by Frank McLynn
Amazingly, the horrors of the earthquake were quickly subsumed in the rejoicing when Madero arrived. There were many anecdotes illustrating the godlike status the little man enjoyed for a while. The American journalist John Reed asked a soldier why he wore the Madero colours on his uniform. `I don't know,' said the man. `My captain told me he is a great saint.' Another man, found shouting out: `Viva Madero. Viva democracia,' was asked what democracy was and replied: `I don't know, senor. I think that must be the fine lady at Doctor Madero's side.' On 7 June 1911 reason had surrendered to emotion. In retrospect, the earthquake, overwhelmingly read as a good omen - a symbol of the man who shook Diaz - should have been read the other way.
Madero had already made two mistakes that were to prove fatal: he had demobilised the revolutionary armies of the north, demoralising his own supporters and diminishing his own status, while putting himself entirely in the hands of the regular army; and by allowing Leon de la Barra, Diaz's foreign minister, to remain as interim president until the October presidential elections, he made a rod for his own back. With Diaz supporters still in the majority in Congress and de la Barra as chief executive, Madero needlessly faced four months of `Porfirismo without Porfirio', during which he was constantly beset by hostile intrigues. De la Barra made little secret of his intention to derail Madero's policies at all points, and his first aim was to drive a wedge between Madero and Zapata, who had neither been a signatory to, nor consulted over, the notorious treaty of Ciudad Juarez.
If Madero had been a true revolutionary, Zapata could reasonably have expected to become the next governor of Morelos, but it soon became apparent that he could advance under Madero only by abandoning his land-reforming credentials, the core of his identity. Meanwhile, other jealous anti-zapatistas were jockeying for position in Morelos. The Figueroas threw down their gauntlet by sending their men to occupy Cuernavaca and Jojutla while Zapata was engaged in the bloody struggle for Cuautla. They then tried to marginalise Zapata by building an alliance with the two-faced Leyva family, who had taken no part in the recent armed struggle. When Patricio Leyva made overtures to Zapata as if to an equal, Zapata wrote back angrily: `You are no channel of authority for me, for I take orders only from the Provisional President of the Republic, Francisco Madero ... I only tell you that if you do not turn over Cuernavaca to me, I will have you shot.'
Within weeks it became obvious to Zapata that nothing in Morelos was going to change: the planters were not going to be stripped of their power, Zapata himself was expressly ordered by Madero's agent Robles Dominguez to take no action against the haciendas, and on 26 May Madero himself announced that Clause 3 of the Plan of San Luis Potosi, relating to land reform, could not be implemented `in its entirety'. Zapata correctly read this to mean it would not be implemented at all. He was angry and stupefied to see the entire power structure of Morelos - the very people who had been in arms against him weeks before - confirmed in their privileges and positions. The world seemed turned upside down: it was almost as if it was the zapatistas who were the enemies of the Revolution and who deserved punishment. Within days there were reports that the planters had gone back to their old practice of fencing off village land.
Faced with this amazing reversal of fortunes, Zapata seemed to become momentarily paralysed with indecision, as if he was no longer sure of his purchase on reality. He rode down to Cuernavaca and wired Robles Dominguez for Madero's permission to proceed to appoint a temporary governor. There was no reply - hardly surprisingly, for the planters had already nobbled Madero and got their own stooge nominated for the position. Zapata could have used his 4,0000 armed men to impose his will, but did not do so; still strangely supine and dazed, he did not even react when the planters treacherously seized Tepepa and had him shot. Refusing to remain in Cuernavaca while the planters installed their puppet governor, he rode away disconsolately, brooding on Madero's treachery. He still thought of Madero as a man with genuine free will. He had not yet come to the awful realisation that, by so stupidly forfeiting real power, Madero had lost the capacity to deliver land reform even if he had wanted to.
Zapata decided to brace up by revisiting his roots. His first call was on Genovevo de la 0, the most outstanding of the independent zapatista chiefs, whom he had not yet met. The meeting was a great success, and there was an immediate rapport. Buoyed up by this encounter, Zapata went up to Mexico City on 8 June for his first meeting with Madero. At a conference at the Madero family mansion on Berlin Street, attended by Carranza and two other Madero aides, the president-in-waiting began by imploring Zapata to get on with the Figueroas. Zapata brusquely replied that he had no reason not to get on with them, as his sole interest was land reform, not high political ambition. Madero replied that land reform was a matter for later, once the zapatista armies had been disbanded. Zapata asked what guarantees he had that an unreconstructed federal army would obey Madero in Morelos once all the revolutionaries were disarmed.
When Madero gently reproved him for lacking the spirit of reconciliation, Zapata cut through the refined atmosphere of a high bourgeois Mexico City salon with some blunt talking. He stood up slowly, picked up his rifle and went over to Madero. Pointing to the gold chain on his waistcoat, he said: `Look, senor Madero, if I take advantage of the fact that I'm armed and take away your watch and keep it, and after a while we meet, both armed the same, would you have a right to demand that I give it back?' Madero nodded. `Well, then,' said Zapata, `that's exactly the situation in Morelos.' This was particularly uncomfortable talk for Madero; it was the second time in two months he had been menaced by a gun-toting revolutionary, but this was a man unlike Villa and not likely to burst into a flood of tears and beg forgiveness. Madero was concerned enough to offer to visit Morelos, and accepted an invitation from Zapata for 12 June.
The visit turned out to be a fiasco. Once again the Morelos planters, more politically sophisticated than Zapata, hobbled Madero and hijacked his programme to the point where Zapata in disgust refused to attend the welcome banquet for Madero. The latter, a mere shuttlecock being batted about by special interests, did not see how he was being manipulated, but he did note Zapata's absence and interpreted it as intransigence. Zapata's boycott was politically naive, for Madero went on to see the Figueroas, listened to their apparent reasonableness, and returned to Mexico City convinced that Zapata was a hothead and that his followers were an uncontrollable canaille - a conclusion reinforced by sight of the bombedout ruins at Cuautla.
Zapata meanwhile continued to press Madero by letter for guarantees on land reform and the future of his men. Madero predictably stalled on the agrarian question, but insisted on the immediate disarmament of all save 400, who would serve under Zapata as commander of the federal police; moreover, should the zapatistas rise again over their grievances, it would be Zapata's duty to suppress them with main force. Zapata was angry with this order that he should become in effect a political eunuch, with no leverage in Morelos; he read Madero's requirements, correctly, as a demand for unconditional surrender. Yet he was determined to exhaust all peaceful avenues. In mid June he returned to Cuernavaca and started mustering-out some of his units; he took in 3,500 arms and paid out 47,500 pesos in demobilisation pay.
Having demonstrated good faith, he asked for formal confirmation as commander of the federal police, but the Morelos planters put pressure on Madero to rescind the offer. Even while this matter was in limbo, with Madero dithering as usual, a resolution of sorts was effected when Zapata asked the interim puppet governor, Juan Carreon, for Soo rifles for his police. When Carreon refused, Zapata raided the arsenal and took them anyway. Immediately the howls about a `modern Attila' went up again from Mexico City's yellow press. A media `scare campaign' featuring `hordes' and dreadful atrocities kindled atavistic fears of a new War of the Castes, of pyjama-clad Indians with machetes, high on peyote, seeking out the white man on murder raids. This toxic black magic worked its poisonous spell. Madero, now under pressure from elite opinion to deal decisively with Z
apata, summoned him to Mexico City to answer the planters' charges of sedition and treason.
Still Zapata remained conciliatory. At a meeting with Madero in the capital on 20 June he accepted with a heavy heart a new deal, whereby he would no longer be police chief but simply retire into private life with fifty bodyguards. Within a month he had gone from odds-on favourite as Morelos's next govenor to being a nobody, a retired revolutionary.
The planters' euphoria did not last long. They found that it was one thing to get Madero to humiliate Zapata, quite another to get his followers to accept this as the way things were to be. The villagers had tasted the heady brew of freedom from the haciendas and military victory, and this was a genie that could not be put back into the bottle. A spontaneous `Zapata for governor' movement rose up; when the planters tried to use force against the villages, they found they had a serious problem of banditry on their hands. Seeing their cunningly devised coup d etat unravelling before their eyes, the planters panicked. They approached Zapata, offering to back him as governor if he would drop his demands for land reform.
They had seriously misread their man. A normal political boss or bandit chief could have been made over in this way, but not Zapata. He began secretly to rearm his demobilised men, aided surreptitiously by the new minister of the interior, Emilio Vasquez, who had never liked Madero's `everything as is' treaty with Diaz, and who now tried to subvert the policy by clandestinely allowing arms and ammunition to come into the possession of the zapatistas. Tensions rose another notch on 2 July after a bloody slaughter of zapatistas by federals in Puebla City, following a dispute over arrest jurisdiction. Zapata's instinct was to march at once to Puebla, but Madero wired him not to intervene. Still stoical, Zapata obeyed, but it was an open question how much longer he could remain quiescent in such an atmosphere of fear and suspicion.
In August, de la Barra, determined to destroy Zapata before his interim term expired, appointed a hardline porfirista, Alberto Garcia Granados, as minister of the interior, knowing that he despised Madero and was itching to crush the revolutionaries of Morelos. Echoing the mantra of all hawkish autocrats - `we do not do deals with terrorists' - the minister ordered Zapata to disband all his units forthwith or he would use the Army against this `nest of bandits and brigands'. Madero, desperate to avoid war in Morelos, many times invited Zapata to the capital for talks, but Zapata had had enough of Madero's prevarication, and stalled him each time. While publicly supporting Madero and making this clear in writing, he told his followers that Madero was so weak that the porfiristas manipulating him would not be above calling a conference of all revolutionary leaders and then massacring them all in one spot.
Under extreme pressure, Zapata eventually sent his brother Eufemio to confer with Madero. It was agreed that there would be elections in Morelos on 13 August, and that the zapatistas would then demobilise finally. However, any chance that Zapata might retire into private life was torpedoed by de la Barra, who issued an order for the immediate suppression of the zapatistas and sent two forces to apprehend him: federal troops to Cuernavaca and Jonacatepec, and Ambrosio Figueroa's men to Jojutla; for good measure, he added that Zapata and his representatives would be barred from any further talks in Mexico City. As a deliberate slap in the face for Zapata, de la Barra appointed his enemy Ambrosio Figueroa as governor and military commander in Morelos. Madero not only concurred in this but told Figueroa: `Put Zapata in his place for us, since we can no longer stand him.' Any thoughts that Zapata could retire to the countryside and be another Cincinnatus were brutally banished by this blatant provocation, and especially by the news that the most hated man in Mexico, General Victoriano Huerta, was commanding the troops on their way to Cuernavaca. Zapata wrote to Madero to ask either for an explanation or an order to halt Huerta; Madero did not reply, and provided neither. Anticipating all-out war, governor Carreon hurriedly postponed the state elections.
Huerta's orders were to compel the immediate demobilisation of all zapatistas and shoot any who resisted, but he interpreted this as licence to destroy anything he regarded as a legitimate military target, to impose martial law and to search out and destroy Zapata. However, Huerta was also cutting across the interests of all other parties in Morelos. The planters found they had a Frankenstein's monster on their hands, for he was not interested in them and their land-grabbing schemes. He wanted to impose a regime in the state that would redound to the advantage of his friend Bernardo Reyes, who was running against Madero in the October presidential election. Francisco Figueroa, a shrewder political operator than his brother, saw that the new dispensation would not be in his family's interests and warned Ambrosio that to cooperate with Huerta would be ruinous; he should therefore reject the offer of governorship. Conflict between Huerta and the Figueroas was not long coming: Huerta declared that Carreon was a weakling and must be replaced, but Ambrosio refused. Huerta hit back by suspending the state constitution and imposing martial law, using as the pretext a recent attack on his forces near Cuernavaca by Genovevo de la O's band.
Madero, importuned by the Morelos planters, by the Figueroas and even a loyally protesting Zapata, now intervened to try to restore order to an increasingly chaotic situation. His first task was to sound Zapata's intentions. Zapata told him he would demobilise at once provided martial law was lifted, Huerta's forces did not move beyond Cuernavaca and Raul Madero was made military commander in Morelos, but he added that further issues would then have to be dealt with: the removal of all Diaz supporters from the state, the supervision of state elections by his own handpicked scrutineers and a guarantee of agrarian reform. Both de la Barra and Huerta refused to pay any attention to these negotiations, de la Barra, who nursed a particular hatred for Zapata, declaring that it was intolerable that Madero should allow a `bandit' to dictate terms. He got his war minister to wire Huerta with orders to advance from Cuernavaca to Yautepec if Zapata did not disarm that very day. Huerta replied that he would advance once he had 1,500 infantry, 6oo cavalry and 500 75mm shells for his cannon.
Madero was completely hoodwinked by de la Barra. On the morning of 16 August he left Cuernavaca jauntily for the capital to get de la Barra's rubber stamp on the agreement he had negotiated with Zapata, unaware that an hour after his departure Huerta put his men on the march for Yautepec. When he learned the truth, in a letter from his mother, who urged him to come down hard on de la Barra, he was angry and in a mood for confrontation. However, de la Barra himself had meanwhile had second thoughts: it was dangerous for him to be seen openly defying Madero and supporting Huerta, who was known to be backing Bernardo Reyes in the presidential election. Moreover, he had on his desk a protest memorandum from all the municipal authorities of Morelos, stating that Huerta's troops were an infringement of state sovereignty and must be withdrawn. He therefore sent Huerta an order to suspend all military operations. Huerta played dumb and pretended not to understand the wire, so de la Barra was forced to repeat it.
Madero returned to Cuautla for a final round of negotiations with Zapata. Once he was gone, de la Barra rethought his position and sent Huerta an ambiguously worded order to suspend all `offensive operations' while Madero was in the state; this left Huerta free to engineer a situation where he could open fire `in self-defence'. After conferring with Zapata, Madero on 25 August sent a stinging cable to de la Barra, demanding respect for villagers' rights: `They want to be paid attention to and listened to. Just because they make a protest, nobody can try to shut them up with bayonets.' The talks with Zapata had been a success, even though Madero had to endure a lecture about letting the Revolution go off at half cock and not making land reform a priority. At the first meeting at Cuautla railway station, they had greeted each other cordially and Madero had called Zapata his truest and most honest general. When they parted later, Madero made a speech calling Emiliano `the valiant and most honourable general Zapata', declaring he could see through all the slanders of his enemies.
A euphoric Madero travelled back to the capital. He ha
d met and got on well with all the principal village leaders, they had accepted the idea of his brother Raul as military governor with enthusiasm, and Zapata had agreed to demobilise without mentioning agrarian reform. All they required in return was the withdrawal of Huerta and his army to Mexico City. Prospects for a permanent peace looked rosy, but in Mexico City de la Barra's intrigues continued unabated. By this time he had got it into his head that Madero was playing him at his own two-faced game: having fathomed the extent of de la Barra's support for Bernardo Reyes, Madero had made a secret deal with Zapata, whereby the demobilisation would be bogus; then, if a defeated Reyes revolted after the election, Zapata would be ready to raise the standard for Madero.
His head full of paranoid imaginings, de la Barra sent another cable to Huerta, telling him to restore order `in those areas that Zapata did not control'. Huerta resumed his advance on Yautepec. The municipal president of the town came out to meet Huerta with a white flag, but Huerta, pleading `self-defence' against one man and a flag, fired on him. When he heard of this latest act of sabotage, a stupefied Madero cornered de la Barra in the presidential office, where an angry altercation took place. Shaken by this, and the appearance of maderista demonstrations in the city, de la Barra ordered another 48-hour truce in Morelos. This time he proposed a general muster in Cuautla, the zapatista demobilisation to be supervised by police units from Veracruz and Hidalgo. For once Huerta, halted outside Yautepec, seemed to be obeying orders; in fact he needed the 48-hour interval to prepare his artillery.