Villa and Zapata: A History of the Mexican Revolution

by Frank McLynn

  THE END OF HUERTA

  Although Huerta's path to power had been brutal, if he had been cleverer he could certainly have conciliated all factions of the opposition except Zapata. Most niaderistas acquiesced in Madero's downfall and embraced the new regime, albeit mainly through fear. The privileged classes thought they had their iron man, their Cromwell, though admittedly the common man saw Huertismo as simply a return to the bad old days of the Porfiriato. However, brittle class divisions did not mean Huerta was doomed to fail; he failed through his own stupidity. The events of 1913-14 are a classic of self-destructive behaviour by a man who wanted to rule as an untramelled autocrat and would not compromise with anyone in his bid for personal despotism. This partly explains why Diaz, though feared and despised, was never hated in the visceral way Huerta was. Where Villa lusted after women, where Fierro believed only in murder and Urbina only in money, Huerta pursued the mirage of absolute power. The generous amnesty terms he offered to the rebels - and which many accepted - were a purely cynical temporising measure; Zapata saw that clearly, even if his subordinate commanders did not.

  Huerta's greatest single problem was that Woodrow Wilson would not recognise him. Despite the inaccurate portrayals of Wilson's Mexican policy as either narrow-minded Calvinism or crude Dollar Diplomacy, it was actually surprisingly subtle and nuanced. Wilson knew a great deal about Mexican affairs, to the point where he preferred to handle this aspect of foreign policy himself, deliberately marginalising his unstable secretary of state William Jennings Bryan. Wilson's position was quite simple: he would recognise the Huerta regime if Huerta held elections and promoted the values of liberal democracy. If Huerta had played his cards correctly, US recognition would have followed as swiftly as that by Britain and the European powers. However, this was the one demand Huerta would not concede, partly because he would not tolerate true separation of powers, with a curb on his executive action by Congress, partly because he was certain that any genuinely free election would be won by the man he double-crossed after the February 1913 coup: Felix Diaz.

  This time around Huerta could not use Lane Wilson to discredit those he disliked. Lane Wilson was a lame duck from the moment his presidential namesake took office. In any case, Woodrow Wilson distrusted the advice he got from professional diplomats, whom he (correctly) perceived to have agendas of their own. He therefore preferred to work through special envoys and secret agents, principally his speechwriter William Hayard Hale and John Lind, the ex-governor of Minnesota; he showed his contempt for the diplomatic corps by not replacing Lane Wilson and leaving a charge d'affaires in control at the US embassy in Mexico City. Both Hale and Lind advised Wilson that he should work for Huerta's overthrow - advice which chimed with Wilson's own instincts. Lind travelled to Mexico City via Veracruz and proposed recognition on condition that presidential elections were held in which Huerta would not stand. After several unsatisfactory meetings with Huerta and his new foreign minister Federico Gamboa, Lind was informed that Woodrow Wilson's proposals constituted unacceptable interference in the affairs of a sovereign nation. Gamboa then insulted Lind personally by handing him a sarcastic note, which insinuated that Wilson's proposals were predicated on an abysmal ignorance of the Mexican constitution. This was fighting talk, and Lind never forgave it nor forgot it.

  At first Wilson ordered a policy of strict neutrality as between Huerta and the northern rebels, but his patience wore thin as Huerta evinced total contempt for all democratic forms and constitutional niceties. He made it clear that he had no time for Cabinet government, despised politicians, and wanted to be a simple caudillo autocrat. He crushed the free press of Madero's time, either by closing newspapers or censoring them. He appointed generals to take control of state governments and insisted that all civilian governors had to double as military commanders. The militarisation of Mexican society became palpable, with both schools and the railways used almost exclusively for the interests of the Army. This militarisation not only alienated Washington but also the old-style porfiristas who had originally welcomed Huerta's seizure of power. They saw clearly that Huerta was indeed a second Cromwell, that when faced with a choice between Congress or even the hacendado class and the Army, it would be the beloved Army every time.

  However, Huerta's true crossing of the Rubicon came when he ordered the murder of senator Belisario Dominguez. On 23 September 1913 Dominguez denounced Huerta in Congress, and had his speech privately printed and circulated when Diaz suppressed it in the official Diary of Debates. Two days later Dominguez was arrested at home by the secret police, and a few days after that his bullet-riddled body was found in a ditch. This precipitated a crisis between Congress and Executive. Congress passed a motion demanding an inquiry to get to the bottom of Dominguez's murder. Huerta sent troops into the legislature and demanded that the resolution be retracted on pain of dissolution of the Senate. When he met with refusal, Huerta made good his threat and imprisoned seventy-four deputies. This further alienated Washington and Wilson's displeasure turned to fury when the new British minister, Sir Lionel Carden, who already had a reputation for being anti-American, provocatively presented his credentials the day after the deputies were arrested.

  Huerta ordered a slate of new elections in October. He got his tame Congress by the simple expedient of making it impossible for the voters to elect anyone but huertistas. The result was a predictable farce with turnout levels as low as 5 per cent. The presidential election was even more of a pantomime turn: since Huerta was constitutionally precluded from presenting himself as a candidate, he allowed Federico Gamboa to run as the huertista candidate, while privately telling the US charge d'affaires that if Gamboa won he would have him shot. Felix Diaz was the main opposition hopeful (there were two other makeweight candidates), and would have won in any kind of fair contest, but Huerta had thought of a new scam. He had his officials put multiple voting slips into the ballot box with his name on them as a `write-in' candidate, then barefacedly declared that he could not disappoint the evident wish of the people. The decision was thrown to the tame Congress, which did as ordered and declared the elections `null and void'; pending fresh elections, set nine months in the future, Huerta was to continue as provisional president. Felix Diaz saw the writing on the wall and fled the capital to sanctuary on a US warship berthed at Veracruz.

  After this farce Woodrow Wilson was determined that Huerta be forced out. Maximum leverage was exerted on the British, and the foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, sent his private secretary to Washington to assure Wilson that London would fall in with any credible American initiative for bringing peace to Mexico. Wilson demanded the dismissal of Sir Lionel Carden as an earnest of British good faith; Whitehall fell into line and kicked Carden upstairs as ambassador to Brazil in order to save face. On 3 February 1914 Wilson signalled an abrupt shift in his Mexican policy by lifting the embargo on arms supplies to the Constitutionalist rebels. Hitherto Villa and Carranza had relied on clandestine purchases, while arms manufacturers in Britain, Germany, France and Spain grew rich on the lucrative trade with Huerta; Washington had been particularly shocked by a shipment of ten million cartridges to Mexico City from Japan.

  Huerta would have had enough trouble on his hands simply with the struggle with the USA, but he also faced domestic problems arising from the increased militarisation of Mexico and a series of economic and financial crises. By spring 1914 Huerta had expanded the Army to a strength of 250,000 (4 per cent of the entire male population), though the number of effectives was far fewer because of payroll padding and other forms of creative accounting. Since there were no volunteers, these numbers were made up by press-ganged conscripts, who made poor soldiers and often deserted once they reached the front. Huerta tried to encourage men to sign up by using crude anti-American propaganda - a favourite motif was that the `traitor province' Sonora was a `twentiethcentury Texas' and Carranza an American agent - but nobody took his bromides seriously. In despair he tried to enlist private armies recruited by sub-cont
ractors, but this too did not work.

  The paradox of Huerta's regime was that the more he expanded the Army and the more he militarised civil administration, the less powerful his fighting forces became. Having seduced many rebels away from the cause of revolution, he found he could neither integrate them into civilian life - turn swords into ploughshares - nor persuade them to play a meaningful role in the campaigns against Villa, Zapata and Carranza. The greatest blow was the defection of the rurales who, almost to a man, deserted, rebelled or were eliminated, leaving the burden of normal peace-keeping on the hard-pressed Army. Huerta's appeal to the wealthy classes to help him militarily fell on deaf ears; they preferred the prospect of annexation by the USA to disgorging their own funds to pay for troops. Accordingly, all attempts to form militias or volunteer regiments ended in fiasco. Some foreign companies hired `white guards' but soon found it was cheaper to bribe the local threat, be it federal or rebel, than to pay for expensive private armies.

  There can be no doubt that the Mexican oligarchy revealed itself as singularly gutless and cowardly, concerned only for its own privileges and reluctant to spend a peso to defend them. Some analysts see a catastrophic decline in morale and willpower within a single generation on the part of the wealthy and propertied. Where the nineteenth-century oligarchs were prepared to mount up and go into battle against bandits or Apaches, their etiolated early twentieth-century successors had become pampered suburbanites. Some say the elite was shell-shocked as a result of years of revolution and the overnight disappearance of the old modalities of deference and hierarchy, that the peasants had called their bluff and revealed the elite members as paper tigers. Other say that this `crisis of legitimacy' concealed another one, peculiar to Huerta. Almost nobody, except a few huertista cronies, perceived the regime to be legitimate, and indeed how could anyone pay it more than lip-service? Huerta was bankrupt of ideas and believed only in force as the solution to all problems. Madero had mixed reform and repression, but with Huerta there was only repression. Huerta despised Madero for not having used enough repression, but the real reason for Madero's downfall was not that he had been too tyrannical but that he had not been radical enough. Huerta was like a pilot who tries to correct a spin by sending his plane into an even more severe spin.

  In such a context, the perennial financial problems with which Huerta wrestled could be viewed as a mere bagatelle. He faced rising expenditure, mainly on the expanded Army, at a time of falling revenues caused both by falling trade and investment and loss of territory to the rebels. The income from import duties, stamp taxes and foreign loans all declined. While the stagnant economies of the south and south-east continued almost unchanged, the previously more vibrant sectors in the north were faring disastrously. The greatest recession was in mining. Mines closed down because their feeder railways were out of commission and because supplies of dynamite were commandeered for military purposes. In 1914 production of silver was one-third the Igio level, copper half, gold 50 per cent and lead an incredible 5 per cent. Lumber mills and textile factories had shut down, as cotton could not get through; oil supplies from Tampico hung by a thread that could be severed at any moment; the country's chief dynamite factory at Gomez Palacio was now in rebel hands.

  The inevitable knock-on effects of the economic slump were felt on the financial markets. Huerta faced hyperinflation as goods became scarcer, prices rocketed and the peso slipped alarmingly against the dollar. The exchange rate of the peso was two to the US dollar in early 1913; a year later it was three to the dollar. From the summer of 1913 Mexico was off the Gold Standard. With no confidence in a depreciated paper currency, employers found themselves having to pay in scrip. Desperate for funds, Huerta found that non-recognition by the USA made the raising of loans, even in Europe, almost impossible, and even when loans were forthcoming, they were consumed in servicing existing debt. In despair, Huerta finally suspended payment on the National Debt, evoking howls of outrage from bondholders, increasing general economic uncertainty and decreasing the likelihood that foreign investors would sink money into Mexico.

  Just as much an economic illiterate in his own way as Villa, Huerta increased domestic taxes across the board, further destroying business confidence. Alongside the hike in existing taxes, he introduced a plethora of new ones and forced businesses to make loans under threat of unspecified dire consequences. Huerta thus effectively destroyed his claim to be the champion of the propertied classes, but even the selfdestructive act of kicking away the social props on which his regime rested did not help him. His government continued to have cash-flow problems and to be unable to pay its contractors or civil servants. In the final absurdity, Huerta allowed arrears to accumulate in his soldiers' pay, precipitating a mutiny at Ensenada, Baja California, in January 1914.

  Sensing Huerta's inherent weakness, Zapata made careful preparations in early 1914 for a campaign that would sweep him up to the gates of Mexico City. His strategy was aimed at capturing Chilpancingo, the state capital of Guerrero. His intention was that all his other chiefs would attack in their areas and pin the federals down along the MorelosGuerrero-Puebla border; with four simultaneous attacks, Huerta would not know which was the real offensive and which the feint. While he was thus perplexed, Zapata himself would take Chilpancingo in a lightning strike. Having paralysed the federals with the prestige of such an unexpected victory, he intended to proceed to take Iguala and Acapulco, before swinging all forces in southern and central Mexico round for an all-out assault on Mexico City.

  On 12 March 1914 Zapata set up his headquarters at Tixtla, confident of victory since he now had 5,000 seasoned fighters to throw against the 1,400 federal defenders at Chilpancingo. There was no chance of federal reinforcements, since the Jojutla garrison mutinied the very day he arrived in Tixtla, destabilising the entire southern sector. After investing Chilpancingo closely, Zapata circled 26 March on the calendar as the day he would deliver the knock-out blow. However, three days early some of his chiefs jumped the gun and a premature attack delivered the city to the zapatistas with surprising ease, partly because rebel prisoners broke out of jail at the very moment the attack was being pressed. General Luis Carton, the man who had been closely associated with Robles's atrocities, tried to flee to Acapulco but was caught and brought back to Chilpancingo where, after a court martial, Zapata had him executed on 6 April.

  Elated by this success, Zapata sent his forces out in all directions. Acapulco, Iguala, Taxco and Buenavista de Cuellar all rapidly fell to his armies, and Zapata felt confident enough to send reinforcements to revolutionary groups in Michoacan and Mexico State. When the envoys of the Michoacan rebels came to see him, they asked for proofs of his revolutionary sincerity; suspicious of bandits and ambitious politicians posing as revolutionaries, they asked what he was fighting for. Zapata asked Jose Robles to bring out the box containing the Anenecuilco title deeds. As he pointed to the documents, Zapata said: `That's what I'm fighting for. Not the titles themselves, but this record of constancy and honesty - that's what I'm fighting for.'

  Zapata next moved into Morelos, mopping up the federal garrisons at Jojutla, Cuautla and Jonacatepec, most of whom defected to him with their weapons. Meanwhile he sent de la 0 to open another front in Mexico State, and his brother Eufemio on the same errand in Puebla. By now he had cleared all federals out of Morelos except for the garrison at Cuernavaca which he was too weak to subdue. He did not lack the numbers but, as always, shortage of ammunition was the headache: 3-4,000 men besieging a city for five days needed at least 200,000 rounds of ammunition, and the zapatistas did not have it. Many were the occasions when he envied Villa the proximity of the USA, and his surpluses of cattle and cotton with which to buy cartridges and arms. Meanwhile he was reduced to ineffectual negotiations for a loan, either from the US government or American entrepreneurs. He sent envoys, again in vain, to Wilson to get his belligerent status recognised. Wilson, who was officially neutral as between Huerta, Villa and Carranza (but at this stage clearl
y favoured Villa), strangely refused to take Zapata seriously. Zapata was wounded by this rebuff and tended to listen to his Morelos veterans, who argued that a national role was anyway irrelevant to their needs and aspirations. It was Palafox who stressed the importance of the American connection, arguing that if he was successful in the field, Zapata would have to play a national role anyway.

  Woodrow Wilson did, however, assist Zapata unintentionally, for on 21 April Huerta suddenly had to pull all federal forces out of southern Mexico to face a new threat: Mexico seemed on the brink of all-out war with the United States. John Lind, the polar opposite of Lane Wilson, as maniacally hostile to Huerta as Lane Wilson had been to Madero, had continued to deluge Wilson with schemes, proposals and outright demands for Huerta's overthrow. Terrified that Huerta might actually win the imminent war with the Constitutionalists, Lind eventually tired of lobbying Woodrow Wilson from a distance and returned to Washington in early April 1914 to brief the president in person, during which time Wilson was presented with the pretext he needed for intervention in Mexico.