Villa and Zapata: A History of the Mexican Revolution

by Frank McLynn

  Gutierrez reiterated the demand for Carranza's resignation. After stalling for four days, Carranza sent another cable from Cordoba in Veracruz state, making it clear he regarded himself as above the law: now he said he would resign only after his three demands had been met. Gutierrez conferred with the best minds at the Convention. Jose Vasconcelos wrote an opinion that from the viewpoint of constitutional law it was crystal clear that sovereignty resided in the Constitutionalist Army rather than in the person of Carranza, and that Carranza was consequently as plainly a rebel as ever a rebel could be. On io November the Convention declared Carranza to be in open rebellion. Gutierrez appointed Villa `general in chief' and chief of all operations designed to put down the insurrection.

  Unfortunately the trigger-happy Villa compounded his original mistake in not attending the Convention by not waiting until the constitutional law had run its course. Before Gutierrez declared Carranza a rebel, Villa lost patience with the endless second chances seemingly being offered to the First Chief and sent his troops into Aguascalientes. To save face, Gutierrez had to pretend that he had invited him, but the final sessions of the Convention took place with 30,000 villista soldiers billeted in the town. This ham-fisted action alienated many of the `third way' delegates who were still attempting an eleventh-hour reconciliation with Carranza. The most important man so alienated was Obregon. Initially close to Angeles, and deeply critical of Carranza's autocratic behaviour, he found, like many liberals in many eras, that third ways are unviable. He faced a stark choice: Villa or Carranza. After his recent bruising experiences with Villa, it is hardly surprising that he chose Carranza.

  Obregon, even more than Angeles, had dominated the Convention and when he chose to throw in his lot with Carranza, many of those who had been present at Aguascalientes went with him, including even some former villistas. Villa's great mistake had been to hold himself aloof and come into town only for the signing of the final protocol, allowing Obregon to reap all the rewards of charismatic leadership. Zapata's error had been even more egregious, for he had neither entered wholeheartedly into the business of the Convention nor boycotted it and thus ended up with the worst of both worlds. Zapata was now ineluctably involved with the national struggle even though he was uninterested in it. As Womack remarks: `In letting their secretaries involve them with Villa, the Morelos chiefs had thus committed their people to a fight that was not theirs.' Zapata could be in no doubt about the outcome of Aguascalientes and, even if he was, Villa soon put him in the picture. In a sombre letter written on io November Villa told him that the men who had defeated Huerta were now doomed to fight each other. The Revolution had already become a genuine civil war.

  THE CONVERGENCE OF THE TWAIN

  On the evening of 24 November 1914, as the last carrancistas left, the zapatista vanguard tentatively entered Mexico City. The zapatistas found evidence of the most malign vandalism by Carranza, supposedly the torchbearer of `civilisation' against barbarism. The mint and all government archives had been plundered; vast numbers of horses, trainloads of paintings and other spoils, huge caches of ammunition and materiel, all had been spirited away in railway cars, leaving the Mexican railway system in paralysis; as a piece de resistance Carranza's generals attached the railway track to Veracruz to a locomotive, so that it was progressively ripped up as the engine chugged slowly forward. The irony was that Carranza's vandals then entered a Veracruz recently evacuated by the US Marines which the Americans had left as an object lesson in city management - a town so clean and hygienic that its fabled vultures had had to seek sustenance elsewhere.

  Zapata's men came not as conquerors or marauders but as awe-struck sightseers, gaping at the unusual features of the city. They were peaceful, deferential, simple folk, the classic country cousins up for the day in the big city, naively carrying banners of the Virgin of Guadalupe and displaying their rustic origins by their coarse white cotton clothes, Franciscan sandals and big straw hats. They wandered the streets like lost children, begging and panhandling for coins from passers-by, knocking on doors and politely asking if they could have some food. A terrified flaneur was approached by a group of zapatistas wielding machetes who, he was convinced, wanted to kill him. However, they took off their huge sombreros, threaded them circularly through their fingers, and said in humble voices: `Young master, could you let us have a little money?' The most famous story is that the zapatistas opened fire on a clanging fireengine speeding to an emergency, thinking it a kind of primitive tank, and killed twelve firemen.

  To the amazement of Mexico City's bourgeoisie, there were no expropriations, except of houses belonging to Morelos planters. It was not long before the middle classes were pointing to the absence of speeches, proscriptions and confiscations, praising Zapata to the skies and contrasting him with the predatory and aggressive Carranza and Obregon. Where Villa and his chiefs always made straight for the most luxurious houses once they occupied a city, Zapata displayed a Cato-like asceticism by staying in a dingy third-class hotel a block away from the railway depot. He left city administration to his underlings and delegated to his brother Eufemio the task of showing provisional president Eulalio Gutierrez around the presidential palace.

  The man who four years earlier was an obscure village leader in Morelos was now master of Mexico City. To the oft-whispered question by an anxious urban bourgeoisie - `what does he want?' - there was only one answer: nothing. Zapata always hated the national capital and could hardly wait to return to Morelos, but there was more than caprice or personal predilection involved here. A dislike of cities was imbricated in the entire zapatista ideology, for cities represented the power of the state and its full-time officials, the ultimate anathema for all attracted by anarchism. Zapatismo was always revolutionary in its visions and aspirations, but it was never so in the Leninist sense of aiming to capture the apparatus of the state and imposing a national ideology.

  Few political movements have been more misunderstood than the one headed by Emiliano Zapata. Anarchism is a useful shorthand tag, as long as one appreciates that Zapata merely wanted the euthanasia of all bosses, owners and overseers. In no sense was he actuated by full-blooded anarchistic theory like that of Bakunin, which was anyway an urban theory reflecting the concerns of city dwellers. The peasants of Morelos, with their white pyjamas and banners of the revered Virgin of Guadalupe, were light-years away from the atheistic Russian anarchists. Bakunin was noted for puritanism and asceticism, but Zapatismo was characterised by a free and easy hedonism of the traditional Mexican kind, where drinking, cock-fighting, playing cards and making love to women were the staples of existence. Even in his later years Zapata himself liked to chew the fat with his men in the plaza, chomping his trademark cigar and sipping brandy while he discussed horses, gamecocks, the weather, farm prices and other peasant concerns.

  There was a soupcon of Bakunin only in Zapata's hostility to the state, his dislike of the railway (which was politically inspired rather than Luddite) and his cult of simplicity. The uniform of white pyjamas became almost de rigueur in Morelos, even for government officials; in villages anyone wearing trousers, a shirt or boots risked being derided as a catrin, a dandy. It was said with justification that in Morelos the grand `coming out' ball had given way to the bullfight, the frock coat and top hat to the baggy white drawers and sarapes. There was perhaps some similarity to Russian rural anarchism, too, in Zapata's dream of a peasant utopia of free villages, with `small is beautiful' units (families, clans, villages) enjoying self-government and autarky, bonded together in a loose, voluntary association. The Mexican Revolution progressively worked in Zapata's favour in this regard, as it replaced loyalty to landlord and jefe politico with commitment to village, cacique and local community. The role of political thought in Zapatismo can be overstated. Although Zapata listened respectfully whenever his intellectuals spoke about the finer points of anarchism, in his own mind he was satisfied that all his true political aspirations were already contained in the Plan of Ayala.
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br />   One might remark, parenthetically, that once again we note the paradox that intellectuals played a greater role with Villa than with Zapata, even though Zapatismo was, by common consent, the more revolutionary movement. Many factors can be adduced to explain this: Villa's greater bedazzlement by academic learning; the simplicity, economy and coherence of Zapatismo; and, most of all, the fact that Zapata appealed only to anarchists and Christian mystics. Intellectuals of the democratic-liberal kind opted for Villa, as the heir of Madero and a proven campaigner against political corruption. Most of these intellectual liberals vehemently denied Carranza's claim to be Juarez's spiritual heir and insisted that that honour go to Villa instead, as the embodiment of the spirit of Madero; they insisted, rightly, that in the main only cynics and pragmatists opted for Carranza. Villa liked to play up to this version of himself by learning great chunks of Juarez's 1857 Constitution and reciting it to his intellectuals. Fearing the social convulsion that would follow from real reforms in the area of land and labour, the villista intellectuals were concerned mainly with political and educational, rather than socio-economic, change and viewed the Centaur as a tabula rasa on which they could make their own impressions. Villa always liked to indulge this illusion. Zapata, by contrast, always kept his intellectuals firmly in their place, allowing them occasional furloughs, as at the Aguascalientes Convention.

  The core of Zapata's own beliefs was his mystical feeling for the land, `the mother who nourishes us and cares for us', in the words of St Francis of Assisi in the Canticle of Beings. The ideology of Zapata, then, envisaging a free association of landowning villages, was fundamentally nostalgic, backward-looking and defensive. This does not mean it was non-revolutionary; as more than one commentator has pointed out, the Golden Age of the revolutionary can be located in the past as well as the future. This communalist vision of a society free from bosses, caudillos and the subordination of the civilian to the military, was communalistic but emphatically not communist. How far Zapata was from communism or socialism can be gauged from a conversation he held with Soto y Gama which was reported as follows:

  SOTO Y GAMA: Emiliano, what do you think of communism?

  ZAPATA: Explain it to me.

  SOTO Y GAMA: For example, all the people of a village farm put their lands together and then they distribute the harvest equally.

  ZAPATA: Who makes the distribution?

  SOTO Y GAMA: A representative, or a council elected by the community.

  ZAPATA: Well, look, as far as I'm concerned, if any `somebody' .. . would try to distribute the fruits of my labour in that way ... I would fill him full of bullets.

  As he took stock of the situation in his dingy downtown hotel, Zapata saw four main problems confronting him. He was unable to export his revolution to Mexico's `deep south'; even in Zapata-controlled areas, he faced the headache of endemic banditry; his own programme seemed out of kilter with the other main currents in the Revolution; and, above all, he could not see the enduring basis on which he could construct an alliance with Villa. There was the further worry that Zapatismo always threatened to leave its founder behind by evolving a different character in different localities. Although Zapata could take pride in land distribution effected in his name in no less than nine states, and although there was a massive transfer of power and resources to peasants and away from landlords and caciques, the Revolution went its own way even in nominally zapatista states. In Guerrero, for instance, refusal to pay rents had always been a more important factor than the struggle of village and hacienda, while in Hidalgo and Puebla peasants virtually abolished the sugar-cane industry by invading hacienda land and growing staples like corn and beans there instead of sugar.

  In the `deep south' of Oaxaca, Chiapas, Yucatan and Quintana Roo, the Revolution had so far had little impact, with harvests of coffee and henequen largely unaffected. The hacienda owners in these areas had learned nothing from the events of 191o-14 and all the old abuses - beatings, droit du seigneur, debt peonage - continued as before. Indeed, as the new ideas from the north drifted down into south-eastern Mexico, they produced a ferocious backlash from the hacendados. Whereas the power of the landlords had been blunted or destroyed in Chihuahua, Durango, Morelos, San Luis and Tlaxcala, because the military power of the revolutionaries there was irresistible, in Yucatan and the south opposition to the old order was weak and sporadic. Zapata could not spare the resources to export rebellion there, even if he had been prepared to conduct military operations outside his patria chica, which he was not. Consequently the south-east became a battleground between hacendados and the `proconsuls' Carranza had sent there to make his writ run. The landlords were able to exploit the devout religiosity of the peasants against the anticlerical carrancistas in this struggle, but it was abundantly clear that all hope of spontaneous and effective zapatista revolt was in vain.

  A more serious problem for Zapata was banditry. The hallmark of the Revolution, as in all revolutions, was confusion. In the chaos, ruthless and clear-sighted individuals had a unique opportunity to grab for themselves and to settle all manner of local disputes and personal vendettas under the umbrella of `the revolution'. Tierra y libertad was a slogan used to `legitimate' any number of family quarrels, blood feuds, sectarian disputes and even the murder of rivals in love or business. The Juchiteco revolt in Oaxaca, ostensibly part of the Revolution, was in fact an ancient conflict, and the locals took advantage of the revolutionary situation to revive it. Furthermore, lacking leaders of the calibre of Zapata, agrarian reform movements in states far from the epicentre at Morelos tended to lapse into jacquerie or banditry. Non-political jacqueries were a particular feature of west-central Mexico, which had remained deaf to the initial call to arms from Madero in 1910.

  Outright banditry was a particularly prevalent offshoot of the Revolution. Scholars debate the peculiar socio-economic circumstances in which bandits are apt to arise and whether their `revolt' can be said to have social content. If in any given state the hacienda was too powerful as an institution for organised political opposition, the enemies of the hacienda tended to appear in the guise of bandits. On the other hand, many bandit chiefs cooperated with whichever side, revolutionary or reactionary, would pay them the most. Was the declared social content to the bandits' revolt mere verbal window-dressing to justify loot, or was it genuinely based? `Social banditry', like the terrorism/ freedom fighting antinomy, is a peculiarly thorny question. A man lacking the ability or objective possibilities of launching a guerrilla movement in support of agrarian reform, as Zapata did in Morelos, could well have no outlet for social protest other than banditry. There is no doubt that hard and fast distinctions are impossible, for a chief of brigands operating legitimately as a `social bandit' in state X could be said to be an illegitimate terrorist when extending his operations into state Y; so much depends on the context. One generalisation that holds good in the Mexican Revolution is that mining areas were largely free from banditry.

  Unfortunately for Zapata, bandits inspired purely by loot and the desire to rape and kill with impunity fastened on the identical victims targeted by the zapatistas - principally haciendas and trains - and justified their bloodthirsty marauding as Zapatismo. Genovevo de la O's assaults on trains were widely copied, though for the genuine bandit the troops on the train were not the target. To capture a train established a brigand leader in peasant mythology, and such men were careless of the consequences. The most famous such case was the seizure of locomotive No. 789 near Aguascalientes. The bandit leader simply opened the throttle and sent the train pounding away through northern Jalisco. Luckily there was no other traffic on the line and the empty loco finally ran out of steam thirty miles away, near Encarnacion.

  Zapata was unfortunate also in that his heartlands were traditional hotbeds of banditry. Puebla, Guerrero and Michoacan were all states with a fearsome reputation for brigandage. These were all areas characterised by sparse population, poor communications, few villages and absentee landlords, where the popu
lation was concentrated in towns and the people comprised a rural proletariat rather than a peasantry proper. By 1918 in Michoacan Zapata's influence had largely been eclipsed by local bandits with bloodthirsty reputations. Even in Morelos during the years after 1915, banditry was an acute problem and bandit chiefs arose to dispute the hegemony of the zapatistas. Already, in late 1914, Zapata saw the danger. His own movement was broad-based and coherent, but he had noticed how even a state like Durango threatened to dissolve into warlordism when the strong hand of Villa was removed. The villista presence there simply overlaid a pre-existing pattern of conflict between Tomas Urbina, Orestes Pereyra and Calixto Contreras who controlled the cotton country and the Arrieta brothers who dominated the mountains.

  Yet another issue for Zapata to ponder was the Janus face of the Revolution and how this affected his own programme. There had always been a dualism in the Revolution, with a collectivist ideology running in tandem with a capitalist one. This was because the hacienda was both a means of oppressing the peasantry and depriving them of traditional rights and a fetter on capitalism. In i9io, therefore, the hacienda had come under attack from two directions simultaneously: from peasants (mainly, though not exclusively, in the south) demanding land reform, and from northern entrepreneurs keen to use more advanced technologies. Zapata himself was neither pro-capitalist nor anti-capitalist. He was quite prepared to be an entrepreneur himself, but he insisted on the primacy of the political over the economic: he would not allow the principle of profit maximisation to override the principle of independence and autarky for the villages.