Villa and Zapata: A History of the Mexican Revolution

by Frank McLynn

  It mattered not who the ordinary people of Chihuahua were. Whether they were the original settlers from the colonial period, the military colonists from the independence period, traditional Indian villagers, squatters on public land or the genuinely landless occupying common land by prescriptive right, they were all swept into the maw of big capitalism. In the USA, the 1862 Homestead Act had, at least in theory, opened up lands owned by the state to a new class of small landowners. Diaz did not even attempt to go down that road. Instead he sold off huge swathes of public land to giant capitalists, whether the domestic variety like Terrazas or, more controversially, large foreign corporations like Standard Oil. In the late nineteenth century Chihuahua was a microcosm of Mexico itself. Rising gross national product and foreign investment were matched at the state level, there was a flourishing export trade with Europe and the USA, and the alliance between the national oligarchy and foreign investors provided an arrangement perfectly beneficial to both. Terrazas was even an imitation Diaz: strikes were outlawed, dissidents murdered and the press muzzled.

  Such was the dominance of Terrazas that his Banco Minero de Chihuahua was either broker or partner in all foreign investment schemes in the state. His political control was absolute and his power so great that he could even nudge Diaz on occasion. The dictator thought it the better part of valour to ignore Terrazas's support for Lerdo in 1876 and contented himself with wresting formal political control from Terrazas in the years 1884-1903. Nobody doubted, however, that Terrazas was the real power in the state, and that don Porfirio's regime depended for stability on the coexistence between him and Chihuahua's strongman. Only in the 189os did Terrazas have to fire a warning shot across Diaz's bows. Fearing that Terrazas was becoming too powerful, Diaz nominated one of Terrazas's enemies, Lauro Carrillo, as governor. Terrazas decided to teach Diaz the facts of Chihuahuan life by discrediting Carrillo. He tacitly engineered a rising at Tomochi which he knew Carrillo would not be able to contain. In the end Diaz would be forced to turn to Terrazas for a solution.

  Inter-elite rivalry was thus the deep cause for the Tomochi affair, which showed Diaz there were limits to his power. Tomochi was a village in western Chihuahua where, thanks to some adroit behind-the-scenes manipulation by Terrazas, an insignificant revolt snowballed into a major confrontation between veterans of the Apache wars and federal troops sent by Carrillo. The federals were defeated again and again by the doughty Indian fighters, even when the odds were ten to one in their favour, and this demonstration of military incompetence by the Army encouraged resistance elsewhere in Mexico. Diaz's prestige was badly damaged and he was forced to ditch Carrillo. Once Terrazas achieved his aim of ousting the governor, he pulled the plug on the Tomochi revolt. Starved of arms and money from Terrazas, the Tomochi rebels could not go on.

  Bowing to the inevitable, realising there was no power in Chihuahua except Terrazas, Diaz formally co-opted him in 1903 by appointing him governor of Chihuahua. Constrained by bonds of honour to the villages and military colonists, the machiavellian Terrazas baulked at openly crushing them. He therefore resigned his office, pleading old age, and handed over the reins to his son-in-law Enrique Creel, who had made no promises and commitments to villagers or colonists. Creel turned on these unfortunates ruthlessly. He and his family coveted new land so that they could make a killing from land speculation. The key was the new railways, for the Mexican North-western line, the Kansas Orient and the Pacific Railroad were all laying track through Chihuahua. In 1904-5 Creel passed two laws of special moment: the first replaced elected heads of municipalities with officials appointed by the governor; the second amended Juarez's 1857 legislation so that the state, not the federal government, became the final arbiter in the case of expropriation of village lands. Creel's hatred of the free villages was noteworthy. Apart from the fact that they were an obstacle to his money-making schemes, he seems to have genuinely detested them as a `fetter' on economic progress in general; in short Creel was a genuine cientifico ideologue.

  Creel picked off the least sophisticated Indian villages and non-Spanish speakers first. Expropriations immediately created a new class of landless labourers, whose only recourse was an appeal to Mexico City. Appellants to the capital would then be given the runaround, told to appeal from local authorities to governors and then to state courts in a meaningless vicious circle - meaningless because Creel controlled everything and there was no way to break out of it.

  Once Creel was confident of total support from Diaz, he began to move against the hardcore of ancient military colonies. First, he refused to accept any custom-hallowed traditional rights. In the case of agreements legally entered into, he asked to see the title deeds; often there were none, or they had been deliberately destroyed. When copies of the originals were requested from the archives in Mexico City, Diaz's bureaucrats would refuse to accede to the request, or would tell the truth but not the whole truth: for example by saying that no such deed existed in the National Archive, knowing full well it was in the provincial archives.

  It is at first sight surprising that Creel's chicanery did not trigger armed rebellion, but conditions were different from those during the Tomochi revolt of i 891-5. Then there was economic depression, but now there was boom, with rising wages and, at least in the short term, plenty of openings for the dispossessed villagers. More importantly, this time there was no hidden hand of Luis Terrazas manipulating events; the Creel-Terrazas clique was monolithic and there were no divisions in the Chihuahua elite.

  However, just as Diaz had eventually decided that Luis Terrazas was too powerful and tried (unsuccessfully) to clip his wings, so he now felt that Creel needed to be taken down a peg. Fearing that the more militant villages could be pushed too far, and he would have another Tomochi on his hands, Diaz counselled Creel to ease up on his programme of expropriations. Creel contemptuously rejected the advice, arguing that any such concessions would be perceived as weakness. Angered by Creel's attitude, Diaz suddenly declared in correspondence with the governor that his 1905 Land Law was unconstitutional - a direct slap in the face. Creel retaliated by an implicit threat of rebellion, saying that those who would be dispossessed, through having obtained land by the 1905 law, were among the most powerful men in Chihuahua and would surely revolt. Once again, Diaz backed off, leaving the villagers, whose hopes had been raised by his intervention, high and dry. Once Diaz capitulated, Creel moved against the recalcitrant villagers with even greater harshness.

  Chihuahua under Creel was a divided society, with a clear line demarcating the haves from the have-nots. The unfortunate villagers who declined were balanced by those who managed to cash in on the land bonanza and its spin-offs: these included artisans, urban shopkeepers, small ranchers, miners and other employees of foreign enterprises. However, ranged alongside the dispossessed villagers were the rural shopkeepers who had depended on them for a living and, more importantly, many local magnates who would have been elected to high office if Creel had not abolished elections and imposed his own nominees. Gradually the tide of dissidence increased, informed not just by nostalgia for the old days of village autonomy but backed up also by anti-American xenophobia and resentment at the privileges granted US nationals over Mexicans.

  Anti-Americanism as a phenomenon should not be overstated, but it did make some headway in the final years of the Diaz regime, especially among railwaymen and mineworkers. Chihuahua was fertile ground for the anarcho-syndicalist revolutionary magonista party, led from exile in Texas by the Magon brothers who preached spontaneous revolution by the peasantry, which intellectuals would head as a `vanguard'; the problem was that the peasantry required leaders before they would rebel. The magonistas also called for all who invested in Mexico to become Mexican citizens, as well as for no re-election for four-year presidents. Their particular target in Chihuahua was the Mormon settlers, protected by Creel, who were hated thrice over: they practised polygamy, were hostile to Catholicism and had bought up expropriated land. The magonista movement did
not make the impact expected, partly because it was honeycombed by Creel's spies, not to mention Diaz's, and was subject to systematic persecution on both sides of the Rio Grande.

  Moderate non-violent opposition to the Creel-Terrazas coterie in Chihuahua came mainly from Silvestre Terrazas, one-time secretary to the bishop of Chihuahua and a man destined to play an important part in the life of Pancho Villa. A journalist of great talent and courage, Silvestre Terrazas founded the newspaper El Correo. At first he trod carefully, never criticising Diaz directly, but using the anti-capitalist ideas of the Catholic Church in the papal encyclical Rerum Novarum to mount a subtle critique of US penetration of the Mexican economy. After 1906, however, El Correo had Creel and Luis Terrazas firmly in its sights. Silvestre Terrazas introduced the novel idea that Creel had no right to be governor, for Creel's father was a US citizen and, according to Mexican law, the fathers of all state governors had to be native-born. Soon El Correo was the focus for all legal opposition in Chihuahua, whether this meant backing strikes or resisting the expropriation of villages. Silvestre Terrazas became a marked man in the eyes of the regime, and was jailed for long periods in 1907, 1909 and 1910. Diaz dared not have him assassinated, however, for Terrazas had an international reputation.

  By 1909 politics in Chihuahua had reached a brittle, pre-revolutionary stage, compounded by the Creel-Terrazas assault on the villages, the general national political crisis involving Madero's challenge to Diaz, and the consequences of the 19o8 economic depression, which hit Chihuahua harder than other parts of Mexico. Mines closed down as the world price of silver and copper plummeted; food prices shot up because of bad harvests; and Creel responded to these events by raising taxes (to compensate for falling revenues) on the very people who could least afford them. As the villagers shimmered in anger at Creel's class war - there were no augmented taxes on his hacendado cronies or on foreign capitalists - an event happened that, so to speak, put the cap on Chihuahua's general crisis of political legitimacy.

  Enrique Creel and his brother Juan owned their own bank, the Banco Minero. Suddenly, in March 1908, it was announced that 300,000 pesos had been stolen from the vaults. Suspects were rounded up and tortured to extract confessions, but Silvestre Terrazas caused a sensation by revealing in El Correo, with an unimpeachable list of affidavits and alibis, that all the charges were trumped up; there had been no robbery; the theft was an `inside job' and Juan Creel had arranged to have his own bank robbed because, it seemed, he had lost 200,000 pesos playing the New York stock exchange and needed to replace the money quickly. Nobody reading Silvestre Terrazas's lucid account could possibly doubt that Juan Creel was the real culprit. His brother at once arrested Silvestre Terrazas and tried to muzzle the press, but the damage to the Creels' credibility was done. Coinciding with Madero's nationwide presidential candidacy, this cause celebre in Chihuahua merely underlined the rottenness of the entire Diaz system.

  Such was the political and economic context of the society in which Pancho Villa spent his twenties, erratically tacking in and out of normal life and legal activity. The schizoid nature of his existence can be gauged from two simple facts: in agog Villa led a gang of desperadoes on a raid, during which they burned down the town hall and archives of Rosario in the Hidalgo district; yet the following year he bought himself a house in Chihuahua city, as if he were a solid bourgeois.

  The zigzag pattern in and out of banditry was even more pronounced in i9io. There is something Zorro-like about the way Villa conducted his parallel military and civilian lives in this year of decision. On the one hand, Villa was building up his reputation as a bandit chief and building up the nucleus of a guerrilla army. Early in i9io he and his men raided the San Isidro ranch, ransacking the place and killing the owner and his young son. In October he and Tomas Urbina, his most prominent lieutenant robbed the Talamontes ranch in the Jimenez district of Chihuahua. In July 1910 came his most famous pre-revolutionary exploit. One of his comrades, Claro Reza sold him out to the authorities and fingered him as a bandit. Villa retaliated coldly and violently by gunning him down in the streets of Chihuahua City. There are various versions of this event, but John Reed's account may well be the most accurate: Villa was eating ice cream on the Paseo Bolivar (he always had a passion for ice cream) when he saw Reza approach with a girlfriend. He challenged Reza to draw, gunned him down, then nonchalantly strolled away, defying bystanders to do anything about it.

  Yet at the same time he was building up contacts among the opposition to Creel and Diaz. He certainly met the editor Silvestre Terrazas in 19lo, but perhaps even more important was the encounter with Abraham Gonzalez, Madero's political agent in Chihuahua. Gonzalez had every reason to remember his first brush with Villa. It had been arranged by intermediaries that they would meet after dark at the headquarters of the Anti-Re-electionist Party in Chihuahua City; Villa and his comrade Feliciano Dominguez went to the rendezvous with scrapes pulled over their faces. Gonzalez approached his office just as Villa arrived and reached into his back pocket to take out his office keys. In the darkness Villa mistook the movement for a quick draw. To his amazement Gonzalez found two cocked pistols pointing at his head. Calmly he reassured Villa as to his intentions, and Villa was so taken with Gonzalez's utter fearlessness that he became an admirer on the spot.

  Once inside the office, Gonzalez gave Villa a brief history lesson and explained the aims of his party. He pointed out that so-called bandits could be seen as political rebels, and that Madero would wipe the slate clean for all his supporters. This was a key event in `consciousness raising'. Immediately Villa saw how everything fitted into place, how the hardships of his own life made sense in the overall social and political context. He became Abraham Gonzalez's ardent disciple. Some sceptics have queried why Gonzalez should have wanted to concern himself with a minor bandit, but it is likely that Silvestre Terrazas had had a preliminary interview with Villa and recommended him highly. Certainly Villa always revered Gonzalez thereafter and always spoke of him with affection. Gonzalez also introduced Villa to his chief when Madero came to Chihuahua City. According to one story, Madero interviewed Villa at the Palacio Hotel. Tearfully Villa poured out the story of his life, as if to a priest, and asked Madero's forgiveness for his sins. Madero granted him absolution and told him the Revolution would redeem him. Where cynics say that Villa used the Mexican Revolution to legitimate his own murderous instincts, more sympathetic critics are inclined to see Villa's long commitment to the Revolution as a quest for redemption.

  It is certain that after he became involved with Abraham Gonzalez, the Creel-Terrazas clique identified Villa as a dangerous enemy. Why had they not done so before? Possibly the answer is that before igio Villa was not - or at least was not perceived to be - a danger to the elite, and they took the complaisant attitude to banditry that the FBI is said to take towards the Mafia: it's just one set of mobsters killing another. However, three things changed in i 9 i o. First Villa became more confident or more cavalier. He stepped up his rustling activities, selling huge herds under an alias, and he took part in a raid on the hacienda of Talamontes. Next he killed Claro Reza who, unknown to him, was a police informer of long standing (Reza had actually taken rurales into the mountains to capture Villa by treachery, but he escaped by mere chance. Villa intercepted correspondence making clear Reza's spy status). Finally, most worrying of all for the Terrazas and Creel, the bandit was becoming politicised by his contacts with Abraham Gonzalez and Madero.

  We can form a very accurate picture of Villa on the eve of his great exploits. Aged thirty-two, 5 feet io inches in height, weighing 170 pounds, he was muscular with a strongly protruding lower jaw, badly stained teeth, crinkly black hair and a thick black moustache that made him look like a Hollywood heavy. People commented most of all on his hypnotic brown eyes that held and dominated the listener like a snake with a mouse, or seemed to strike sparks when he was angry. He was a great horseman, who rode straight and stiff-legged, Mexican style and so loved horses that he
won the soubriquet `the Centaur of the North'. He could ride ioo miles over mountain trails in a single 24-hour span. He dressed plainly, with none of the stereotypical Latin love of glamour and the meretricious. As for his prowess as a quick-draw gunfighter, one anecdote is eloquent. Silvestre Terrazas once asked him to hit a tiny branch of wood that was floating on a river 200 yards away. Villa drew his pistol, took deliberate aim and shot the piece of wood into two equal chips.

  He was hugely respectful of learning, passionate about education and deeply regretful about his own ignorance; sometimes he would tearfully confess himself out of his depth in intellectual matters. He was the classic case of the man who comes through from obscurity purely because of revolution, in this respect resembling Bernadotte, Hoche, Humbert and Augereau of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic period in France. It is extremely unlikely that the world would ever have heard of Pancho Villa had there not been a Mexican Revolution, for his lowly origins, his lack of education and family ties, his political inexperience and his reputation as a bandit would all have marginalised him. Not even his great energy - a quality he possessed in abundance and more so than any other personality in the Revolution - would have availed him if he had been born in 1858 instead of 1878.