Villa and Zapata: A History of the Mexican Revolution

by Frank McLynn

  That the elections were far freer than they had been in Diaz's day, and that in areas untouched by revolutionary violence they were reasonably fair, cut no ice with a cynical and jaundiced electorate. They saw clearly enough, even if Madero did not, that ideology and abstract political concepts were meaningless in Mexico; what mattered were bread-andbutter issues of the economy, especially land reform. `Liberty' might mean something to an educated lawyer in Mexico City, but to the campesino the only meaningful liberty was the economic one he had been deprived of by the hacendados, with Madero's imprimatur. The trouble about `No Re-election' as a slogan was that it was taken as a panacea for a host of problems, economic and social, whereas Madero had meant it narrowly, as a technical question to do with presidential succession. By 1912 the overriding feeling among the masses was that if elections changed anything, the elite would abolish them.

  Madero still had his supporters, but they were narrowly based, among the middle class and the urban working class. Theoretical revolutionaries who looked to the proletariat as a vanguard class were always going to be disappointed with him. The urban working classes in general did well out of Madero, who recognised labour unions and the right to strike, and such strikes as occurred were opportunistic, taking advantage of government setbacks on other fronts. With labour unions apolitical, `economist' in the sense of being concerned only with members' wages and conditions, and opposed to political violence, the working class strongly supported the status quo. The working class in Mexico was probably too weak to be a revolutionary force even if it had wanted to be, but rural revolution also made it obsessed with issues like food shortages, again making it hostile to the rebels.

  Given that Madero in Mexico was the obverse of Kerensky in Russia five years later, like him a `bourgeois' leader but making as many concessions to the Right as Kerensky made to the Left, the question arises: why were the forces of reaction and conservatism not more content with him? It seems, as has been well said, that it was a case of liking the music but loathing the conductor. Partly it was because the inapt tag `revolutionary' hung about Madero; partly because the macho hunting and shooting oligarchs despised the president's intellectual and aesthetic tastes and predilections, and he despised theirs. They disliked the ideological tone of his liberalism and his vague talk of a `middle way'. Most of all, however, the Right hated Madero for having displaced Diaz and ended the `good old days' when they could command automatic deference and obedience from the lower orders. They wanted a strongman and could not see Madero in the role: he was suspect thrice over, as a northerner, a civilian and a liberal. They could never really forgive him for having been prepared to negotiate with Zapata. Since Madero was within their range, the Army commanders especially displaced on to him the impotent rage they felt towards `upstarts' like Villa and Zapata.

  The devotees of law and order were also frustrated with the constant drip-drip of revolts and risings during the Madero years. Although the autumn saw Madero apparently well entrenched in power after the defeat of Orozco, the orozquista guerrilla bands were proving hard to eradicate, and in Morelos Zapata's fortunes had revived. There was also a new rebellion in Durango and Sinaloa that was beginning to make headway. None of these events was significant on its own, but their cumulative effect was beginning to exhaust and demoralise the regime, to encourage right-wing coups, and make Madero vulnerable to the forces of reaction.

  Madero's bitterest enemies seized their chance to make political capital. Henry Lane Wilson exhorted Washington to rescue US citizens from the `chaos' about to engulf the Pacific coast from Durango. The State Department responded, and Taft sent the USS Buford to the coast of Sinaloa to pick up the desperate American expatriates, but found only eighteen people. As the London Times commented sardonically: `The only refugees collected so far seem to be people wanting to travel gratis to San Diego.' Meanwhile, drinking in a cantina in Ciudad Juarez on 15 September, Victoriano Huerta was heard to boast: `If I wanted to, I could make an agreement with Pascual Orozco and I would go to Mexico City with 27,000 men and take the presidency away from Madero.' When this was reported to minister of war Angel Garcia Pena, he stripped Huerta of his command.

  That there was little in the way of policy dividing Madero and his right-wing enemies became very clear when Felix Diaz finally rebelled in October 1912. Nephew of the exiled dictator, in his forties, a former brigadier and chief of police in Oaxaca, Diaz was in many ways the unseen evil genius of the Madero years. Diaz was the name to which so many plots and conspiracies forever led back, and all the risings in Veracruz and Oaxaca were instigated by him in one way or another. In October 1912 he finally appeared in the field in his own right: the garrison at Veracruz immediately went over to him and he took the city without significant opposition. The inevitable manifesto he then issued denounced the Madero family but dealt entirely in personalities; there was not a word about society or the economy. As Alan Knight remarks: `Felix Diaz's pronunciamiento - in style, pomposity and even location - was in the old nineteenth-century tradition of Santa Anna.'

  Diaz's revolt struck a chord with conservative Army figures, who were impressed by his putative role as strongman. Yet the Army did not declare for him, largely because he remained inactive around Veracruz. Soon he found himself bottled up by a besieging army under General Joaquin Beltran, who proved immune to bribery or suborning. On 23 October Beltran ordered his men to advance through the undefended railway yards, and by mid-morning the federals controlled the port, having sustained negligible casualties; Diaz's troops had lost fifty dead and wounded.

  Diaz himself was captured and all resistance ceased. Humiliated by this catastrophic defeat, Diaz and his minions set about rationalising their own inadequacies: it was variously `explained' that the federals had advanced through the marshalling yards carrying a white flag, or that Beltran accepted a aoo,ooo-peso bribe from Diaz to bring his troops over to the rebels and then double-crossed him. The right-wing elements in Mexico City, who had hoped that Diaz's rising might be the coup de grace for Madero, were furious that the president had suppressed the revolt so easily, in contrast to the abortive attempts to suppress Zapata or the protracted campaign against Orozco. Such right-wingers in a bate missed the point and failed to compare like with like: Zapata and Orozco headed rural movements, but Diaz's was a self-contained urban rebellion, easy for a loyal Army to put down.

  A military court found Diaz and twenty-six of his officers guilty of treason, and sentenced him to be shot at dawn on 26 October. Madero now had to decide whether to confirm the death sentence. He decided to let justice take its course: his mercy with Bernardo Reyes had been unavailing, so perhaps he finally had to show he was master in his own house. High society and the press immediately began to clamour for clemency for `uncle's nephew', but the more the opposition tried to sway him, the more Madero became determined on execution. Then the oligarchy found a novel method of looking after its own. The Supreme Court, packed with stooges from the Porfiriuto, intervened to declare Diaz not a proper object of military justice, since he had de facto resigned his commission the moment he rebelled. Diaz was imprisoned, first in a fortress in Veracruz harbour and later, in January 1913, in the very military prison of Tlatelolco where Villa had been held. In yet another of those preposterous absurdities in which the Mexican Revolution abounded, the democratic system, which Diaz rose against, contrived to save him. Always a stickler for legal niceties, Madero acquiesced, but predictably won no plaudits for clemency from his enemies, while being despised by his allies.

  Beset from both Right and Left, and with few friends in the middle, in January 1913 Madero at last received significant backing when Venustiano Carranza called a meeting of northern governors at his estate at Cienega del Toro. All five governors who attended, from Coahuila, Chihuahua, Sonora, San Luis and Aguascalientes, were disillusioned with Madero, for meddling in state affairs and trying to abolish their state militias; they also thought he had been too soft with the zapatista rebels. However, they agre
ed there was a danger of a coup from the Right and that Madero's position needed shoring up. Unfortunately, the northern governors were too late. Extremist factions had already gained access to Diaz and Reyes in the Tlatelolco prison and were planning the next revolt. The entire credibility of the Right meant that the next rising had to be decisive; to avoid civil war, it also had to be a strike of surgical precision.

  To unite the various right-wing factions, a mastermind of machiavellian duplicity and consummate depravity was required. Such an individual now came forward in the shape of Henry Lane Wilson, the US ambassador, a 55-year-old career diplomat, short and stooping, with deep-set eyes and beetling brows; like his friend Huerta, he was also a notorious drunk. Wilson had come to Mexico as ambassador in 1910 after service in Belgium and Chile, the perfect dollar-diplomacy envoy, totally the creature of US business interests. Yet there was more. In the entire history of diplomacy, which has known its share of eccentrics, Wilson must rank as the maddest of the mad. He was obsessed with what he called `the American colony' - the large numbers of US citizens living in Mexico - and nurtured an insane hatred for Madero that could only adequately be explained by a psychologist of the abnormal. A more intelligent or energetic president than Howard Taft would have recalled Wilson the moment he wrote one of his mad dispatches - such as the request in March 1912 for a thousand rifles and a million cartridges to be sent to the Embassy in Mexico City, so that he could defend `the American colony'.

  Lane Wilson had taken secret satisfaction from the Orozco rising and the Diaz revolt, but to his angry stupefaction both had failed. He was now in a race against time if he was ever to achieve his heart's desire of overthrowing Madero, for in November 1912 Woodrow Wilson was elected as the 28th president of the United States. Madero had made bitter representations to the State Department about Lane Wilson, and by now even Taft realised that his ambassador in Mexico City was a suitable case for treatment. An honourable man would have dismissed Lane Wilson instantly, but Taft's pride stood in the way; he did not want to admit that his entire policy towards Mexico had rested on the gibberings of a crackpot. He therefore did nothing. In those days, an incoming president did not take office until March, so Woodrow Wilson, desperately anxious to sack his namesake in Mexico City, could also do nothing.

  Realising that his days were anyway numbered, Lane Wilson entered with rare gusto into planning Madero's downfall. An elaborate conspiracy was hatched, involving twenty-two Army generals, but at first Huerta refused to commit himself outright. Such a far-flung plot could not be kept secret, and on 4 February 1913 a loyal Army officer passed Gustavo Madero a list of names, including those of generals Aureliano Blanquet and Joaquin Beltran; against the name of Huerta a question mark had been placed. Gustavo Madero raced up to the presidential palace at Chapultepec to show his brother the list. Incredibly, Madero took the line that this was a hoax: if there was any conspiracy, he argued, Huerta would be at the heart of it and not just mentioned as a `possible', and as for Blanquet and Beltran, why, these were the men who had fought for him against, respectively, Orozco and Felix Diaz.

  This was Madero's greatest, but not yet his final, act of folly. The conspirators had actually agreed among themselves the division of the spoils, once Madero was overthrown. The generals would release Bernardo Reyes and Felix Diaz from jail, Reyes would take over as provisional president until Diaz could be elected president constitutionally, and a variety of posts would be given to the generals. The true reason a question mark had been placed against Huerta's name was that he was playing hard to get: he had been promised the post of commander-in-chief of the Army, but the devious alcoholic thought he could aim even higher. Originally planned for March, the coup was brought forward at Lane Wilson's urging to 9 February.

  At dawn on that Sunday morning General Manuel Mondragon, Porfirio Diaz's one-time Army chief whom Madero had foolishly allowed to return from exile, marched 700 men out of Tacubaya barracks and set out to free Reyes and Diaz. The bloodshed, which was to continue for ten days and give the coup the name of La Decena Tragica (Ten Days that Shamed the Nation), began almost immediately. At Santiago Tlatelolco prison the commanding general refused the order to hand over Reyes and was shot dead. The released Reyes was now, according to the plan, to proceed to the National Palace, address the nation, and declare himself the new president. However, when the jaunty and confident Reyes entered the Zocalo, he was met by a fusillade, and the Zocalo quickly became a battlefield in which bystanders and loiterers were caught up in the carnage; among 400 people shot dead in a bare ten minutes was Reyes himself. In confusion Felix Diaz pulled back his stricken troops to the old city arsenal at Ciudadela, one and a half miles away, where he paused to reflect on what had gone wrong.

  Alerted in the small hours by the rumbling of artillery being transported from Tacubaya, Gustavo Madero had hurried to the National Palace and rallied the garrison there with a rousing speech. Gustavo had a glass eye and was nicknamed Ojo Parado ('still eye'), but everyone agreed he had the heart of a lion. Won over by his oratory, the garrison obeyed the orders of the loyal General Lauro Villar, who arrived shortly to take over. They set up machine-guns on the Palace roof, and it was these that dealt such fearsome destruction when Reyes arrived. The rebel troops - mainly cadets - sent to occupy the National Palace had at first appeared to achieve their objective, and messages were sent to Reyes accordingly. Then Villar had counterattacked and forced them to surrender. Reyes, expecting a walkover, rode straight into a heavily defended fortress, with snipers on the rooftops and machine-guns and mortars at all the gateways.

  Madero now hastened down from Chapultepec with a small escort. On Paseo de la Reforma, close to the Alameda park, Huerta met him and offered his services; this `coincidence' has always seemed more than a little suspicious. Surviving an assassination attempt by a sniper firing from scaffolding on the uncompleted Fine Arts Palace (a bystander was killed instead), Madero rode through the heaps of dead and dying in the Zocalo and entered the National Palace, to find loyalist casualties high and General Villar gravely wounded. Some see Villar's removal from the fray as the freak contingency that altered the entire course of La Decena Trkgica. In an evil hour, persuaded by war minister Garcia Pena, Madero gave the command of the loyalist troops to Huerta. This was dangerous folly. Huerta pledged loyalty and embraced the president with a kiss of Judas, knowing that the fly had just walked into his spider's web.

  Felix Diaz and 1,50o rebels now faced Huerta and the Army across downtown Mexico, and for two days there was a stand-off, with both sides hoping for reinforcements. Madero went to Cuernavaca and returned with Felipe Angeles and another i,ooo troops. Huerta meanwhile executed one of his fellow-plotters, the obese cavalry commander General Gregorio Ruiz. Huerta hoped thereby to prove his loyalty to Madero beyond question, but there are those who say that iron entered the soul of the Mexican Revolution at that moment. There had been atrocities already, but henceforth treachery, murder and crimes against humanity became the norm rather than the exception.

  On I i February government forces launched a sustained attack on the Ciudadela. A heavy artillery barrage was followed by an infantry assault in which there were 500 casualties, including civilians. For four days there was a brutal slugging war of attrition, in which Madero's troops dislodged the rebels from all their outer bastions, but could not take the `inner ring' in the Ciudadela itself. Mexico City was convulsed and appalled by the novel spectacle of war, as shells and shrapnel tore through the city centre. Shopping centres were palls of smoke, elegant residential areas echoed to the machine-gun's hasty stutter, and the once distinguished heart of the capital was like a gigantic rubbish tip, a tangle of telegraph wire, sandbags and bizarrely skewed lampposts, with the number of human corpses defying the best efforts of improvised ambulances. After the initial loss of life, civilians kept off the streets, taking advantage of the lulls in fighting to decamp to the safer suburbs, often with mattresses on their backs - whether as crude bullet-proof protection or
in the hope of sleeping on a friendly floor is uncertain.

  Soon food grew scarce, prices became hyperinflationary, and many urban myths arose about dinners of roasted cat and dog. Public health problems were partly solved by desperate expedients, such as burning bodies out on the plains of Balbena, but this called for extra resources which were soon exhausted. Many corpses were simply doused with petrol and incinerated on the spot, creating a Dantesque spectacle of horror as twitching limbs and noisome foetors made a macabre sensory impact on bystanders. There was further mayhem when a rebel shell blew a hole in the walls of Belem prison. In the ensuing mass breakout, many prisoners were shot dead; some turned aside to loot, others were recaptured and still others joined the rebels; the chaos was compounded by casual looters who took advantage of the confusion to go on the rampage. The wildest rumours spread: that the city mob had risen and was consigning property and persons to the flames, or that the zapatistas were in the city and the dreaded Genovevo de la 0 was threading his way through the suburbs, beheading enemies and collecting scalps.

  Henry Lane Wilson watched all this with appalled horror. His machinations with Diaz and the generals had not had the required effect, so it was time to move on to the next stage of his plan and force Huerta off his perch. Wilson began by deluging Washington with totally false reports to the effect that people were going over to Diaz in their hundreds and that he was the only hope for peace and stability. He browbeat his colleagues, the European ministers, into presenting a `joint remonstrance' to Madero, making exaggerated claims about loss and damage to the property of foreign nationals, and on 12 February, together with the Spanish and German ministers, he sought an interview with Madero; the absurd bird-fancying British minister, Sir Francis Stronge, was quite willing to cede all his authority to the hectoring Wilson, provided he could obtain fresh eggs to feed his pet parrots.