by Frank McLynn
As a child Alvaro Obregon learned all the chores on a farm and spent much time with Mayo Indians, who had a reputation for reckless courage. He attended the primary school in Huatabampo and was a bookish child, but financial necessity forced him to cut short his education after elementary school. Obregon was one of those remarkable individuals who could turn his hand to anything, and in his early years he revealed himself as a jack-of-all trades with innate talent as an entrepreneur. At the age of thirteen he learned photography and carpentry, began raising tobacco, became an expert mechanic and taught himself to read music before forming a family orchestra which he conducted. His formation was not in the liberal humanities but in the hard school of opportunism and ruthlessness.
By the turn of the century Obregon was chief mechanic at the Tres Hermanos sugar mill owned by his maternal uncles, the Salido brothers, who were prosperous hacendados in the Mayo river region. In 1903 he married Refugio Urrea, and became a tenant farmer, alternating this with life as a door-to-door shoe salesman. In 19o6 he managed to buy a small farm which he nicknamed `The Poor Man's Manor', and built up a prosperous chickpea business. In 1907 tragedy struck. He had sired a child every year since his marriage, but that year his wife and two of the four children died. His three sisters took in the two surviving children, leaving the widower Alvaro with time on his hands, which he put to good purpose by inventing a chickpea harvester. Soon he had an assembly line producing these for eager buyers in the Mayo valley.
Rich enough by 1910 to be able to go down to Mexico City for Diaz's centennial celebrations, Obregon had the reputation in Sonora for being something of a genius. His outstanding mechanical ability was matched by great natural intelligence and an obvious creative streak. He also possessed a phenomenal memory: it was said he could remember the order of an entire pack of cards, arranged at random, after seeing the cards just once, and he became a feared poker player, so formidable that people actually asked him not to play. Affable, lighthearted and easygoing, Obregon enjoyed wit and humour and fancied himself as a joker. When he became famous he aspired to be Mexico's Will Rogers as much as her Woodrow Wilson. He liked to exaggerate the poverty of his childhood. One of his sayings was: `I had so many brothers and sisters that when we ate Gruyere cheese, only the holes were left for me.'
Obregon is one of the few leaders in the Mexican Revolution for whom sufficient evidence of his inner life exists that we can hazard a guess at the demons nudging him. Freudians would doubtless say he was deathdriven. Some childhood loss, perhaps the death of his father, gnawed at him. As a child he evinced signs of autism and did not speak a word until he was five. Repressed rage was obviously part of the syndrome for, when a friend of his mother's spoke disparagingly of the mute five-year-old as a monkey, the child suddenly found voice and spat out vociferously: `Vieja loca' ('Crazy old woman'). There was another significant event when he was fifteen. He was working on his brother Alejandro's farm some miles from home, and the two of them shared the same room. During the night Alvaro cried out as if in agony and woke his brother. He said he had just had a vivid dream in which their mother died. Next morning a man galloped up to say that their mother had died, at the precise time Alvaro had had his dream. Further evidence of something buried in the unconscious - something to do with death - appears in the Poe-like poetry he wrote.
In igio-i I Obregon did not join the revolt against Diaz. He feared to lose his wealth and was anyway sympathetic to the ageing dictator - a fact with which revolutionary Sonorans often afterwards reproached him. Obregon liked to indulge in breast-beating to head off the criticism of others and had this to say about rgio-ii: `The maderista party was split into two sections; one was composed of individuals responsive to the call of duty, who left their homes and severed every tie of family and interest to shoulder a rifle ... and the other of men who harkened to the promptings of fear, who found no arms, who had children liable to become orphans, and who were bound by a thousand other ties which even duty cannot suppress when the spectre of fear grips the hearts of men. It was to the second of these classes that I unfortunately belonged.'
In 1912 he joined Madero's fight against Pascual Orozco. He recruited 300 men and formed the 4th Irregular Battalion of Sonora, under the command of General Sangines. He proved a born captain, his mind full of decoys, ambushes and chess-playing manoeuvres; some even claim he was the first person to advocate that each soldier should dig his own foxhole instead of using a collective trench. Obregon had now converted fantasies of death into an everyday reality, and his family letters are full of references (unconscious wishes?) to death in battle. Promoted to colonel after defeating the orozquistas at San Joaquin, he resigned in December 1912 and returned to his farm. When Huerta assumed the presidency after murdering Madero, he at once offered his services to the government of Sonora.
Obregon set out on a mission to capture Sonora's border towns from Huerta at exactly the moment Villa crossed the Rio Grande on his great adventure; capturing the border towns would enable the Sonoran rebels to levy customs duties and smuggle in arms. Together with Juan Cabral, Obregon took Nogales in March and then moved on Naco, defended by General Pedro Ojeda, a man in the Huerta mould, who boasted that he always executed every single prisoner of war he took. When Obregon approached, Ojeda, confident that his defences would hold, boasted: `I will cut off my head before I will surrender or cross into the United States.' Yet a few days later he made the crossing, his head still intact, having blown up the customs house before he went.
Obregon then quickly took Cananea, Moctezuma and Alamos, leaving (of the major towns) only Guaymas in Huerta's hands. The rebels raised forced loans and used expropriated estates as collateral for other credit lines. The US mining companies and the Southern Pacific Railroad were quite content to pay taxes to the Sonoran rebels, who had no radical programme and presented themselves simply as more efficient managers of a capitalist economy than the huertistas. By the summer of 1913 Obregon had emerged as the military figure in Sonora, and it was in this capacity that he welcomed the fugitive Carranza into the state. He now commanded an army of 6,ooo men, including 2,000 Yaquis; Obregon proved expert at holding the ring between Sonora's capitalists and the Yaquis with their radical agrarian aims.
Huerta entrusted the reconquest of the north-west to General Luis Medina Barron, another figure of Huerta-like ferocity, who knew the Sonoran terrain intimately. In face of his advance, the rebels withdrew from the siege of Guaymas, and a confident Barron boasted that he would go on and take Hermosillo. In a three-day battle at Hacienda Santa Rosa, Obregon proved his calibre by severely defeating Barron, who withdrew after losing half his army. A furious Huerta sacked him and replaced him with the atrocity specialist Ojeda, who had so recently fled across the border. Obregon appeared to retreat, luring Ojeda on, then fell on him at Santa Maria at the end of June. For a cost of twenty-seven dead and thirty-one wounded, the Sonoran rebels killed 30o and took another Soo prisoner, as well as capturing a huge stock of arms, ammunition and mnateriel. Obregon was already perfecting his technique of manipulating the enemy into fighting on ground of his own choosing - the Wellington touch. Ojeda skulked in Guaymas, secure only with the covering fire of two federal gunboats.
Once he had tightly invested the federals in Guaymas, Obregon refused to waste time on frontal assaults. He had already proved himself a military master, drawing the enemy away from his base, extending his lines of communication, picking him off in skirmishes and generally demoralising him before giving battle. He planned his battles with graphs, equations, and geometrical figures. At Santa Rosa in May 1913 he calculated his moves to a nicety while encircling the federals, working out trigonometrically how to cut off the garrison's escape.
Many Sonoran generals, such as Benjamin Hill, who had fought for Madero, resented Obregon's meteoric rise and regarded him as a johnnycome-lately. None the less, when Carranza confirmed him as commander-in-chief of the north-west on 20 September 1913, Hill and the others had no choice but to obey h
is orders. Carranza's appointment contained its own absurdities, for Obregon was now the military supremo, in theory, not just in Sonora, Sinaloa and Baja California, but also in Chihuahua. There Villa was doing all the fighting, but Carranza did not see fit to consult him about the command or even whether he accepted the authority of the `Constitutionalists'.
In any case, as the summer wore on, Obregon was increasingly taken up with political problems. He had to pacify the Yaquis and, more importantly, to decide what attitude to take to Carranza. The Yaquis were the simpler task of the two. Obregon, who had been brought up among Indians and knew how to speak to them in their own idiom, which buttons to press and which taboos to avoid, was particularly successful at recruiting Yaquis, who became his crack troops. He was not the only commander to recruit them, but he alone had an instinctive understanding of their psychology and how to motivate them. His duplicity emerges in the solemn promise that he would restore the Yaquis to their lands if they campaigned for him like tigers. Once he was successful, Obregon forgot his promise, and it was bitterly ironical that it was he who in the late 1920S finally destroyed them, both as a culture and a fighting force.
Carranza was a more ticklish problem. It particularly irked Obregon that Carranza had come to Sonora as a virtual refugee, and had arrogantly assumed powers and titles that no one had given him. The `First Chief' had quasi-presidential powers, entirely self-assigned, and the politicians of Sonora had colluded with him in this fraud for entirely selfish reasons, out of jealousy of the governor Juan Maytorena. It was true that Maytorena had done himself no good and won few new friends by his cowardly flight to the USA, but now he was back, to find that Carranza had usurped most of his functions, and was like a gigantic Constitutionalist cuckoo in the Sonoran nest. Since Maytorena returned to find himself marginalised, and Obregon was angry that Carranza had not nominated him supreme military commander of the Constitutionalists, but only commander in the north-west, equal in billing with incompetents like Pablo Gonzalez in the north-east, it seemed that Maytorena and Obregon should logically make common cause.
Obregon continued his military success. In November he took the city of Culiacan, demonstrating threefold qualities as a captain: mastery of terrain, deployment of men, and timing and positioning of artillery. He was also learning political skills. During a five-month lull in fighting in Sonora over the winter of 1913-14, he became a master of intrigue, using the time to discredit Felipe Angeles, his only military and intellectual rival among the carrancistas. Angeles had joined Carranza after some close dicing with death under Huerta. When Angeles came back from Cuernavaca with i,ooo men to support Madero during La Decena Tragica, Huerta was furious, as Angeles nearly ruined his intrigue by his loyalty. As a reward he was arrested and placed in the same cell as Madero and Pino Suarez just before Major Cardenas came for them. Angeles was lucky to escape the same fate; perhaps only his Army rank saved him.
Obregon was already becoming a skilled political manipulator. He liked to play to the gallery, affect buffoonery, pretend to be amiable, disorganised and self-effacing. At Culiacan he was wounded in the leg but joked that bullets did not take him very seriously: this one had not aimed straight at him but caused the wound by ricocheting off a rock. Yet in reality this `just folks' persona concealed a frightening ambition, as such a mask often does. The real Obregon was a man with ice in his soul where Villa had fire. Here was a man who dissembled, dissimulated, was secretive, played his cards close to his chest, was opaque and poker-faced and in general hid his true feelings, deep thoughts and ultimate intentions. Villa was an open book, but Obregon was the most enigmatic character in the entire Revolution.
The year of 1913 saw the rise to national prominence of Villa, Carranza and Obregon. Yet there was a fourth national figure in the field, who had the longest-lived credentials of all, as he had been a revolutionary general since the early days of 1911. For Zapata, with his previous experience of Huerta, the bullet-headed dictator presented a greater challenge than Madero had ever done. When he heard the news of the February coup, Zapata wrote at once to Genovevo de la 0 to caution him not to accept any offers of talks from the new government: `Beware ... and strike the enemy wherever he shows himself.' To make his position crystal clear, Zapata made a formal announcement of his undying hostility to Huerta and Felix Diaz in two separate pronunciamientos published on the second and fourth of March 1913.
One effect of Huerta's accession to power was to increase factionalism in Morelos, for the state was now split three ways, between zapatistas, maderistas and those who decided to make their peace with Huerta. Orozco's example in this regard was potent and many guerrilla chiefs sought accommodation with Huerta, citing Orozco and Zapata's praise for him in the Plan of Ayala; Zapata was particularly cast down when the fourth-ranking member of the zapatista junta, Jesus Morales, went over to the enemy. Huerta showed how he meant to proceed in Morelos by reappointing the hated Juvencio Morales as military commander there. The dictator gloatingly told his drinking companion, Lane Wilson: `The best way to handle these rebels is with an eighteen-cent rope to hang them with.'
Zapata made clear this was to be war to the knife by attacking the train from Mexico City to Cuernavaca and killing seventy-five troops. Huerta responded by declaring martial law and announcing that he was to transport 20,000 Morelos peons to Quintana Roo. Zapata then wrote a blistering letter to Huerta and Orozco accusing them of `mercenary trafficking ... to assassinate the Revolution'. Orozco and Huerta made the mistake of sending peace commissioners into Morelos to put out feelers to the rebels. Zapata seized them, gave them a show trial, and executed them, thus making clear there would be no compromise. General Robles was keen to head south to avenge this `atrocity', but in March-April Huerta was preoccupied with the north and advised Robles to wait until he could supply him with the necessary manpower. A sort of uneasy `phoney war' hung over Morelos in these months, allowing the planters to harvest produce which Zapata would later tax.
Huerta soon evinced his short way with constitutional niceties. When Robles arrived in Morelos and announced that he intended to be governor as well as military commander, the state assembly informed him this was unconstitutional. However, Huerta simply swept up the assemblymen in mass arrests and imprisoned them in Mexico City. He then warned the planters that he was going to use whatever measures were necessary to destroy Zapata; if the planters were caught in the crossfire, that was simply the regrettable collateral damage of warfare. The effect of the dictator's hard line was to eliminate liberals at a stroke and make people either zapatista or huertista; the hawkish alcoholic was operating his own law of excluded middle.
Zapata would dearly have liked to put together the kind of military coalition Villa forged in the north, but his perennial problem was that disadvantages of geography and social structure meant that he could rarely field large armies. He was restricted to operating with guerrilla units of no more than fifty men each. Whereas a combined operation, involving the armies of Sonora, Chihuahua and Coahuila, was finally achieved by the revolutionaries in the north in 1914, such a grand slam remained a dream for the zapatistas. Zapata did try to ignite the whole of southern Mexico, though with limited success. In Merida, Yucatan, 18o transported zapatistas fought a furious gun battle with the authorities for two hours before being overwhelmed and survivors executed, and elsewhere in Yucatan, as well as in Oaxaca and Veracruz, there were many sporadic Viva Zapata risings, but Tabasco and Chiapas, where the plantocracy was strongest, saw little action. In general, Zapata continued to operate along well-worn grooves: in Morelos, Mexico State, the Federal District, Puebla, Guerrero and southern Michoacan.
His staffwork was, however, better than in the past. Much of the credit for this went to his new chief of operations, Manuel Palafox, an exengineering student, salesman and accountant. Aged twenty-six, short of stature, rickety-looking and pockmarked, Palafox was a workaholic of boundless energy who turned the zapatista movement into a streamlined operation. He knew the polit
ics of the north, and legal procedures, and was thus more than just useful; he it was who acted as chief prosecutor at the kangaroo court that condemned Huerta's envoys to death. The one strike against Palafox - and in a macho society it was a serious one - was that he was a homosexual of promiscuous appetites. Zapata was known for his contempt for gays, well summed up by the remark he made in 1912 to Otilio Montano, when the co-author of the Plan of Ayala suggested they wear disguise at a time when they were being hardpressed by the enemy. Zapata indignantly refused either to wear dark glasses or to shave his moustache, saying that he was not `a fairy, bullfighter or friar'.
The day after Robles's `election' as governor of Morelos, Zapata showed his contempt by attacking Jonacatepec and taking it after thirtysix hours' bitter fighting. Five hundred federals died or were taken prisoner, yielding 330 Mausers, two machine-guns, caches of ammunition and 31 o horses. Zapata spared the commander, Higinio Aguilar, and his officers on condition he did not fight zapatistas again. For mixed motives of greed and gratitude Aguilar joined Zapata and proved extremely useful, not just in the training of recruits, but by brokering arms purchases from all the corrupt federal officers he knew. The shockwaves of the fall of Jonacatepec were felt at once in Mexico City, where disruption to the Yautepec quarries meant that work on prestige building projects, like the National Theatre and the London and Mexico Bank, had to be suspended.
On 23 April Zapata launched a full-scale offensive. First he invested Cuautla, then on May Day blew up a train on the Mexico/Morelos border, killing over loo troops. With his outriders probing towards Cuernavaca, Huerta decided it was time to hit back before the zapatistas made common cause with the rebels in the north. Huerta displayed in the south the sort of energy that was conspicuously lacking in the north and many of his own cabinet criticised him for this scale of priorities; Zapata, they argued, was a mere gadfly and not papabile but Carranza was, and his movement, with its intelligentsia and inchoate bureaucracy, was the real threat.