Villa and Zapata: A History of the Mexican Revolution

by Frank McLynn

  The array of important middle-class military/administrative figures was completed by Manuel Chao, Maclovio Herrera and Eugenio Aguirre Benavides. Chao, an ex-schoolteacher turned commander of rurales, always resented Villa, for having attained the supreme command in Chihuahua that was `really' his. Behind the scenes he intrigued with Carranza against Villa's interests. So too did Maclovio Herrera, but Villa admired him more than he did Chao, since he was a man of reckless courage who had won his laurels by the desperate but successful cavalry charge at Tierra Blanca. More loyal to Villa was Eugenio Aguirre Benavides, commander of Villa's Zaragoza brigade. It was his brother who had been Villa's most constant visitor in jail in 1912, and the Benavideses had always been staunch maderistas and disliked by Carranza for that reason. Eugenio benefited both from Villa's high regard for Luis and for the extended Aguirre Benavides family in general, who were close friends of Raul Madero. The inheritor of the Madero mantle, Raul, worked closely with Eugenio as second in command of the prestigious Zaragoza brigade.

  If Silvestre Terrazas was his administrative genius, Villa liked to devolve personal finance and general business dealings either to Lazaro de Garza, a shady businessman to whom he entrusted important armsbuying and diplomatic missions in the USA or to his own brother Hipolito, who controlled the gambling concession in Ciudad Juarez. Since Hipolito was literate, Villa also gave him huge sums for arms purchases in the USA, but Hipolito was as insignificant vis-a-vis Pancho Villa as Eufemio Zapata was with his brother. A dandy and pretty boy, fond of fast cars and fast women, the corrupt, money-grubbing hedonistic Hipolito had none of his brother's qualities: without him he would have been a pathetic playboy manque. Utterly venal and morally skewed, Hipolito was not beyond cheating and fleecing his own brother to embezzle money meant to buy arms and materiel; worshipping Mammon with monotheistic fervour, Hipolito carried the love of money to insane levels that even transcended the avarice of Tomas Urbina.

  Villa's attitude towards his middle-class intellectuals was always ambivalent. He found them useful as the respectable face of Villismo, masking the realities of Fierro and Urbina; as bureaucrats with useful skills; as intermediaries with other factions and especially with the yanquis; and as expert drafters of Plans and manifestos. However, he had a visceral dislike of lawyers and bureaucrats and tolerated them merely as a necessary evil. The only educated men who could get under his guard were schoolteachers, as they catered to his perennial obsession with education. It was difficult for intellectuals, even men of the world like Felipe Angeles, to deal with an unpredictable and impulsive loose cannon like Villa. Fond of making policy on the hoof, Villa would endorse a proposal from Angeles one day, then next day listen to a completely contrary idea from Fierro or some other brutal favourite. One thing is absolutely certain: Villa was always his own man. The absurd idea, sometimes floated, that Villa was a pawn in the hands of manipulative intellectuals, is laughably inaccurate.

  As a warrior, Villa was above all interested in the Army. It was a Napoleonic feat for a former bandit leader to weld thousands of fighting men into a coherent force that would take his orders. Here he was greatly helped by the ex-Army officer and former Abraham Gonzalez protege, Juan Medina, who became his chief of staff. Medina was a veteran of Diaz's 1903 campaign against the Yaquis, but grew so disgusted by the treatment of the Indians that he resigned from the Army and became a small businessman in Chihuahua. One of Medina's problems was that he was dealing with such heterogeneous material. Men joined Villa for a multiplicity of reasons: to defend local autonomy; to regain village land; to get land grants; out of revenge for previous bad treatment by hacendados; because of unemployment; as an alternative to regular work; or simply to get easy pickings of loot, money, drink and women. There were ex-federal rankers who had joined as an alternative to being shot; ex-hacendados like the four Murga brothers who had joined for the same motive (but became convinced villistas); and a plethora of mercenaries, adventurers or soldiers of fortune who had made the long journey from the four corners of Mexico on the lure of Villa's name.

  Foreign mercenaries, however valuable to historians (since most of them wrote detailed memoirs), were a headache for Villa. There were two main difficulties. If he executed one of them, or even if they were killed in battle, there was an immediate problem with a foreign government. More importantly, there was no means of checking their credentials. Foreigners with no battle experience used the same scam over and over again: enlisting for the initial signing-on fee or as a licence to loot, and then vanishing as soon as there was hard fighting to do. None the less among the iron pyrites there was some pure gold. Three who made a particular impression were Sam Drebben, Horst von der Goltz and Ivar Thord-Gray. Drebben, known as `the fighting Jew', was a veteran of Latin American warfare, having served with the marines in Cuba in the Spanish-American War of 1898, in Nicaragua, and in South America properly so-called. Ivar Thord-Gray had been a soldier of fortune in India, China and the Boer War. Von der Goltz was a curious case of the `talking horse' who became a real winner: lacking the military experience he boasted of when joining up, he proved remarkably quick on the uptake and soon became an indispensable part of Villa's artillery corps.

  Perhaps the main problem Villa and Juan Medina had to solve was how to ensure the loyalty of army units to the commander-in-chief rather than to individual generals. Since each unit came from a particular locality with a local warlord as leader, it proved especially difficult to professionalise the Army of the North and break down these regional solidarities. Villa dealt with recalcitrant generals in a number of ways. Realising that it was pointless to try to bypass the local leaders and appeal directly to the rank and file, he tried to insinuate the idea that all good things came from him rather than these leaders. All important functions - artillery, horses, the supply of arms and ammunition, the medical corps - were reserved as areas where he had direct day-to-day control. At the limit he had his own commissars and bodyguard of `immortals' whom he could use against particularly insubordinate commanders.

  Villa controlled all arms, ammunition and uniforms as well as the supply lines to the USA; he made sure that these lines operated independently of the Carranza supply network. He also issued his own currency. At the beginning of 1914 this was readily accepted north of the Rio Grande, since the Americans were convinced Villa and Carranza would win the struggle against Huerta, in which case Villa's currency would be redeemable at par. Villa also made sure that everyone in the artillery corps was personally loyal to him; no cronies of subordinate generals or warlords were ever recruited. The real problem about the artillery was that Villa was forced to use people whose loyalty might be suspect on other grounds, either because they were foreign mercenaries or ex-federals; before 1914 Juan Medina and Felipe Angeles were the only members of the federal officer corps serving willingly. However, Villa was lucky, for the mercenaries von der Goltz and Thord-Gray distinguished themselves and became the mainstay of the artillery corps.

  Villa also created the equivalent of a Praetorian Guard in the form of the dorados - an elite corps personally loyal to him, acting as bodyguards, adjutants or a reserve in battle, like Napoleon's Old Guard. The dorados originally consisted of three units of thirty-two men each, but eventually evolved into a 400-strong unit. Villa packed the corps with his relatives - in the (often mistaken) belief that kinship would make them loyal - but was always on the look-out for men of exceptional bravery he could recruit. One famous story of a recruit concerns a man whose horse was shot under him when the villista cavalry retreated during a battle. When the federals advanced, killing all prisoners and wounded, this man gutted his horse, hid under the skin and then emerged when the villista cavalry advanced again.

  Although Villa allowed his subsidiary commanders, especially Urbina, a lot of licence, at the limit he was prepared to act decisively against them for acts of insubordination. Members of the dorados, or killers like Fierro and Manuel Banda, whose job it was to shoot men guilty or suspected of cowardice, wo
uld be sent as hit men or to arrange a summary execution. The drunken General Domingo Yuriar, who contemptuously refused an order from Villa, found himself hauled before the firing squad before he had even sobered up. Even here, however, there were limits to Villa's power. He wanted to execute Manuel Chao for disobeying an order, but Chao held a commission directly from Carranza; to execute him would have meant risking war with the `First Chief' while Huerta still remained undefeated. Naturally Carranza, who disliked Villa and was jealous of him, secretly encouraged acts of insubordination by Villa's commanders.

  Yet overwhelmingly the main reason Villa could overawe fractious or recalcitrant commanders was his own charisma and prestige. He consciously promoted a cult of personality and a Viva Villa mentality in his men. Villista propaganda plugged away at the same themes: Villa was a lion, a man who believed in true values and ideals, he was on the side of the poor and could never be bought off by the oligarchs, he was a Robin Hood who would deliver on land reform once the fighting was over. He was also presented as a father to his people, ever solicitous for their welfare, and as proof there was his impressive medical corps. Sixty Mexican and US doctors tended the wounded in a mobile army surgical hospital comprising a special train of forty box cars, fitted out with the very latest equipment; the badly wounded were sent back at night to hospitals in Parral or Chihuahua City.

  The propaganda was effective, not least because the new recruits in 1914 were drawn by Villa's own success and personality, not that of Urbina or the lesser generals. The Division of the North was a fighting machine all could take pride in. American observers conceded that the fighting spirit, stoicism and endurance of the villistas went beyond anything even the US Marines could match. Villa's cavalry was matchless, partly because the Centaur himself knew so much about horse-breeding and selected only the very best mounts from the best farms in Chihuahua and Coahuila. Most of all there was the mobility of the Division of the North, which outmatched anything either Carranza or Huerta could manage. The villista warrior could live off the land, encumbered by nothing more than arms, ammunition, canteen and a single blanket. Villa's use of trains impressed all observers: he took ten days to transport 7,500 men from Torreon to Chihuahua, whereas it took Huerta two months to do the same trip in reverse.

  One of the reasons morale was so high was that Villa allowed his men to take wives, mistresses and girlfriends on campaign with them. There had long been a tradition in Mexico of women accompanying armies, and not just because they could cook, forage and nurse. More pragmatically, since most armies consisted of press-ganged recruits, the only way to prevent a near ioo per cent desertion rate was to allow the troops to bring their womenfolk along. The distinguishing feature of the Division of the North, in contrast with earlier armies, was the sheer number of women camp-followers. To the despair of Villa and Medina and their plans for `professionalisation', females actually seemed to outnumber the males in the revolutionary armies. When trains steamed up to the front bearing villista troops, women and children could be seen on the roofs or the cowcatchers. A campfire at night was a babel of women baking tortillas on mesquite twigs, giving birth or conceiving loudly. The general bedlam effect was enhanced by day when a veritable convoy of musicians, whores, hucksters and beggars, to say nothing of journalists, photographers and American film crews accompanied the army.

  Women also took up arms and fought as soldaderas. Villa strongly disapproved, but there was not much he could do about it. His attitude to women was the traditional `children, church and kitchen' of timehonoured Mexican machismo. John Reed had a most revealing exchange with Villa on this subject, which began when the reporter asked the general if women would be allowed to vote in a future Mexican government. `I don't think so,' Villa replied, but when Reed told him they did so in the USA, he shrugged: `Well, if they do it up there, I don't see why they shouldn't do it down here.' Villa seemed mightily amused by the idea and came back to it: `Women seem to me things to protect, to love. They have no sternness of mind. They can't consider anything for its right and wrong. They are full of pity and softness. Why, a woman would not give an order to execute a traitor.' When Reed insisted that women could be just as tough as men, Villa asked his current `wife', described by Reed as `a cat-like slender young girl', what she would do to the traitors he had just caught. She replied that it was not her place to comment, that Villa knew best, but when he insisted she gave a direct answer, she recommended execution. Villa looked at Reed and chuckled. `There is something in what you say,' he mused.

  Villa's private life continued as polygamous, tangled and chaotic as ever. Although he did not salt away huge sums of money for his own use, unlike his brother Hipolito or Tomas Urbina, he was forced to earmark increasingly large sums to indulge his growing army of `wives', mistresses, concubines and their children. Given Mexican machismo, Luz Corral, the `number one wife', would not have expected Villa to be faithful; her own credo was that as long as a husband respected a wife inside the home, what he did outside it was not her business. Even so she was taken aback by the avalanche of other women that forced itself on her attention.

  When she returned to Chihuahua from El Paso in 1913, she discovered that Villa had fathered three children by three different women. Luz was quite prepared to take these waifs under her wing and made a particular pet of Agustin, son of a woman called Asuncion Villaescusa. Luz also discovered that one of Villa's daughters, Reynalda, was living with his sister Martina and found a berth in her home for her too. Confronted by the new menage, Villa accepted the situation as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Once he realised how tolerant Luz Corral was, he revealed more and more about his private life. He brought another daughter, Micaela, to live with them after discovering that her mother, Petra Espinosa, had been two-timing him with one of his officers.

  As long as Luz was acknowledged as the unchallenged number one wife, she was quite satisfied with Villa's polygyny. However, her broadminded tolerance snapped when she realised there existed another number one wife of equal status, named Juana Torres, with whom she found Villa shacked up on her return. Gradually the full story came out: how Juana Torres had been a cashier in Torreon when Villa took the city, how he had taken a fancy to her, wooed and won her and set her up in a house in Chihuahua City. Now at last she realised why Villa had kept her in El Paso for weeks after he had taken Chihuahua, all the time pretending that he was building a new house for her.

  For several months the two women fought a frenzied battle for Villa's affections while he alternated his domicile between the two houses. Eventually it became clear that only Luz Corral had real feelings of love for the hero. The venal Juana Torres became careless and, working hand in glove with her mother and sister, helped herself to 40,000 pesos from Villa's private funds. Villa found the money missing and immediately guessed who had taken it, though he lacked proof. He jailed the mother and sister while he sought the evidence that would incriminate Juana. She stupidly wrote her mother and sister an angry screed, pouring scorn on Villa as a barbarian and bandit, an illiterate oaf who was anyway useless as a lover and had taken her by force. Naturally, the letter was brought to Villa, who read it and fell into one of his fearsome rages. Villa's apologists say that he dealt with the incident in an understanding way, allowing Aguirre Benavides to make Juana Torres's case for her and showing understanding of her frailty. His enemies tell a story that sounds truer. Villa summoned Juana and brandished the intercepted letter in front of her face. She turned pale with fear, but her ordeal was not over. Villa made her read the letter aloud slowly, and at each insult spat in her face. Weeping and terrified, la Torres staggered through the letter, after which Villa banished her and her family from Chihuahua for life.

  Perhaps Villa learned something from this incident for, until 1915, there was no other rival to Luz Corral as premiere wife. Naturally there was the usual glut of mistresses and one-night stands, with Villa indulging in his usual practice of `marrying' the unwilling or the virginal. He was not a m
an who took no for an answer and although he did not ravish women, he deceived them by bogus wedding ceremonies or blackmailed them into giving themselves by threatening their family or kin. Technically Villa was never a rapist, but even if he had been, there would have been no repercussions. When John Reed asked him about rape, he looked at him sardonically and said: `Tell me, have you ever met a husband, father or brother of any woman that I have violated? Or even a mistress?' Villa was known to be madly jealous about his women and he was jealous even of the men who had been their lovers before he met them. Momentarily infatuated with a young woman in Torreon, he was infuriated to learn that she had been the mistress of Dario Silva, one of the magnificent eight who had crossed the Rio Grande with him in March 1913. Being one of the originals availed Silva nothing; Villa humiliated him publicly in front of his brother officers and forced Silva to wait at table on them all.

  The reality of Villa was often sordid, but early in 1914 the legend moved on another notch. On 3 January Villa signed with the US Mutual Film Corporation a $25,000 contract for a film on the exploits of the Division del Norte. Villa agreed to fight all his future battles by day, to ban all non-Mutual cameramen and, if necessary, to simulate combat. Although Villa went beyond the letter of simulation by re-enacting battles, this was not a contractual requirement. Thousands of feet of documentary film were shot, which was intercut with fictional reels in which the young Raoul Walsh, later to be a notable Hollywood director, played the young Villa in a romantic concoction of falsehood and melodrama. Walsh later recalled that Villa was an indifferent actor who could not get the hang of movies: when asked by the director to ride slowly past the camera, Villa would spur and whip his horse so that he shot past the protesting cameraman at full tilt. However, the film crew did get Villa to postpone his executions from dawn to 7 a.m., so that they could take advantage of the better light. Finally, on 9 May 1914, The Life of General Villa, with Pancho playing himself in several scenes, opened at the Lyric Theatre, New York; in a typical Hollywood happy ending Villa became president of Mexico. He was now a worldwide legend. The hard fighting due in 1914 would show whether he was worthy of his iconic status.