by Frank McLynn
Carranza had some political talent - he built up close relations with the governors of San Luis Potosi, Aguascalientes and Chihuahua - but he was most of all that sad spectacle, the professor in politics. A walking encyclopedia of the history of Mexico, Carranza had never thrown off his youthful obsession with Juarez. Jose Vasconcelos said of Carranza that `Juarez was for him all of human greatness, above and beyond universal geniuses.' Carranza knew nothing directly of foreign countries, but had travelled the world in his books. He always preferred Europe to the United States, and within Europe his favourite history was French, with France, seen through a rose-tinted and conservative lens, his model and inspiration in politics and culture.
Carranza thought Madero had made two mistakes: he had truckled to the Right and the Diaz supporters, whereas `a revolution that makes concessions commits suicide'; and he had not acted decisively enough against Henry Lane Wilson and Washington. Carranza was always antiAmerican in the sense that he resented the Yankee colossus's frequent interventions south of the border, its economic imperialism and, particularly, the gigantic land-snatch of California, Arizona and New Mexico that had capped Mexico's humiliation in the war of 1846-8. From his reading of Mexican history, Carranza saw Madero's downfall in February 1913 as a `parallel' with the overthrow of Comonfort in 1858. Clearly what was needed was a new Juarez - and who more suitable than Carranza himself ?
In the opening weeks of the Huerta regime he proceeded with extreme caution. One of the great myths of the Mexican Revolution is that the three northern states of Sonora, Chihuahua and Coahuila exploded into spontaneous revolt once Huerta murdered Madero. What really happened was that Huerta's bull-in-a-china-shop antics gave them no choice. Always supremely cautious, always with the instincts of a trimmer, Carranza sent a delegation to Mexico City to assure Huerta of his loyalty (this is a well-documented incident which Carranza's hagiographers have tried to rewrite or edit out of the record). Carranza was prepared to bow the head to the tyrant, but Huerta was determined to impose his own Army cronies as governors in all the states and to give no guarantees whatever on local autonomy. Faced with Huerta's intransigence, Carranza saw no future for himself, so rebelled. It is utterly unconvincing to say, as Carranza's apologists do, that the embassy he sent to Huerta was simply a cynical device to play for time.
Always a stickler for protocol and constitutional niceties - in this at least he resembled Madero - Carranza took care to get a mandate for rebellion from the Coahuila legislature. On 4 March 1913 a group of Army officers chose him as first chief of the `Constitutionalist' Army, and Huerta's presidency was declared illegal, unconstitutional and piratical - but the Coahuilans took this step with great reluctance. It was the same story in Sonora: the death of Madero and Huerta's inability to compromise forced a reluctant elite into rebellion. Even so, it was not until mid-March, with Huerta's armies advancing to seize the state, that Sonoran leaders threw off the mask.
Carranza issued his manifesto as the Plan of Guadalupe. This had the distinction of being the least ideological of all Mexican pronunciamientos: nothing whatever was said about agrarian matters or land reform; the Plan was a purely political call for the overthrow of Huerta, after which, it was implied, everything was up for grabs. Interested only in a political transfer of power, and aware that commitment to land reform would merely stiffen the opposition to him, Carranza managed to produce a document that was ideologically blander even than Madero's anodyne Plan of San Luis Potosi. In some ways Carranza's programme was merely a dotting of the `i's and crossing of the `t's in Maderismo, but there was a toughness and ruthlessness in Carranza's utterances that was very different from Madero-style discourse. Most importantly, Carranza declared war to the knife: there would be no compromises and no deals, his aim was to extirpate Huerta and all his works, root and branch.
For this reason Carranza set himself up as an alternative government. He issued five million pesos of paper money, and announced measures to deal with taxes, exports and expropriations in the territories his army intended to conquer. Most controversially, he revived Juarez's decree of 25 January 1862, which stated that all enemy prisoners were to be executed as rebels against the properly constituted government. This single action began a cycle of atrocities that by the end of the Revolution had spiralled almost out of control. Partly Carranza's motivation was to ape his beloved Juarez, but in part the decree was an accurate manifestation of an autocratic personality, who believed that any opposition to his will merited death.
It is part of the fascination about Carranza that a one-dimensional, cautious, circumspect martinet should yet have had the imagination to bluff his way into the position, never seriously challenged thereafter, of supreme chief of the Revolution. He did start with certain advantages. At fifty-three he was much older than the other revolutionaries, so that he appeared mature and full of gravitas. His height and bearing were on his side, as was the patriarchal beard which he stroked like the archetypal wise old man. He was also ahead of his time in his awareness of image and public relations, and to this end dressed the part of a `father of the nation', in northern-style wide-rimmed grey felt hat, twill coat, riding breeches and leather boots. The idea was to promote the image of a man of action but, by eschewing meretricious Army insignia, to distance himself from `the man on horseback' who already had his avatar in the shape of Huerta.
Carranza aspired to the charisma of Juarez and the power of Diaz and was determined to succeed where Madero had failed. However, he was no Juarez, though he adopted the same granite-like persona and had the same irreducible stubbornness. He also lacked Diaz's finely tuned political instincts, but he had mastered Fabian tactics, knew the virtues of stalling and procrastination, and cultivated a deliberate slowness of manner, allowing him to prevaricate in public. A rustic and patriarchal inflexibility, yoked to plodding body rhythms suggested the cycles of Nature and the inexorable working out of Fate. By sidelining and sidetracking people, he made it impossible for them to have face-to-face confrontations with him. In his own mind he saw himself as a bridge between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, channelling the violent currents of the Revolution into orderly conduits. He wanted the law to be supreme, whereas a man like Villa wanted the myth of action, Sorel-like.
Above all, then, Carranza was an actor. By sleight of hand he built himself up as the only credible national alternative to Huerta. As Alan Knight has remarked: `Other revolutionary caudillos might excel in military power or popular appeal, but none could press a stronger claim to national leadership.' In short, Carranza gambled, took the long view, and arrogantly behaved as if all other revolutionary leaders had agreed to his title as first chief of the Constitutionalist Army. He expected the Villas, Obregons, Zapatas and others to fall in with his plans, but in return had nothing to offer them: no money, no resources, just pious platitudes. The gamble paid off. As with so many other leaders in history, Carranza - basically a nonentity, lacking genius, heroism or idealism - was taken by others at his own absurdly elevated self-evaluation.
In the early rounds of the military contest with Huerta, it was the murderer of Madero who won all the points. Carranza at first tried to avoid battle, but was worsted by federals in an encounter at Anhelo. Next he attacked Saltillo, but the federals had constructed their defences well and Carranza's assault was badly planned; after fifty-five hours of costly fighting, he was forced to withdraw. For several months he remained inactive at Monclova, unmolested as the federals slowly moved reinforcements north. At this stage in the revolt, Huerta reckoned Zapata a greater threat than Carranza, possibly because he himself had failed against Zapata and then swept all before him in the campaign in the north against Orozco.
Gradually, however, the slow federal attrition told on Carranza, and he was forced across the state line and on a long circuitous retreat to Sonora. The short route was via the USA but Carranza, the anti-American, was determined that he would never set foot on US soil now that he was the `real' president of Mexico. The other co
nsideration in his mind was that Juarez had trekked north in 1863 on his `long march' without leaving Mexican territory, and he wished to emulate the exploit of his hero. To achieve this, Carranza made an absurdly roundabout journey from Piedras Negras to Hermosillo, via Torreon, Durango, southern Chihuahua, the western Sierra Madre and northern Sinaloa. Carranza's flight - for that is what it was - was written up by his propagandists as a stirring feat of high adventure, replete with suitable `heroic' ingredients: crossing the continental divide on horseback with just too men, ascending mountain passes in monsoon-like rains, then descending into the valley for an emotional meeting with the revolutionary leaders of Sinaloa and Sonora. The fat and short-sighted Carranza, once described as `mediocrity incarnate' needed an `exploit' like this to establish his reputation and credibility as a revolutionary leader.
He established his government in Sonora and remained there until March 1914. Why Sonora? At least three reasons seem salient. Most obviously, the revolutionary army there numbered 3,000, as against little more than i,ooo in Coahuila. Sonora was also uniquely placed as a hideout for a rebel leader, since there was no direct rail link between the state and Mexico City. The west coast railway line had a gap at Jalisco, between Tepic and San Marcos, so rapid federal troop movements were not feasible; by contrast, the rebels could smuggle in arms across the border from the USA. Sonora also suited Carranza sociologically and ideologically. Socially stable, politically homogeneous, with high levels of literacy and foreign investment, a burgeoning middle class and a mestizo population eagerly embracing capitalism, it was a microcosm of the sort of Mexico Carranza wanted to see after the Revolution, a progressive culture that could overwhelm the old colonial, Indian, Catholic Mexico of the central plateau. Above all, land reform was not an issue. As Alvaro Obregon, Carranza's great ally in Sonora, pointed out: `We are not agraristas here, thank God. We are all doing what we are doing out of patriotism and to avenge the death of senor Madero.'
However, there was no disguising the fact that for most of 1913 Carranza avoided a military showdown with Huerta and remained on the back foot. Although Sonora later came to be regarded as the nursery of Revolutionary politicians - producing as it did Obregon, Adolfo de la Huerta, Benjamin Hill, Salvador Alvarado, Juan Cabral and Plutarco Elias Galles - in the initial stages of the struggle against Huerta, Carranza had to build up slowly. After all, the governor of the state, Jose Maria Maytorena, fled to Tucson, Arizona `for his health' after Madero's murder, so that he would not have to commit himself, and though Carranza had divided up Mexico into seven military zones, there were operations in only three of them in 1913, and in only one to any great point. All the real resistance to Huerta in that year was achieved elsewhere, by rebels who were not carrancistas. The cutting edge of the anti-Huerta opposition was in Chihuahua, a state Huerta foolishly thought he had tamed, and the protagonist was once again Pancho Villa.
Maderistas in Chihuahua were desperate for leadership, since Abraham Gonzalez had by now joined Madero on the list of the murdered. Immediately after disposing of Madero, Huerta ordered Gonzalez arrested and brought to Mexico City. On the way his train was stopped, and he was taken off and shot; for good measure his lifeless body was then mangled under the train wheels. Huerta gave out that Gonzalez had been killed while his supporters were trying to rescue him. Coming immediately after the similarly transparent `explanation' for Madero's death, this was universally taken as an insult to public intelligence; the brutal and drunken Huerta could not even be bothered to think up a plausible story. Loyal Chihuahuans now not only had two martyrs (Madero and Gonzalez) to mourn but could see no future for themselves. The decision to rebel was forced on them, for otherwise they considered themselves certain to be massacred, either by Huerta's army or by Orozco's colorados.
Across the border in Texas, Pancho Villa had been spending a miserable exile. The wife of his El Paso hotelier remembered him as a man of uncertain temper, with a passion for ice cream and peanut brittle, who kept a box of homing pigeons in his hotel room. Suddenly there came news of La Decena Trkgica and Huerta's coup. Villa was overwhelmed by news of Madero's murder. All his differences with him, all the betrayals by the president when Villa was in jail, all was now forgotten and Madero was henceforth remembered as `Maderito' - `dear little Madero'. Villa now had two scores to settle with Huerta: vengeance for the death of Madero and personal revenge for the attempted firing squad and the seven months in prison.
With some vague thoughts of building an alliance, Villa set out for Tucson to interview the cowardly Maytorena. While he was waiting to talk to him, Villa met a more doughty representative of Sonora, Adolfo de la Huerta, a genuine revolutionary, who implored him to go to Sonora and raise the standard there. When Maytorena finally spoke to Villa and learned of this talk of Sonora, he was alarmed for his own position and gave Villa i,ooo pesos, on the strict understanding that he would return to Chihuahua, not Sonora, to start an insurrection. The naive Villa, unaware of all the undercurrents, actually felt himself to be in Maytorena's debt. With the money he paid what he owed in El Paso, and bought nine horses and nine rifles. On the night of 6 March 1913 he splashed across the Rio Grande with eight comrades (including Juaregui). To start a rebellion they had with them a few pack mules, two pounds of sugar, two of coffee and one of salt, and 500 cartridges each.
At San Andres Villa made contact with his brothers Antonio and Hipolito, together with villista veterans like Maclovio Herrera, Toribio Ortega, Rosalio Hernandez and, most importantly, Tomas Urbina. At first they did not fare well. Chihuahua rose in revolt, but only a handful of men joined Villa, and the other guerrilla leaders refused to accept him as supreme commander. For a time the state was racked by spontaneous and fissiparous warlordism. One of the early leaders was an exschoolmaster named Manuel Chao, whose first exploit was an attack on the federal garrison in the town of Santa Barbara. At the height of the battle, the townspeople suddenly turned on the federals, shooting at them from their houses and thus catching them between two fires; the garrison surrendered soon afterwards. Chao tried the same stratagem at Parral, in collusion with leading city burghers, but the plan went awry when federal reinforcements arrived at the crucial moment. Forced to evacuate, Chao's men melted into the countryside, fighting as guerrillas, occupying haciendas and destroying railway tracks. By the beginning of April 1913 other guerrilla groups had arisen, most notably one led by Villa's old compadre Tomas Urbina, who directed raids into southern Chihuahua from his base in Durango.
Villa realised that campaigning this time was going to be tougher and bloodier than in 1911. Then the revolutionaries had been fighting for a mere change of leader, now they were fighting for a change of regime, which meant guerre a outrance. In 1911 the Chihuahua oligarchs had not fought for Diaz, and Madero's campaign had been well financed. This time guerrilla bands would be fighting on a shoestring against the combined might of Huerta's army, the Terrazas' militias and Orozco's colorados. Grand gestures were out of place, Villa knew, so he began to build up slowly. Leaving Chao and Urbina to their spheres of influence, he made his base in north-western Chihuahua where he had many old contacts among the maderista veterans, and where he was close enough to the US border to get fresh supplies of arms.
Villa reasoned that the way to get recruits and turn his campaign into a high-profile affair was by spectacular attacks on Terrazas haciendas and dramatic redistributions of land. Madero had called him a Robin Hood; very well, he would act like one. His first target was the hacienda of El Carmen, notorious locally because its manager practised droit du seigneur on nubile peon girls and had his own system of debt peonage. Villa attacked the hacienda, executed the manager and his assistant, threw open the granary and distributed food to the peons, urging them to rebel rather than accept such treatment again. He did the same thing at the haciendas of San Lorenzo and Las Animas, winning popularity and recruits.
There was something of an irony in the way Villa, with his harem of `wives', stood forth as the champion of o
ppressed women, but this stance paid popularity dividends. At the village of Satevo a young girl came to him and denounced the parish priest for having raped her and fathered a child; the priest then compounded his offence by refusing to acknowledge the child and claiming that Pancho Villa was the father. Villa forced the priest to confess and ordered his execution. The village women then interceded to beg for the life of their padrecito. Villa agreed, provided the priest made a full confession of his sins from the pulpit, which the shaken cleric was only too pleased to do. The incident enhanced Villa's reputation as a dispenser of Solomonic justice.
Villa's actions in March and April showed him to be a master at winning hearts and minds. While confiscating and redistributing lands, and providing villagers with extra food, he executed all bandits and colorados and made a great show of protecting US property. He sent one local bandit, `El Mocho', to the firing squad after he shot an American. Indeed his pro-Americanism was so overt that it caused grumblings among the more political of his followers, for whom the `Yankee octopus' was as much a mortal enemy as Huerta. To assert his authority on this point, Villa drove one zapatista guerrilla, named Maximo Castillo, across the border into the USA. Americans responded by selling arms and ammunition to the villistas; a daring raid on a silver train had given Villa the wherewithal for a bulk purchase in April. The US arms embargo never worked, partly because Villa used women and children as agents of contraband, but mainly because Americans across the border ignored it: some were sympathetic to Villa, others simply refused to allow Washington to interfere with normal business, and others again took the realistic line that there was simply too much border with Mexico to patrol effectively.
By the end of May Villa had 700 well-armed and highly disciplined troops under his command. Impressed with his achievement, one of the major warlords, Toribio Ortega, agreed to serve as Villa's second-incommand and brought in his 500 guerrillas. Ortega was one of the rare genuinely honourable revolutionaries, a man with a reputation for compassion, integrity and financial honesty. His example was persuasive. Gradually more and more warlords took the same decision, seeing in Villa the only credible defender of Chihuahua against Huerta. Chao and Urbina both lost caste irremediably in June and July, Urbina by a disgracefully handled sack of Durango City when his troops ran amok, and Chao by three successive defeats (at Ciudad Camargo, Mapula and Santa Rosalia) when Orozco led a i,ooo-man cavalry dash from Torreon to Chihuahua City in the style of Nathan Forrest in the American Civil War. By August, the three-pronged offensive by the Army, the Terrazas militias and the colorados threatened to overwhelm Chihuahua. Urbina lacked the discipline and Chao the military imagination to prevail against such odds. To survive, the revolutionaries had to put all their bets on Pancho Villa.