Villa and Zapata: A History of the Mexican Revolution

by Frank McLynn

  Two aspects of Villa's economic overlordship deserve special attention: his attitude to the money supply and his alleged socialism. An economic simpleton, Villa saw no reason why he could not simply print the money he needed, and to an extent the American banks in El Paso colluded with this by accepting his currency at eighteen-nineteen cents on the dollar, on Villa's guarantee. Villa's assault on market orthodoxy was more difficult to handle, especially when he gave the poor of Chihuahua fifteen dollars each on Christmas Day 1913, and then fixed the price of staples: beef was to be sold at seven cents a pound, milk at five cents a quart and bread at four cents a loaf. Mexican merchants tried to evade Villa's pricefixing by pricing their goods on a two-tier system, one price quoted against Mexican silver money, the other against Villa's paper money. Villa retaliated by ordering a mandatory sixty days in jail for anyone caught discriminating against his currency. When that measure failed to work, and people continued to hoard silver and `real' bank bills, Villa declared that all such money not exchanged for his currency at par within a week would cease to be legal tender and its holders treated as counterfeiters. This tough measure panicked the hoarders into disgorging.

  A primitive welfare state, food subsidies, controlled low prices, hostility to the market and expropriation of land looked like radicalism in anyone's language, and Reed called Villa's system `the socialism of a dictator'. In fact, Villismo was very far from socialism. It is true that there were some socialist elements in Villa's thinking, even if he was not fully aware of all the implications, and that Villa's organ Vida Nueva often attacked Carranza for saying that private property was inviolable - that depends, was the villista response - but Villa was more interested in rewarding his veterans with land grants than redistributing expropriated haciendas to peasants. As for expropriation without compensation, this was done not for ideological reasons but simply because the hacendados had evaded taxes for decades by undervaluing their lands for taxable purposes; the total of back taxes owed therefore amounted to more than the current market value of the estates, and the confiscations were therefore sequestrations rather than expropriation.

  There were many other reasons why Villa's policies could not be called socialistic. The pastoral economy of the north was utterly unlike the plantation economy of Morelos, and was therefore not amenable to the same kind of land division; for one thing, water shortages made huge economies of scale necessary. In any case, the produce of the great estates provided Villa with his `sinews of war', so he was unlikely to shoot himself in the foot. His approach was simple: where the old oligarchs had fled, Villa gave their haciendas to his generals or put in boards of supervisors; where they had supported him, he left their lands untouched. Land reform was anyway never the pressing issue in Chihuahua that it was in Morelos. In Chihuahua the central feature of social conflict was villages versus caciques or jefes politicos, rather than villages versus haciendas; the struggle was not class against class but regionalism against central government. Alan Knight's judgement seems sound: `Villa's "socialism" was a figment of the Brooklyn Eagle.'

  Yet the greatest reason for scepticism about Villa's alleged socialism is that in his two-year hegemony in Chihuahua there was never anything that could be pinned down to an `ism' - except in the obvious sense that Villismo means all the things actually done by Villa and his supporters. The principal reason was a dual set of `contradictions' - both between Villa's utopian dreams and the everyday realities of running a state, and between the competing demands of peacetime and wartime economies. To begin with, there was no consensus on land reform, no agreement, for instance, on whether land should be distributed free of charge or sold on the open market to rich peasants. Silvestre Terrazas found his job as commissioner of the expropriated estates a bed of nails, especially since every time he suggested a particular village community should be given back its ancient lands stolen by a hacienda, Villa riposted that he really wanted to give it to his troops as the nucleus of his Shangri-La military colony system.

  The demands of the revolutionaries and the needs of war were also in conflict. The simultaneous pursuit of guns and butter could go on only so long as Villa enjoyed the halcyon days when there were vast herds of cattle and bumper harvests of cotton to export. Moreover, democratic elections could not be permitted as long as Villa's veterans were at the front, for in their absence his enemies could easily `steal' elections. Land reform was also halted during wartime, not just because Villa dithered about what his real intentions were, but because he had a personal repugnance against distributing land to anyone not actively fighting; it seemed unjust to him that cowards, self-seekers and black marketeers could stay at home and buy land while his heroes fought Huerta. Meanwhile, Villa's growing corps of intellectual advisers counselled him that his pet project - three days' agricultural work and three days' military training - was unviable and would lead to the collapse of agriculture and widespread famine. Villa solved this problem by stating that he would allow Silvestre Terrazas to distribute land at discretion, but that the former Creel-Luis Terrazas estates had to be reserved as military colonies for his soldiers.

  Once the pent-up demand for the state's cotton and cattle had been satisfied, Chihuahua's economy experienced problems. Forced contributions and the sale of the confiscated estates palliated the worst aspects of dearth and inflation, themselves caused by shortage of revenue from the non-operating mines and the declining numbers of cattle, which had either been slaughtered to feed the armies or exported to the United States. Inflation was exacerbated by the huge amount of money printed by the villista mint. Villa's paper peso declined from US fifty cents in January 1914 to US twenty cents in June. Rationing was not really an option, as Villa lacked an efficient bureaucracy to administer it. Frustrated by problems that seemed beyond him, Villa lashed out at the mercantile class, accusing them of hoarding and economic sabotage. He put Silvestre Terrazas in charge of a secret police agency to sniff out these `enemies of the people'. His police travelled on trains, eavesdropped on conversations, intercepted letters, conducted surveillance operations, and generally took the political pulse, but they found few saboteurs to execute. Crime was, in any case, at a very low level during Villa's twoyear suzerainty: either the criminals were caught and executed after a summary trial or they were drafted into the Army.

  It will be appreciated that Chihuahua under Villa was very far from being a socialist society. Distributing chunks of Terrazas land to his soldiers was not an instance of Villa's `socialism' but sheer pragmatic necessity; not even Villa could get men to follow him without rewards. With Villismo's evenhandedness between Army and the dispossessed, its lack of a clear ideology and its eclectic `middle way' approach to problems, the analogy it most calls to mind is Peron's Argentina. A comparison with Zapata's Morelos makes the point at once. Zapata's land redistribution led to subsistence agriculture, not the marketing of cash crops; Villa, by contrast, enjoying the proximity of the USA, both exported and redistributed the profits away from the peasantry. Villa's bureaucrats were under express orders to prohibit the kind of communal land tenure that was second nature to the Indians of Morelos. In Morelos, under Zapata, the state could be said to be withering away; under Villa in Chihuahua it was stronger than ever, intervening at all points in economic and social life. The one area in which Villa retained revolutionary purity was the low level of corruption in his regime. Except for Villa himself and Urbina, no villista chief acquired the sort of wealth Obregon did in Sonora. Villa had no equivalent of the rapacious `proconsuls' whom Carranza sent out into the four corners of Mexico to try to make the writ of the `First Chief' run. Where the carrancista `proconsuls' were greedy outsiders who bled dry lands in which they had no personal stake or roots, Villa's chiefs operated at a purely local level, with the whole villista nexus really no more than a grand coalition of local revolutionary bands.

  The radical element in Villismo may have been overstressed by commentators more impressed by attitudes than socio-economic reality. Although the lo
t of peon, tenant and sharecropper did improve under Villa, what changed most of all was the mentality of the ordinary man and woman. Now that the world seemed turned upside down, with the rich cowed and the poor enjoying unheard-of privileges, with one of their own as ruler of Chihuahua, the dispossessed and wretched of the earth no longer perceived obedience, deference and rigid hierarchy as laws of nature. One of the first casualties of the new attitudes was the Catholic priesthood. Under Diaz the parish priest was widely perceived as a leech - exacting six pesos for conducting a marriage ceremony and the rest pro rata - and a lecher, who took advantage of the confessional to enjoy droit du seigneur: `the girls here are very passionate,' one priest leeringly told John Reed. However, under Villa in 1913-14, anticlericalism was the order of the day. In Durango priests were beaten up and arrested and churches desecrated, and in Chihuahua clerics were sent to the firing squad. Particular targets were priests who owned village lands or supported local elites of the pre-Villa era; especially hated were Spanish priests and nuns, who were expelled en masse. Villa's anticlericalism, though, was always pragmatic rather than ideological; he was no more a Jacobin than he was a socialist.

  Accusations of socialism notwithstanding, the middle classes of Chihuahua were mightily relieved by Villa's moderation and conciliation and the iron discipline he imposed on his men. Villa too offered amnesty to functionaries and bureaucrats who had served under Huerta and Orozco, promising no reprisals. His moderation was also aided by the statesmanlike posture of Silvestre Terrazas, the channel through whom all accusations of `counter-revolutionary' behaviour were processed. Terrazas received many letters addressed to Villa, containing inflammatory and combustible material that might have provoked the volatile Centaur into ordering massacres; Terrazas largely kept such correspondence from his chief.

  The one area where Villa would not compromise to win the good opinion of the national bourgeoisie or foreign observers was in his vendetta against Creel and the Terrazas. Villa sent his men into the British consulate, violating diplomatic immunity, to drag out Luis Terrazas junior, son of the clan patriarch. Villa knew that the Terrazas had not had time to get all their gold out of the Banco Minero and suspected that the younger Luis Terrazas knew where it was hidden. Terrazas was accordingly put to torture until he revealed the hiding place: it turned out that gold bars worth US$6oo,ooo were hidden inside a column in the bank. Villa did not reward Terrazas for this information by releasing him; instead he kept him as a bargaining chip, to prevent the Terrazas blocking the sale of their cattle and other assets in the United States. This ploy was only partly successful, for Luis Terrazas senior seemed prepared to let his son die rather than bow the head to Villa. Until 1915 Washington constantly put pressure on Villa to release the young Terrazas, but he ignored all overtures. Finally, after nearly two years of imprisonment, Terrazas did succeed in escaping, but died soon afterwards, possibly as a result of the pent-up stress of his ordeal.

  It should not be thought that Villa spent the winter of 1913-14 purely on economic, administrative and civilian matters. One of the reasons he very soon turned over the formal governorship to Manuel Chao was that he wanted to concentrate on the spring military campaign to overthrow Huerta. Villa's army had by now become so large and so complex that it took great administrative talent to keep it in being as a viable, coherent force. Villa was not yet as far advanced as Zapata in being able to streamline his fissiparous military followers into a centralised force. Like Napoleon, he had subordinate commanders and technicians who owed everything to him, and he had others who had had independent careers before him and who still retained a considerable measure of autonomy. To keep them all loyal, Villa had to have recourse to something like Napoleon's marshalate.

  Of the commanders who operated semi-independently, the pre-eminent figure was Tomas Urbina, a charismatic leader with a reputation second only to Villa's. An arrogant, drunken roue of sinister appearance, described as `a broad, medium-sized man of dark, mahogany complexion, with a sparse black beard that failed to hide the wide, expressionless mouth, gaping nostrils and the tiny animal eyes', Urbina really was what Villa was often accused of being - a bandit masquerading as a revolutionary. Urbina was another man who had turned against Orozco in 1912, ended up in jail, and narrowly escaped execution through Emilio Madero's intercession. Like Villa, he was a native of Durango, and his particular sphere of influence was the Durango/Chihuahua border, but there the resemblance ended. Urbina was nowhere near as intelligent as Villa and, unlike him, had not bothered to conquer his illiteracy. A disloyal, obstinate, vain, avaricious ingrate, obsessed with money, corrupt at every level, unable to control his troops, not just a commander of looters but a looter himself, Urbina bamboozled Villa for many years before the great caudillo finally saw through him.

  The fact that he was indistinguishable from his men in mentality or intellect may actually have enhanced his charismatic appeal in the short term. One peasant told John Reed: `A few years ago he was just a peon like us; and now he is a general and a rich man.' Another told Reed that Urbina had a magic aura: `He is very brave. The bullets bounce off him like rain off a sombrero.' When Reed interviewed Urbina, the chief frankly told him he had just one interest in the Revolution: to become fabulously rich and to replace the Terrazas as chief hacendado in Chihuahua. Initially based at Las Nieves hacienda, where he lorded it like the worst of the corrupt oligarchs of the Porfiriato, for two years Urbina got away with murder, literally and metaphorically, because with him Villa had one of his famous blind spots and would not hear a word said against him.

  In June 1913 Villa sent Urbina south to try to coordinate the various rebel movements in Durango. After assembling 4,000 men, Urbina decided to launch a night attack on Durango City. Seeing that it was likely to succeed, the foreign consuls tried to broker a negotiated settlement, but the federals fired on a flag of truce and then, unaccountably, pulled out, pleading lack of ammunition. On 19 June Urbina's locusts swept into the city and began two days of mayhem and anarchy. They looted shops, burned archives, emptied the jails and gutted the business quarter; all utilities - gas, electricity and water - were cut off; women were stripped naked and run through the streets; the bones of former archbishops were dug up and the mantle of the Virgin of Durango given to the wife of one of the rebel commanders. Although many doubt the authenticity of the story that fifty virgins, daughters of the best families in Durango, were gang-raped and then committed suicide, it is unquestionably the case that murder and rape were commonplace during the two-day sack of the city. The carnage was particularly high as the city mob joined in the rapine, seeking out federalists and their families, real or alleged, to slaughter. Two days later the charred city of Durango was a ghost town, having sustained ten million pesos worth of damage.

  Urbina's stupidity in allowing this holocaust of pillage, atrocity and sacrilege was egregious. The sack of Durango created a sensation throughout Mexico and, even if the stories of mass rape and murder lost nothing in the telling, the olio of real and fictitious atrocities engendered a climate of fear throughout urban Mexico which actually strengthened Huerta's hand. Urbina ratcheted the Revolution up another notch, adding a Jacobin tinge to the civil war and making it seem likely that the rebels were swinging left with a vengeance. The truth of course was that Urbina simply could not control his army - a disparate, heterogeneous collection of genuine revolutionaries, ex-bandits, ex-miners, cowboys, cottonpickers and simple adventurers. It took him three days to regain control; finally he posted sentries on the streets and ordered all loot to be returned.

  Urbina kept all the restored loot for himself and continued on a career of self-advancement through theft that would lead, in 1915, to his announcement that he had retired from public life. At the expropriated hacienda of Canutillo he stashed banknotes and bullion worth half a million pesos, the proceeds of his exploitation of Durango. He bled the state dry by forced loans, ransoms demanded on its leading citizens (including the archbishop), and an exit tax of 500 pe
sos per head for all wishing to leave the territory. For a month Durango experienced the kind of tyranny and arbitrary exaction unknown since the Conquistadores. His departure north at the end of July was greeted with relief, but he had left behind him a legacy of hatred and bitterness, and decisively swung the Arrieta brothers over into Carranza's camp.

  Fortunately for Villa, most of his semi-independent `marshals' were not of the Urbina stamp. Particularly loyal and dependable was the trio of Toribio Ortega, Calixto Contreras and Orestes Pereyra. Toribio Ortega, whose power base was north-eastern Chihuahua, was accorded Ney-like status by John Reed, who praised him as the `bravest of the brave' but, given his utter lack of interest in money, perhaps nearer the mark was Robespierre, the `sea-green incorruptible'. Calixto Contreras began his career rather like Zapata, as spokesman for a village in conflict with a hacienda. He had the reputation of being a good politician but a poor military leader, unable to control his men. Patrick O'Hea - a Wimbledonbased Anglo-Irishman who emigrated to Mexico in 1905, accompanied Villa on his campaigns and is preferred as an observer by some Revolution buffs to John Reed - portrays Contreras as an impotent buffoon, invariably replying to official protests at the behaviour of his men with a weary `boys will be boys' response.