Villa and Zapata: A History of the Mexican Revolution

by Frank McLynn

  Orestes Pereyra was a former tinsmith who had taken up arms against Diaz in advance of Madero's November 1910 deadline. A veteran of the 1912 campaign against Orozco, he had also been among the first to rise when Huerta brutally seized power. A daring guerrilla leader, who had made his name by raising the peasants who lived around the AngloAmerican owned hacienda of Tlahualilo, Pereyra commanded the most heterogeneous collection of revolutionaries after Urbina - free peasants, miners, temporary workers. Contreras's band was another loose collection, but Ortega had the tightest-knit group of all. The trio of Ortega, Pereyra and Contreras supported Villa in good times and bad and predictably met the fate of almost all leaders in the Mexican Revolution: Ortega died of fever while the other two succumbed to Carranza's firing squads in 1915.

  More interesting than the loyalists among the `marshals' were the intellectual generals. One such was Jose Isabel Robles, an ex-schoolteacher and one-time orozquista. This should have damned him in Villa's eyes, but Robles had redeemed himself by breaking with Orozco when the latter backed Huerta. At twenty-three, the youngest general in Villa's army, Robles liked reading Plutarch and Caesar's Commentaries while on campaign. The other notable intellectual general was a real thorn in Villa's side. Maximo Castillo was an anarchist ranchero of the far Left, who despised Villa's respect for foreign property and was particularly incensed about the privilege of the Mormon colonies in Chihuahua. Political differences soon compelled Castillo to operate as an independent fighting force, at risk from both Huerta and Villa. Villista forces badly mauled the Castillo guerrillas in one ambush, which cost Castillo half his men, but he continued the struggle, sustained by strong local support and his reputation as a genuine Robin Hood.

  Castillo once captured Villa's `wife' Luz Corral, treated her with elaborate courtesy and escorted her to the US border. Villa was so touched by this gesture that for a while he stopped sending his forces after Castillo. It was not through Villa that the Zapata of the north met his downfall. Castillo specialised in robbing trains on which Americans were travelling; he would rob the yanquis but not harm them. More cynical operators decided to try the same trick, passing themselves off as Castillo's men, and among them was a notorious low-life bandit leader named Gutierrez. At a place called Cumbre a group of bandits set fire to a tunnel just before the train entered it, then dynamited both entrance and exit, trapping the locomotive in the darkness and leaving a trainload of people to suffocate to death. Gutierrez disguised his dark deed by pretending it was the work of Castillo. Even though such an exploit seemed totally out of character, the mud stuck and Castillo's career went into terminal decline. He lost all popular support, his men deserted, and he was forced to flee across the border to the hated United States.

  The other category of commanders consisted of those men who owed everything to Villa or who were the equivalent of ronin samurai: freelance expert military technicians appointed by him to high rank. By far the most notorious was the `dark angel' of the villista movement, Rodolfo Fierro, a murderous ex-railwayman, psychopathic even by the homicidal standards of the Revolution. Patrick O'Hea wrote about Fierro: `I only know that this man, with his wandering gaze and his cold hand, is evil itself.' There is something of a mystery about Fierro's status as Villa's `favourite son', for Villa had not even met the man before 1913. Some speculate that it was Fierro's reckless courage and ruthlessness, and his utter loyalty, that appealed most, and that Villa appreciated the gallery touch. At the close of the battle of Tierra Blanca, a trainload of federals tried to escape capture by shunting away from the battlefield. As the engine gathered steam, Fierro rode after the locomotive, jumped on to the caboose and shot the train drivers dead; the train then slowed to a halt and the federals were captured.

  The tall, heavily built, moustachioed Fierro would kill anyone at Villa's nod and was expert at `anticipating' his wishes. In The Eagle and the Serpent Martin Luis Guzman describes the famous scene when Fierro slaughtered colorado prisoners. Released from their compound ten at a time, the prisoners were offered their freedom if they could run ioo yards through a corral and scale a wall before Fierro picked them off. All the more sinister in that he spoke in a soft voice, never blustered or threatened and used mild and inoffensive body language, Fierro prepared for this work of butchery by making sure a relay of fresh pistols was handed to him. In the resulting `turkey-shoot', he never stopped firing for two hours and killed all but one of 200 prisoners. The survivor escaped over the wall at twilight; Fierro explained that he had felt a cramp in his trigger finger and let his attention wander while he massaged the sore muscle.

  Killing meant nothing to Fierro. John Reed wrote: `During the two weeks I was in Chihuahua, Fierro killed fifteen inoffensive citizens in cold blood. But there was always a curious relationship between him and Villa. He was Villa's best friend; and Villa loved him like a son and always pardoned him.' He once gunned down a complete stranger in Chihuahua City to win a bet as to whether a dying man falls forward or backwards; Fierro said forwards and was proved right. The mercenary Edward O'Reilly testified that Fierro liked to shoot wounded villistas too, to save the chore of looking after them. On another occasion Patrick O'Hea, then British consul in Torreon, was stopped in the street by a drunken Fierro who told him he was going to shoot him. Fierro pointed his pistol at the consul and squeezed the trigger but nothing happened; there was a safety catch on the weapon of a kind with which he was unfamiliar. Some of his comrades approached the inebriated gunslinger and explained that if he shot the gringo, there would be international repercussions. Fierro lurched off, after advising O'Hea to smile next time he was staring down a gun barrel.

  The only man Fierro deferred to was Villa himself, and with him he behaved as meekly as a lamb. Villa once caught him slapping a soldier in Ciudad Juarez for not wearing his cap at the right angle. Enraged by this, Villa slapped Fierro across the face; the killer, who would have executed any other man in the world for such an outrage, literally took it on the chin. When a train carrying food and water to the combatants at Torreon was thirty-five minutes late, Villa ranted and raged at Fierro, whom he had put in charge of the railways. Fierro stood mutely, his head bowed - but when Villa had gone and the train drew in, Fierro shot the driver dead for having `caused' his humiliation. For a long time Villa would take no action against Fierro, no matter how appalling the outrages reported to him. Then one day a drunken Fierro gunned down a railwayman who had accidentally brushed against him. At this the other railwaymen demanded action from Villa. To placate these workers, vital to his military success, Villa removed Fierro from his job as railway superintendent and set up a bogus `investigation'. Silvestre Terrazas was appointed presiding magistrate and began collecting evidence, but the trial judge he appointed refused to serve because of fear of reprisals from Fierro. The so-called `trial' petered out in obfuscation, as Villa intended; he had only wanted to conciliate the railwaymen and, as soon as the dust settled, reappointed Fierro to yet another position where he had carte blanche.

  Fierro was deeply implicated in the notorious Benton case, which first made Villa an object of intense interest to the British government. William Benton was a British citizen and the owner of the Los Remedios hacienda. He had a bad reputation as a bloodsucking employer who had been involved in a protracted land dispute with the village of Santa Maria de Cuevas. In 1910 Benton seized village land, fenced it off, denied villagers access, and then fined them for trespass when they were found on the land. He accused all who opposed him of being cattle rustlers and would call in the rurales on the slightest pretext. Benton was also a hothead and reactionary, who habitually let his mouth run away with him. Villa detested him and in 1912, citing Benton's close ties with the Creel-Terrazas clique, expressly exempted him from his policy of not taxing foreigners. Benton refused to pay the tax, so Villa expropriated horses, arms and ammunition in lieu. Since Benton continued vociferous in his support for Huerta and admiration for Diaz, Villa warned him in late 1913 that he would be well advised to depar
t for the USA.

  While clinging to his policy of not expropriating foreign assets, Villa was determined that Benton be forced to disgorge the ill-gotten land he had taken from the village of Santa Maria de Cuevas. The villagers moved back on to the disputed grazing land and shortly afterwards Benton discovered that some of his cattle were missing. It was never discovered whether those responsible were villagers or Villa's men, but the consequence was that on 17 February 1914 an intemperate Benton stormed into Villa's house in Ciudad Juarez, demanding immediate compensation. What happened next was disputed. Some say that Benton reached into his pocket for a handkerchief to mop his sweating brow, and that the gesture was mistaken by Fierro, who shot him dead. Allegedly Fierro merely smirked and said: `Just a misunderstanding.' Others, more persuasively, say that Benton offered Villa the insult direct and that Villa shot him down in cold blood. Whatever took place, the upshot was that Benton was dead and Villa had an international incident on his hands.

  The British press took up the shooting as a cause celebre; questions were asked in Parliament; the British government requested US intervention and mediation in northern Mexico. Having only just lifted his arms embargo on the anti-Huerta combatants, President Woodrow Wilson immediately came under pressure to reimpose it. The British were adamant that Wilson had to take tough action; it was only at his urging that they had abandoned their earlier endorsement of Huerta, and only then on the strict understanding that Wilson would compel the revolutionaries to respect European persons and properties. The international dimension was immensely complicated both by the US insistence that the Monroe doctrine should prevail in the Americas and also as a result of the 1905 Roosevelt Corollary, which declared that in any dispute between Europe and Latin America, the USA would be the sole agency for enforcing European claims.

  Villa had stepped into a hornets' nest and was totally unprepared for the international furore that followed the Benton slaying. At first he told American investigators that Benton had been formally court-martialled and executed after due process. When asked to produce Benton's body to prove cause of death, he refused, thus revealing to the world how blatantly he was lying. Villa's violent and irrational behaviour was a godsend to the Huerta propaganda machine and, by embroiling the rebels with foreign powers, angered Carranza twice over: it impaired his cause and it showed that he had no control over Villa. At first Carranza seemed to have played into Villa's hands by insisting that all foreign envoys deal with him, as First Chief of the Revolution; Villa was only too willing to hand over this hot potato. Later it turned out that by getting himself off the hook and accepting a Faustian pact, Villa had unwittingly, if only implicitly, acknowledged Carranza as his overlord.

  In international diplomacy Carranza was in his element. He knew that Villa's story was a phoney, but he saw capital to be made out of taking over the case. At first he stalled, then, when it became clear that the affair would not blow over, he appointed a Mexican Commission of Inquiry, refusing, however, to entertain the idea of an international commission or a body of foreign forensic experts. Predictably, Carranza's commission found that Villa's story was a tissue of lies, but Carranza bluffed his way out by claiming that Benton's thirty-year sojourn in Mexico made him a Mexican citizen, subject to Mexican law; he also muddied the waters by presenting a massive dossier of evidence showing that Benton had been a ruthless and inhumane hacendado. Most of all, he refused to accept US mediation and insisted that he, and only he, deal directly with Britain. Carranza's Fabian strategy in the end wore down his opponents, and Carranza himself gained great kudos from the affair. He won a brilliant hand of machiavellian poker, using emotive taboos like the Monroe Doctrine and Roosevelt Corollary for his own advantage. He gambled that the USA would not suspend arms sales - they did not - and he gambled that the British, fearing to fall out with the USA when a European war was imminent, would refuse to deal directly with him.

  Rightly or not, Fierro was always associated in people's minds with the Benton affair. The perception gained ground, among domestic educated opinion as well as foreign, that whereas Carranza's `Constitutional' movement had the credibility to deal with foreign governments, Villa always took the short view (in this case, that Benton was merely a gringo sonofabitch) and always surrounded himself with killers like Fierro or another homicidal `untouchable' named Manuel Baca Valles, a particular bite noire of Luz Corral's. This was the context in which the voluntary adherence to the villista movement of Felipe Angeles was especially valuable, and students of Villa are fond of locating Angeles as the angel of light situated on Villa's right-hand side, with Fierro as the Satanic angel of death on his left.

  Felipe Angeles, ex-federal general, scholar, thinker, ideologue, mathematician and artillery expert, was certainly a great catch for the villista movement. Born in the state of Hidalgo in 1868, he had made several trips to France on military missions and was a man of cosmopolitan sophistication. In France when Madero raised his standard, he came back a maderista and was sent to subdue Zapata in Morelos. Despite believing that Madero was the only alternative to chaos, Angeles found himself becoming more and more sympathetic to Zapata and his movement. Because of his strong maderista credentials Huerta had him arrested during the February 19 13 coup and would have executed him had he not feared splitting the Army. Instead he used on him the same tactics he used on Villa, keeping him in prison on trumped-up charges while spurious investigations dragged on. However, it so happened that Lane Wilson was an Angeles supporter, and he was the one man to whom Huerta dared not say no. Accordingly, Angeles was released and, to save Huerta's face, sent off to France on another military mission.

  On his return, Angeles joined Carranza but failed to hit it off with him and transferred his loyalties to Villa. The revolutionary movement in Chihuahua, and Villa in person, gained significantly because of the tension between the men of 19io and those of 1913. The `class of 1913', such as Obregon, felt that the `old guard' of revolutionaries were trading on past glories, while the men of 1910 felt they had risked their lives only to see the rewards and pay-offs going to a bunch of johnny-come-latelies in Sonora. In these circumstances, those (not a few) personally alienated by Carranza or excluded by the possessive jealousies of the `class of '13' turned by reflex to Villa, whose maderista credentials were impeccable. The class of 1910-11 increasingly put their bets on Villa. Jose Vasconcelos allegedly remarked: `We'll win now all right. We've got a man,' to which Alan Knight retorts alliteratively: `It was the recurrent dream of the impotent revolutionary intellectual: to play Plato to some powerful but pliant popular caudillo.' This may well be an accurate analysis of Angeles, who probably had ambitions to be president of Mexico, with Villa as the power behind the throne but based in Chihuahua, allowing Angeles free rein to implement radical reforms in the capital.

  Villa admired and revered Angeles, thinking him the perfect man, a combination of soldier and scholar. He knew of Angeles's benevolence towards the zapatistas and could not get enough of his reminiscences of Madero and Pino Suarez. He admired Angeles's love of books and music, his passion for justice and his compassion; he even baptised one of Angeles's sons so that he could truly call Angeles compadre. For Angeles, Villa was Mexico's best hope. It is interesting that almost all Villa's intellectuals were ex-maderistas, more concerned with education and political reforms than with land and labour, basically men who wished to return to the liberalism of Juarez. Angeles probably saw Villa as a tabula rasa on which he could imprint his ideology. The problem was that Villa had no taste for abstract thought; as Reed remarked ironically: `You had to be a philosopher to explain anything to Villa.' However, Angeles enjoyed one hidden advantage. Unconsciously Villa was looking for a Madero substitute and tended to gravitate to Angeles for this reason; but, as a divided self, primed by Fierro, he would sometimes lose patience with him as a mere theoretician.

  In addition to these military figures, there were significant civilian figures in the Villa entourage. Probably the most important was Silvestre Te
rrazas, a supporter from the early days and secretary-general of the state government of Chihuahua from December 1913 to December 1915. His position of pre-eminence at first seemed threatened when Manuel Chao took over as governor, but Chao in turn was soon replaced by Fidel Avila, an undereducated hacienda foreman, and this allowed Terrazas to regain most of his former influence. Terrazas always presented himself as a civilian who moderated Villa's excesses and civilised him, though he probably knew more about his chief's repression (and condoned it) than he pretended. His motive for joining Villa had always been the love of Chihuahuan autonomy, the patria chica patriotism that was such an important part of the Mexican Revolution. He showed little interest in land reform, but liked the fact that Villa had put Chihuahua on the map as, in effect, Mexico's premier state.

  The extent to which Silvestre Terrazas did and did not have Villa's ear is illustrated by the partial way the leader allowed him to curb the excesses of the military commanders. In theory Villa was committed to selling all expropriated estates and redistributing the land or using it as the nucleus of military colonies. In practice his chief commanders occupied the most palatial houses of the oligarchy in Chihuahua City and took up permanent residence, often burning or destroying precious libraries of rare books or priceless musical instruments in the process. Silvestre Terrazas appealed to Villa to halt this mindless barbarism, so Villa operated a tripartite policy, hoping to satisfy all concerned. In the case of his special favourites, he simply turned a blind eye to their depredations; he issued a decree reserving to himself the right to decide what was confiscated and what was not; and he allowed Silvestre Terrazas to operate a special squad of archival police, acting in the name of Villa so as to override all other authority, with power to enter expropriated or occupied houses and carry off to the state archives books, musical instruments, paintings and other artefacts deemed to have educational or artistic value.