Villa and Zapata: A History of the Mexican Revolution

by Frank McLynn

  Torreon was Villa's most signal victory to date. John Reed described him as the greatest captain in Mexican history: `His method of fighting is astonishingly like Napoleon's ... Villa is the Revolution. If he died, I am sure that the Constitutionalists would not advance beyond Torreon in a year.' The human cost had been extraordinarily high, not just in combatant casualties (one in five for the villistas and even higher levels for the federals). Torreon and its environs were like charnel houses, full of the foetor of corpses and the feculence of decay. The trees were charred and stunted, and no birds sang on their branchless trunks. Every house was a billet for many bullets and every public monument was pockmarked with shell and incendiary damage.

  Villa found the inhabitants of Torreon eating rats and searching through horse manure for partially digested grains which they could reprocess as tortillas. He ordered mountains of food and lakes of wine to be brought into the city for a victory fiesta so lavish it was said to have attracted down the whores from US border towns. The only group for which Villa felt no pity were the hated Spaniards. After confiscating all their property and possessions, he rounded up 700 gachupines and penned them in the vaults of the Bank of Laguna, where he harangued them. After telling them that they were the despised descendants of Cortes who had robbed and murdered his own people, the Aztecs, Villa said they all deserved execution but, to show his generosity, he would simply expel them from Mexican soil. They were driven out of the city at bayonet point and transported on wagons without food and water to the US border, 500 miles north.

  Huerta somehow found a fresh army of 6,ooo, but this force was rapidly imbued by the defeatism of the men they were sent to reinforce. The federals made their last stand at San Pedro de las Colonias, forty miles north-east of Torreon. With the euphoria of a man on a winning streak, the outnumbered Villa attacked as though he held all the aces. Once again Villa's initial forays were beaten off by the io,ooo-strong defenders, and for two days the federals stood at bay behind barricades of cotton bales, but then they self-destructed. A furious altercation had broken out between Velasco and General Joaquin Maas, commanding the reinforcements, about who had the superior command. In a fit of pique Velasco pulled out on 15 April, leaving Maas to his fate. Maas baulked at facing Villa alone and withdrew also, abandoning most of his troops and the bulk of his arms and equipment. San Pedro was left gutted, and most of the abandoned men simply joined up with Villa, helping to staunch the manpower haemorrhage of the recent campaign.

  Although the Division of the North was exhausted and had to rest for a month after its martial labours, the road to Mexico City now lay open. Villa's crushing victories had finished the federals as a credible fighting force in the north. The battles of Torreon and San Pedro had had the effect of destroying a federal army 15,000 strong. The survivors scattered eastwards, many dying of hunger and thirst in the desert, a few limping in to Saltillo. Villa had demonstrated his ability to use artillery, to master logistics and to fight a protracted campaign against a well-entrenched enemy. So far he was easily the most able Constitutionalist general, and he now commanded a 16,ooo-strong elite force which, by common consent, was easily man-for-man superior to the federals.

  Villa's stunning victory at Torreon, followed soon after by the movie of his life, made him an immensely popular figure in the USA. Woodrow Wilson, determined to be rid of Huerta and disillusioned with Carranza after his anti-American outbursts, increasingly saw Villa as the horse to put his money on. Not yet exposed to Villa's dark side, Wilson was somewhat naively inclined to see the Centaur of the North as a frontier hero in the mould of Kit Carson or Davy Crockett. He was particularly impressed by two things: Villa seemed to lack personal ambition and said he wanted the reputedly pro-American Felipe Angeles as president; and he supported the US occupation of Veracruz. Villa saw clearly that the attempt to foment anti-gringo feelings in Mexico was simply a cynical ploy by Huerta, and declared robustly about Veracruz: `It is Huerta's bull that is being gored.' In a conversation with the American consular agent George Carothers, Villa was even more expansive: he told his American friend that no drunkard could drag him into a war with friends.

  If Villa had had presidential ambitions, Wilson's favour could have been decisive. Possibly, too, at this stage, Wilson had not taken the measure of Carranza's anti-Americanism and its depth and virulence. Unconsciously, Carranza sought duels with powerful nations, for his hero Juarez had faced down Britain and France in the 186os, and defeated France in battle. Carranza particularly brooded on the affront to national sovereignty of the `manifest destiny' US invasion of 1846-8, and on the crimes of Lane Wilson. As always, Carranza's reading of history was partial, for he never acknowledged the role of presidents Lincoln and Johnson in Juarez's defeat of Maximilian. There was always something pathological in Carranza's dislike of the gringo. He distrusted all North Americans, even the so-called `good yankees'. He made a point of tweaking Wilson's nose over the Benton case, banged the drum over the Veracruz occupation and pointedly kept Woodrow Wilson's envoy waiting for ten days when he arrived in Sonora in November 1913.

  Carranza made his predilections clear by ostentatiously refusing to truckle to the colossus of the north and by taxing US businesses in Mexico. Villa meanwhile, with the proceeds of the expropriated estates under his belt, did not need to raise money in that way. His image in the USA was further burnished by the part-time US consul George Carothers, who sent glowing reports to Wilson, all the more persuasive in that Carothers had previously been violently anti-Villa. Villa, with his shrewdness about human beings, soon discerned Carothers's Achilles' heel, or rather the multiplicity of heels. The 38-year-old grocer, catapulted into unwonted status when Wilson appointed him a special agent in Mexico, was an avatar of all the vices - a crook, womaniser, gambler and blackmailer. It was an easy matter for Villa to make him over: he simply gave him a profusion of easy deals, lucrative contracts, sweeteners and kickbacks, on the understanding that Carothers would report faithfully to Washington. All American firms wanting concessions in Chihuahua had to go through Carothers.

  Villa was soon able to add another couple of corrupt gringos to his payroll. In Washington he retained the services of the venal lobbyist Sherbourne G. Hopkins, who would work for anyone as long as the pay was good enough, and was not above working for opposing sides simultaneously and selling each one's secrets to the other. Hopkins, however, preferred working for Carranza so sent his agent Felix Somerfeld to Mexico to be at Villa's side. This was a case of Volpone hiring Mosca, for Somerfeld, who controlled an exclusive concession for importing dynamite into Mexico, was if anything even more venal and two-faced than Hopkins. Dealing with three ultra-cynical men as his American agents did not enhance Villa's opinion of the yanquis, and in the end adversely affected his own reputation in the USA. Where Carranza increasingly found credible envoys with gravitas, Villa was represented by a trio of reprobates whose only interest was cash, cash and more cash.

  Probably Villa's only really solid and genuine rapport with an American was his relationship with General Hugh Scott, commanding US forces on the Mexican border. Scott liked Villa personally, he had a fondness for non-intellectual noble savages, he thought Villa was the man on horseback Mexico needed and, unusually for an American, had a real respect for the qualities of `Third Worlders' - a respect gained after forty years of fighting Apaches, Cubans (in 1898) and Filipinos (in 1899-1902). No greater contrast could be imagined than that between the reflective Scott and the absurd William Randolph Hearst, whose jingoistic yellow press had virtually created those wars out of nothing and now fulminated against Villa. For all his talents at public relations, Villa never really got on the right side of the American press; even those newspapers sympathetic to him always seemed to take a patronising tone.

  Villa enjoyed a certain cachet in radical intellectual and left-liberal circles in the USA. John Reed was the principal influence in creating this climate of opinion and his lead was followed by other prominent leftists, notably Mary `Mo
ther' Jones, the famous organiser for the United Mine Workers of America, who had a long-standing interest in how Mexican miners lived. When she was jailed in 1914, Villa wrote to Woodrow Wilson, offering to swap the younger Luis Terrazas for her. Yet the attitude to Villa of the American Left was by no means monolithic. The journalist Lincoln Steffens, who shared John Reed's enthusiasm for the Russian Revolution ('I have seen the future and it works'), dissented with him over Mexico, where he thought the Revolution decidedly did not work. Another jaundiced anti-Villa leftist was John Kenneth Turner, author of Barbarous Mexico, though his attitude was in part pique because his protege Ricardo Flores Magon could not get his brand of revolution off the ground.

  Perhaps the biggest surprise was the attitude to the Revolution of the bestselling author and socialist millionaire Jack London, who wrote in Collier's Weekly that the peons followed Zapata, Villa and Carranza not because they cared for land and freedom but for loot and bloodletting -'a particularly delightful event to a people who delight in the bloody spectacles of the bullring'. Soon the former international socialist was well into his stride, delighting American oilmen and the financiers of Wall Street with the new bearing in his political thinking: `The big brother can police, organise and manage Mexico. The so-called leaders of Mexico cannot. And the lives and happiness of a few million peons, as well as the many millions yet to be born, are at stake. The policeman stops a man from beating his wife. The humane officer stops a man from beating his horse. May not a powerful and self-alleged enlightened nation stop a handful of inefficient and incapable rulers from making a shambles and a desert of a fair land wherein are all the natural resources for a high and happy civilisation?'

  Perhaps the one American whose relationship with Villa has attracted most attention is Ambrose Bierce, officially described as having `disappeared' while attempting to make contact with Villa. He was last seen just before the battle of Ojinaga in January 1914, supposedly fighting for Villa, though in what capacity a 71-year-old writer could have fought for the Revolution is unclear. Scholars debate whether he was simply killed in the battle and buried in a mass grave, or whether he anticipated Benton by crossing Villa and being executed. Certainly his last communication, to a relative, sounds very much like a death wish: `If you should hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags, please know that I think it is a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease or falling down the cellar stairs. To be a gringo in Mexico - ah, that is euthanasia.'

  The combination of Villa's spectacular victory at Torreon and his huge popularity in the USA simply accentuated Carranza's rancour and jealousy towards him. While Carranza had been a remote figure in Sonora, coexistence between him and Villa was possible because of their virtual independence from each other. When Carranza shifted his base of operations to Ciudad Juarez in March 1914 the honeymoon came to an end. Carranza moved to Chihuahua in an obvious bid to bring Villa to heel, after all his behind-the-scenes machinations had failed. Lacking a power base in Chihuahua, he first tried building up his proteges Manuel Chao and Maclovio Herrera as counterweights, then, when that ploy failed, he tried to humiliate Villa by putting him under Obregon's command; Villa simply ignored this directive.

  Carranza had never liked Villa. A man who bore grudges, brooded on past insults and had an elephantine memory for any occasion on which his self-importance had been slighted, he had never forgiven Villa for joining Orozco and rebelling against Madero when he appointed him (Carranza) minister of war in 1911. Even without this scar on his memory, Carranza could never have got on with Villa. The generation gap was important to a man who felt that superior age should automatically entail deference (even though he himself had never been prepared to defer to Diaz). The clash of personalities was, moreover, of an almost textbook type: on the one hand the cold, aloof, ponderous and circumspect machiavellian; on the other the emotional, impulsive, mercurial audacious and energetic workaholic.

  In January 1914, with Villa master of Chihuahua, Carranza once more tried to clip his wings. He had three immediate motives: he needed to get his hands on Chihuahua's revenues; he feared Villa's promised land reforms would antagonise the elite; and most of all he dreaded the example of an independent Villa: other military commanders in other states might get the same notion and leave the First Chief as a mere figurehead. However, all his moves were checkmated. When he ordered Villa to shelve land reform, Villa curtly refused. When he sent his most trusted advisers to try to win over Silvestre Terrazas, he got nowhere. When he sent his `foreign secretary' Francisco Escudero on a mission to Villa, Escudero botched it by insulting Villa at a banquet; Villa raged at the envoy and told him he would already be dead but that he came as the representative of the First Chief.

  At first Carranza hoped for great things when Chao became the governor of Chihuahua in January 1914, but Chao soon found he had no real power, circumscribed as he was both by Silvestre Terrazas and Villa's other intellectual advisers, while unable to make military leaders obey his simplest order. Chao further disappointed Carranza by openly announcing his support for the programme of agrarian reform. Carranza's relocation to Ciudad Juarez was a measure of despair; the only way he could make his writ run in Chihuahua was by being on the spot. It has to be emphasised that it was always Carranza who made all the difficulties, forever Carranza who was proactive and Villa reactive. While the First Chief remained in Sonora, Villa had always acted with great tact and diplomacy and had written to him with respect and warmth, but from March onwards it quickly became apparent that Carranza wanted to control the Division of the North, to supplant Villa and issue orders directly to the subordinate generals, and to monopolise the arms supply line to the USA.

  The snapping point came over Manuel Chao. When Villa, on the eve of the battle of Torreon, ordered Chao to join him with his contingent, Chao replied that it was within his prerogative as governor to refuse and did so. Villa stormed up to Ciudad Juarez, arrested Chao and ordered him held for execution. He then worked himself up into one of his fearsome rages and ranted at Chao about sabotage. When he calmed down, the governor managed to convince him he had not sought to betray him. All might now have been resolved peacefully, but Carranza deliberately chose to be as provocative as Woodrow Wilson was being over Tampico at that very moment. Carranza peremptorily ordered Villa to halt the execution and summoned him for a magisterial dressing-down. This was admittedly courageous, for Villa's troops were present in force, and Villa could easily have done to him what Huerta did to Madero; even so, it is noteworthy that Carranza had a roomful of aides with loaded pistols present at the interview.

  The upshot was predictable. Villa again lost his temper and ranted and raged at Carranza. The glacial First Chief remained as adamant and unmovable as when he dealt with Washington. Eventually Villa backed down and accepted Carranza's authority and a face-saving banquet was thrown for all three men by Silvestre Terrazas. Curiously, Chao seems to have been deeply impressed by the attitude finally evinced by Villa before Carranza made his provocative intervention. The abrazos of reconciliation he exchanged with Villa were sincere, and when the final break between Carranza and Villa came, Chao was on the side of the Centaur.

  Villa was as good as his word. He sacked a Chihuahua editor for criticising Carranza and allowed himself to be gulled into handing over control of the northern railway network. However, Carranza was not deceived by the formulaic expressions of revolutionary brotherhood. Now more than ever it seemed essential to prevent Villa from being the first to enter Mexico City. There was not just the acquisition of the federal arsenal to consider, but access to the rich provinces of Mexico's southeast and the general credibility involved in being first into the capital. Most of all, Carranza was determined to be the next president, and he foresaw that, in an open contest, the old guard of porfiristas and huertistas would be capable of making a deal with Villa to have Felipe Angeles confirmed as president. He therefore sent instructions to Obregon, who for months had been doing an
irritating imitation of Fabius Cunctator, to gear up for a race to Mexico City against Villa.

  Obregon had spent the winter in meticulous preparation, building up his strength, improving drill and mastering railway logistics. He controlled all of Sonora except for the well-defended port of Guaymas which he was much too cautious to attack, and his sole contact with the enemy was in hit-and-run skirmishes, involving casualties usually in two figures. Obregon's approach to war was intellectual where Villa's was instinctive. He really studied strategy, as Villa never did, devouring volumes on the Boer War and the Russo-Japanese conflict of 1904-5, learning all about barbed wire, blockhouses and trench warfare. His aim was to professionalise the Army of the North-west, but this provoked the same backlash from the old sweats that Villa's similar reforms had engendered. His officers hated Obregon's academic approach to war and clung to all the old, inefficient ways - chasing women when they should have been posting sentries. Such was the indiscipline among his troops that one of Obregon's sergeants, sent on a recruiting mission, promoted himself to general when he had raised 300 men and began issuing 50- and Too-peso notes printed on lavatory paper. Obregon arrested him in the middle of a fiesta and gave him the ley fuga treatment.

  Obregon had his own reasons for heeding the call from Carranza and beating Villa to Mexico City. Now that Carranza had moved to Chihuahua, he was the number one man in Sonora, and he intended to keep things that way. Yet meanwhile Villa was aiding the ambitions of Jose Maytorena, who wanted to return to his post as governor after his six-month `sabbatical' in the USA. Obregon and his faction took the view, rightly, that Maytorena had fled when the going was tough and now wanted to return to scoop the prizes won by others. Carranza strongly backed Obregon in this power struggle with Maytorena, keenly aware that he would need Obregon when the inevitable showdown with Villa came. However, Maytorena was a powerful machine politician, with significant backing among the middle classes and the Yaquis. To counterbalance Carranza's support for Obregon, Maytorena lobbied for the support of Villa. Initially Villa was unenthusiastic, remembering the cowardly way Maytorena had skulked in Arizona, but Felipe Angeles talked him round. Angeles and Maytorena were already so hostile to Carranza that they founded a Spanish-language newspaper in El Paso, devoted to attacking the First Chief for ducking land reform.