9 the administrator of the Hospital hacienda raised the stakes by refusing even to rent the lands it disputed with Anenecuilco to the village. A charitable view of Escandon's folly is provided by the historian John Womack, who remarks that Escandon and the planters seemed to be aiming at the `perfect plantation' - a Platonic ideal of the hacienda that would eventually convert Morelos into hacienda-only territory, squeezing out everyone else, even shopkeepers and merchants.

  This was the context in which, in September agog, the elderly Jose Merino resigned as village chief of Anenecuilco and Emiliano Zapata was elected in his place. Zapata was a popular figure in the pueblo, known to like brandy but to drink only in moderation and conspicuous both by his dandyism and his huge moustache (later to be a worldwide trademark); he claimed that he grew it so luxuriantly so that it would set him apart from those lesser breeds `girlish men, bullfighters and priests'. A slightly built man, no more than 5 feet 6 inches tall, Zapata had few strikes against him in village opinion. His vehement opposition to Diaz and Escandon favoured him as did his love of Anenecuilco, which (in the manner of his Indian ancestors) he seemed to imagine as a personal entity. In a macho society what might have been regarded as a blemish by later bien pensants - his compulsive womanising - was regarded in Anenecuilco as a badge of honour.

  Zapata had always been known as a ladies' man. He was said to be a master of seduction, in contrast with his brother Eufemio for whom courtship of a woman usually meant intimidation, violence or rape. In 1908 Emiliano had been involved in something of a scandal even by lax Morelos standards when he abducted a Cuautla woman, Ines Alfaro, set up house with her and begat three children - a son Nicolas and two daughters. Ines's mother denounced Zapata to the authorit
ies, who gave him the minor punishment of serving a stint in the 7th Army Battalion. He bribed his way out and was back in Anenecuilco early in i 909 to take part in the leyvista campaign against Escandon. Yet even if the Anenecuilco villagers had been disposed to think Zapata had gone too far in his behaviour with Ines Alfaro, they would have turned a blind eye because they so esteemed Zapata's skill and reputation as a horseman.

  In contrast to the men of northern Mexico, who had the wide open spaces of Sonora and Chihuahua to ride through, horsemanship of the charro variety was not a feat expected of Morelos males, so Zapata's prowess made an exceptional impact. The charros or Mexican cowboys were admired by oligarchs and peons alike. The charro had to prove himself by riding a wild horse barebacked. An untamed steed, deliberately starved to make it especially savage, without bridle or saddle, would be brought into a bullring. A number of cowboys would ride round and round, making the horse gallop faster and faster. At a preordained sign, usually a pistol shot, the cowboy performing the stunt would then ride up at an angle to the wild animal on his own horse and, timing his movements perfectly, would vault from his own horse on to the back of the angry and agitated wild horse. With nothing, not even a mane to grip on to (since this was always roached first), the rider had to stay on board while the horse went through the entire permutation of pitching, twisting and bucking, using just his knees, legs and innate sense of balance. Usually the demonstration ended when the horse, despairing of unseating its rider, charged the enclosure railings, at which point the wise rider would jump from the horse on to the fence. It was a superb feat of horsemanship and those who saw Zapata demonstrate it swore that they had never seen a better rider in all Mexico.