by Frank McLynn
Diaz tried to stem the revolt in Morelos by co-opting the Leyva family. They were willing accomplices but were paper tigers, their credibility already shot to pieces. All Diaz accomplished was the definitive removal of another set of rivals to Zapata. Even though Emiliano still did not have the absolute allegiance of all southern guerrilla leaders - de la 0, for instance, though friendly, wrote to him as `senor Emiliano' and signed himself `Don Genovevo' - more and more local chieftains acknowledged his overlordship, each one bringing in a further band of men between 5o and 200 strong. By mid-April Zapata was directing operations with all the aplomb of a veteran commander. He learned the art of breaking down personal allegiances other than to himself by, for example, sending Tepepa to fight on the Puebla/Guerrero border with men not from Tepepa's original band; these he meanwhile melded with the rest of the army.
Zapata's rise in southern Mexico was meteoric. His fame and influence spread like wildfire, into the states of Puebla, Tlaxcala, Mexico, Guerrero, Michoacan. This soon brought him into collision with the influential political power brokers of Guerrero state, the four Figueroa brothers, who were to Guerrero what the Terrazas were to Chihuahua, and who had hitherto looked on Morelos as a traditional political appendage to their hegemony in the south. Zapata was determined that independence for his state meant not just freedom from Diaz but also freedom from the Figueroas. What he required, either from Madero or from the Figueroas themselves, was a formal guarantee of Morelos's autonomy. This meant that he had to have in his possession all the major towns of Morelos by the time Madero started serious negotiations with Diaz. When hostilities outside Ciudad Juarez were suspended in April, Zapata realised he was in a race against time.
On the first day of Madero's truce (22 April 1911) he met Ambrosio Figueroa, patriarch of the dynasty in Puebla, at a conference brokered by Madero's Puebla agent. It was agreed that both Figueroa and Zapata would have the rank of general, and that their forces could operate freely and independently anywhere in Mexico. If there were joint operations in Morelos, Zapata would be supreme commander; if in Guerrero, Figueroa. This was a great propaganda victory for Zapata, but in his heart he doubted the Figueroas would keep their end of the bargain. He knew they had their own reasons for not wanting Jojutla attacked again, for they took protection money from the town, and he suspected that, when it came to it, Ambrosio Figueroa would not allow him to lead the Figueroa men in Morelos. Besides, he learned from his spies that Figueroa intended to stab him in the back by pulling his forces out in the event of any zapatista attack on Jojutla, and leaving Zapata to deal with a numerically superior federal force.
Aware of the potential treachery of the Figueroas, Zapata decided not to go for the softer option of Jojutla but to attack the heavily defended town of Cuautla. First he disguised his intentions by attacking and occupying the towns of Chietla and Izucar de Matamoros. Driven out initially, the federals counterattacked with reinforcements and machineguns; they managed to retake Izucar but could not dislodge the zapatistas from Chietla. Some of Zapata's commanders, notably Felipe Neri, complained bitterly that many peons still would not join them and those that did would often join up just for loot, returning to the haciendas to get their wages on top. Neri threatened to cut off the ears of any such `moonlighters' he encountered, but Zapata was more tolerant, realising that the peons would join him in droves only when he had broken Diaz's power in Morelos.
Having feinted towards Chietla and Izucar de Matamoros, and leaving his rearguard to mop up the resistance, in early May he circled round Cuautla, first taking the towns of Yautepec and Jonacatepec and raiding Metepec and Atlixco in Puebla state, all the time levying forced loans, securing provisions, capturing arms and ammunition and generally building up his strength. By mid-May only Cuautla and the capital Cuernavaca were in federal hands. All the time, however, there was the impending threat that in the north Madero would patch up an agreement with Diaz that would leave the true revolutionaries out on a limb. It was vital for Zapata to take Cuautla.
On 13 May he hurled 4,000 men, full of enthusiasm but with no experience in sieges, against 400 crack troops of the elite Fifth Cavalry Regiment of the federal army - the so-called `Golden Fifth'. The battle for Cuautla secured Zapata's national fame and ensured that he would not be just another forgotten southern commander when peace came. Eyewitnesses spoke of `six of the most terrible days of battle in the whole Revolution'. Combat was house to house and street by street, with bloody hand-to-hand fighting, bayonet against machete, and men firing at each other from point-blank range through embrasures in walls. On many occasions hastily erected defences of earth and brick suddenly collapsed, leaving startled but murderous warriors staring each other in the face. In every street the objective was the same: capture the high killing ground from which a withering fire could be directed at the other side. When bullets ran out, the enraged combatants used rifle barrels and butts to bash the enemy's brains out. Everywhere there arose the smoke and gore of the charnel house.
No prisoners were taken, no quarter was given, both sides fought like savages. One detachment of federal troops tried to turn a railway carriage into an impregnable pill-box, complete with machine-guns, but the zapatistas doused the carriage with petrol, set it alight and reacted with joy or indifference to the agonised screams of the incinerated soldiers. While the battle was raging, 6oo federal reinforcements arrived in Cuernavaca under the fire-eating General Huerta, but made no attempt to relieve their suffering comrades in Cuautla, doubtless because Huerta knew the city would rise in his rear if he marched out. Finally, on 19 May, the few battered survivors of the once proud Fifth Regiment pulled out of Cuautla, leaving the smoking ruins of a virtual bombsite in Zapata's hands. His timing could not have been more felicitous, for on 21 May Madero signed the treaty of Ciudad Juarez with Diaz.
It was none other than Diaz who testified that Cuautla was the last nail in his coffin, that he could perhaps have held the line in Chihuahua if Morelos too had not been ablaze. Cuautla made Zapata a national hero and new corridos immortalised zapatista valour. Felipe Neri, one of Zapata's best captains, a kind of Desaix to his Napoleon, sustained a bizarre injury while capturing the heavily defended Convent of San Diego. A hand grenade flung at the wall of the church bounced back and exploded at his feet, seriously wounding him and leaving him deaf for life. It was said that the damage to his hearing made Neri particularly harsh in his treatment of prisoners; those he did not execute he liked to line up, then clip their ears as a mark of Cain.
While Zapata was achieving in five months one of the fastest ascents to fame in all history, Villa and Orozco were champing at the bit outside Ciudad Juarez, as Madero made concession after concession to Diaz. As the armistice stretched on, with disillusioned guerrillas deserting and Madero appearing to do all in his power to let don Porfirio off the hook, Villa and Orozco finally put their collective foot down. In stormy conferences on 3o April and i May they told Madero bluntly that Diaz's resignation was an absolute precondition for any permanent peace. Still Madero dithered: he drew up a `fourteen-point' ultimatum, then repented of his hard line, then repented of having repented. Finally, he told Diaz he required his resignation and that of vice-president Ramon Corral.
Too late Diaz realised the gravity of his position and began to make serious concessions. The stress of having to conciliate on a national scale began to affect the old dictator: everyone who saw him remarked that he had suddenly aged, seemed weak, inert and feeble-minded, evincing clear signs of declining mental vitality and failing health. Right at the height of the Ciudad Juarez crisis he was suffering from an ulcerated jaw, but still the old peasant cunning was in evidence. He sacked his entire Cabinet and made vague promises about returning land to the dispossessed. On 7 May, the day the truce expired, he issued an ambiguous manifesto, declaring he would resign `when anarchy no longer threatened'. Aware that the federal garrison at Ciudad Juarez was running low on ammunition and that the rebels had cut the water supply, he tried to bamboozle
Madero with scare stories about certain US intervention if he attacked.
Amazingly, Madero took this prevarication seriously and confessed to his intimates that he was full of heart searching, but Orozco and Villa by now had had enough of Madero's vacillation; in their view the only beneficiary from the armistice was Diaz, whom they suspected of secretly rushing reinforcements northwards. Taking matters into their own hands, they launched an attack on Juarez, forcing Madero's hand and telling him that the resumption of hostilities was a spontaneous flare-up which they had been unable to control. Madero tried to stop the fighting and asked the federal commander, General Juan Navarro, to hold his fire. Navarro did so but Orozco and Villa ignored him, Madero and the federal white flags. Ferocious fighting then began. A desperate Madero sent Castulo Herrera to Villa to insist that fighting stop, but Villa contemptuously ignored the man he already regarded as a coward. Orozco and Villa practised all kinds of ingenuities to avoid seeing Madero and having to refuse a direct order from him. When Madero finally ran into his military commander, Orozco told him fighting was by now so far advanced it could not be stopped.
Taking care that no bullets winged across the border to El Paso, Orozco and Villa both attacked Juarez at an angle, Orozco coming in from the north and Villa from the south. Among the combatants was a sizeable contingent of foreign mercenaries and adventurers, particularly experts in machine-guns and dynamite. Names that recur in the copious sources for the battle are the Boer Ben Viljoen, who had fought the British in the South African War of 1899-1902; A. W. Lewis, a Canadian machinegunner; Lou Carpentier, a French artillery technician; Oscar Creighton from New York, a dynamite man; and Tom Mix, later to be famous as the star of Hollywood westerns of the silent era.
Ciudad Juarez was another gory revolutionary battle, again with savage hand-to-hand combat. The federals had organised a defence in depth, with an outer ring of trenches, and an inner ring of interconnected buildings protected by barricaded streets. However, they had left a gap in their defences, possibly through lack of numbers, on the eastern side. There an irrigation canal ran parallel to a river, and the undefended terrain between them was piled high with silt dredged from the canal, providing excellent cover. The attackers made their way to the suburbs by this route. To avoid the withering fire of the federal machine-guns, the revolutionaries used dynamite bombs, axes and crowbars to crash through adobe walls, making their way methodically from suburbs to city centre without coming under artillery fire.
The attackers fought in relays, `spelling' each other, retiring to eat and sleep before returning to the fray; thus they were always fresh while the hard-pressed federals were always tired. Carpentier's cannon, in a flukey shot, managed to destroy the federals' water tank, on its second fusillade, just before malfunctioning and playing no further part. By nightfall on 9 May most of the city, apart from the bullring, main church and army barracks, were in rebel hands. Early on the loth the revolutionaries wheeled up a captured mortar and began systematically pounding the barracks into submission. Federal resistance slackened, and soon the maderistas were close enough to lob grenades over the wall. By midday Navarro's situation was desperate: he held on to no more than a few buildings in the centre and was without water. His superior firepower in the form of machine-guns and Mausers was being whittled away hourly by hand-grenade attacks. At 2.30 that afternoon he ran up the white flag for surrender. The federals had lost 18o killed and 250 wounded, against an unknown number, probably higher, of revolutionary casualties.
Navarro's surrender precipitated another clash between Madero and his commanders. For Villa and Orozco, Navarro was already a marked man after his behaviour at Cerro Prieto in December, when he had bayoneted all rebel prisoners to death in defiance both of the Geneva Convention and the Plan of San Luis Potosi; Villa and Orozco had spared the captured federals. Here, surely, was a man to be taken out at once and shot by firing squad, but Madero promised he would spare his life. Always one for saving the life even of a brutal reprobate, Madero did not so much temper justice with mercy as requite injustice with inappropriate compassion. Moreover, he did not want to alienate the Army by executing one of its generals. A true revolutionary would have accepted the logic of the situation and not only dispatched Navarro but told the Army it was finished. By this single action Madero revealed himself clearly as no revolutionary, merely a within-the-regime reformist.
Madero's weakness was too much for Orozco. At 10.30 a.m. on i i May he stormed into Madero's office, Villa at his side, to demand that Navarro be handed over to a court martial immediately; while he was at it, Madero might consider paying his own troops instead of thinking up ways to mollycoddle the enemy. Orozco was also incensed by another matter, for he had heard that Madero was thinking of appointing one Venustiano Carranza as minister of war after the Revolution, when the position should clearly be Orozco's. When Madero refused all these demands, Orozco drew a pistol and held it to Madero's chest. A Madero aide then drew his gun and trained it on Orozco. Faced with this literal exemplification of the Mexican stand-off, Villa stepped outside and bawled an order for his elite squad to come at the double.
What happened next is confused, but Madero somehow got free of Orozco, rushed outside, jumped on top of a car and started haranguing the troops. According to one version of the story, he pushed rudely past Villa, who spat an obscene oath at him. Madero's eloquence did his work and the soldiers started cheering him. At this point, fearing a shoot-out that would destroy all they had worked for in the past few days, Orozco conceded defeat and shook hands with Madero. Villa's reactions were typical. At first enraged with Madero, five minutes later he was in tears, begging his forgiveness. Allegedly Villa said: `I have committed a black crime and my heart is between two stones'; the words sound like Villa in maudlin mood. Madero, knowing Villa's volatility, made sure he got Navarro over the border at once and then formally announced that Carranza would be his new secretary of war; but he shrewdly sugared the pill by agreeing to pay Orozco and Villa's troops in full that very day.
In yet another version of the story, it was Villa who drew the gun on Madero, who then declared: `I am your chief; if you dare to kill me, shoot.' This would explain why Madero was able to break free and escape from the office, for these Napoleon-on-the road-to-Grenoble sentiments would certainly have cut no ice with Orozco. Villa found a displaced outlet for his anger at not being able to execute Navarro by shooting the 6o-year-old Diaz official Felix Mestas with his own revolver. Curiously, this entire crisis, straight out of a melodrama, which should logically have united Villa and Orozco against Madero, drove them apart. Madero had revealed that inevitable concomitant of the weak man - stubbornness - but Villa forgave him, partly because he had no political ambitions himself, and partly because of his psychological `Madero complex'. Orozco, a man of frightening ambition, never forgave Madero's snub and went away brooding on Carranza's elevation.
It may even be that darker plots were afoot that day. One theory, which Villa later came to believe, was that Orozco was secretly in the pay of Diaz. There is some circumstantial evidence to back this, for it is known that Orozco met don Porfirio's agents four times on io and I I May. One version of the day's events on I I May is that Orozco had concocted an ingenious plan to sweep both Madero and Villa off the playing board. Knowing Villa's volatility and propensity to rages, he had worked him to snapping point over Navarro's pardon. Then, when he and Villa burst into Madero's office, the plan was that Madero would be shot dead, and that Villa would appear as the killer and the ringleader of a plot. Meanwhile he, Orozco, would keep Diaz dangling and play both sides against the middle. In the best-case scenario, Madero would be murdered, Villa executed as an assassin and Diaz forced from office, leaving Orozco as the power in the land and the obvious choice as Mexico's next president. Certainly Orozco's subsequent behaviour is consistent with such a thesis.
The fall of Ciudad Juarez, however reluctantly Madero achieved it, was a great fillip for his movement and boosted his credibilit
y enormously. US journalists poured across the border to give him the big build-up, commenting particularly on the efficient way his men policed the city. Madero named Juarez his provisional capital and appointed an interim cabinet, but it still took Diaz another ten days to concede defeat and resign. His intransigence was, if anything, helped by Madero's absurdly anaemic response to his victory. The agreement he drafted insisted on Diaz's departure but left his system virtually intact. All other officials, judges, mayors, police chiefs and bureaucrats remained and, in a key clause, Madero agreed to retain the Army unchanged, with its existing officer corps. He insisted on fourteen maderista governorships and the withdrawal of federal troops from northern Mexico, but said nothing about the south, in theory leaving the Army free to turn its guns on Zapata and the revolutionaries of central Mexico.
Finally Diaz saw that his only option was to go into exile; Limantour advised him that further civil war would make US intervention a certainty. The two of them overruled the absurd sabre-rattlers in the Army, such as Huerta, whose Custer-like boasts they knew were ignorant, vainglorious bluster, and on 21 May the treaty of Ciudad Juarez was signed. Diaz agreed to depart for Europe and Francisco Leon de la Barra took over as provisional president, with a remit to organise autumn elections. The end of the Porfiriato represented compromise on both sides, since both the old regime and the liberal middle-class maderistas were seriously concerned about the revolutionary genie released from the bottle. The pace of revolution was now like that of a tornado with new leaders and new groupings emerging in every state. If their political composition was turbid, their social message was clear: they wanted real socio-economic change, not just a political transfer of power.