Villa and Zapata: A History of the Mexican Revolution

by Frank McLynn

  The last authentic image of Zapata

  Villa putting on a brave face in adversity

  In fact Villa was more badly hurt than Obregon realised. He abandoned the siege of Tampico and pulled his men out of Saltillo, Monterrey and Monclova. The four foundations of Villa's power had crumbled: his reputation for invincibility; his largesse towards the have- nots; his promise of future land reform; and the perception that the United States was on his side. A reverse multiplier effect now occurred as Villa's morale and currency collapsed together. Before his defeat Villa had printed far more money than the objective state of his economy warranted, but people were pleased to accept it, thinking he would be victorious in the civil war and would then pledge the resources of the Mexican state to redeem the debt. Now it transpired that the currency was worthless. The villista peso plummeted from a value of US thirty cents to US one and a half cents in just two months. Now everybody demanded gold or hard currency. When merchants in Chihuahua refused to accept Villa's money, or raised their prices to compensate, Villa imprisoned them and confiscated their property. However, the result was that the shopkeeping class voluntarily took itself out of business. Severe food shortages resulted as merchants of all types refused to stock goods or sell anything.

  The Chihuahua to which Villa returned was a land of chaos. Agricultural production had fallen, because of the war, at the same time as vast numbers of troops, together with their women and children, required to be fed, but the more production declined the greater was the percentage of it used to buy arms. It became commonplace for famished people to watch sheep and cattle being transported to the United States to raise revenue for arms deals while they starved. Villa pleaded overriding necessity. He was now so desperate for money that he was forced to go after previously friendly landowners, foreign capitalists and, most ominously of all, Americans. A forced loan of US$3oo,00o from American mine-owners was rescinded only after extreme pressure from General Hugh Scott. Business and, especially, foreign interests naturally lost faith in Villa.

  Alongside financial and economic chaos was social dislocation. The Division del Norte of late summer 1915 was not the `ever victorious army' of a year before, but a force stuffed full of bandwagon jumpers and ne'er-do-wells who had climbed aboard what they thought was a gravy train and now were engaged in a mad scramble to get off again. Many units deserted to Carranza and those that remained were more interested in looting than fighting. To keep any army in being at all, Villa had increasing recourse to his dorados whom he used as political commissars and death squads. Roaming villista bands, some still militarily formidable, looted and plundered without let or hindrance now that there was no longer any political imperative against banditry. Naturally the middle classes were intolerant of these attempts to `live off the land', seeing them merely as the old-style unreconstructed brigandage.

  Villa's last-ditch strategy involved an attempted defence of Chihuahua, turning it into a fortress by destroying all rail communication with the outside world, followed by a fallback to Sonora, where he intended to link up with Maytorena and his Yaquis; this would pose Carranza and Obregon a major problem, as there were no railways in Sonora. Since the state had been spared the ravages of war, Villa reckoned that he would feed his troops there easily, while Woodrow Wilson would scarcely make an enemy of Villa by recognising Carranza when there was so much vulnerable American investment there. So pleased was Villa with the idea of Sonora as his fallback position that he soon began entering the realms of fantasy. He wrote bullishly to Zapata that after a short rest in Sonora he would come south again, occupying Sinaloa, Tepic, Michoacan and Jalisco, ready to rendezvous with Zapata just outside Mexico City for a second triumphal entry into the capital.

  That was the public facade of Villa in more senses than one: optimistic, euphoric and face-saving. The private Villa was cross-grained, neurotic and irascible, full of fantasies about betrayal. The Maderos were the first to give up on him. After vainly calling on Villa to abandon a hopeless fight, Raul Madero fled across the border into the USA, taking his brother Emilio with him, but not before warning Maytorena in Sonora to keep out of Villa's way if he should head in that direction. Angeles too thought the Sonoran redoubt plan a chimera and urged Villa to face facts. Villa was so angry with his favourite intellectual for this advice that for a while observers feared for Angeles's life, but by September he too was across the border with the Maderos and the other middle-class intellectuals: Juan Medina, Jose Isabel Robles and the Perez Rul brothers, respectively private secretary and treasurer to Villa. Some said they were merely in the United States to lobby Wilson, but it was noticeable that none of them came back.

  Maytorena scarcely needed the warning from Madero. He had experience of the dyspeptic Villa of old and the last thing he wanted was to see the Centaur in Sonora; he knew only too well what his life and that of the other oligarchs would be worth. When Villa's vanguard entered Sonora in September, Maytorena too fled to the United States, as did Rafael Buelna, leader of the villistas in Tepic. Anything was better than a paranoid Villa in full flight. Villa hardly knew Buelna and Maytorena, so accounted their defection no great loss, but he was devastated when his old comrade Rosalio Hernandez, one of the inner circle and a veteran of Paredon, Torreon and Zacatecas went over to Carranza. The last straw was the defection of Urbina. His old favourite had already lost caste by his lacklustre performance. Imitating his master by making continued mindless charges during April and May, Urbina had finally been badly defeated at El Ebano on the outskirts of Tampico, when the defenders routed the villistas, sustaining one casualty for every seven villistas. Villa could forgive military failure, but not insolence and affronts to his honour. Urbina finally moved into forbidden territory. For Villa this was a bridge too far, and he determined on revenge.

  The venal and money-loving Urbina was what Villa was often accused of being: a super-bandit. At his hacienda at Las Nieves he had accumulated a huge fortune from robbery, confiscation, extortion and kidnapping. He owned 300,000 sheep, vast herds of horses and mules, fifty-four gold bars and masses of jewellery hidden in the hacienda grounds. Villa had hitherto ignored all complaints about Urbina, even when it was reported that Urbina was looting instead of fighting Carranza, but the break point came when Villa decided to execute Urbina's second-in-command Borboa for murder. Urbina not only refused to give him up but replied insolently to Villa. Predictably, Villa responded by sending a death squad under Fierro, who had begged for the `privilege' of executing Urbina. There followed a fierce gun battle at the hacienda as Soo villistas overwhelmed Urbina's men. At the end of the shoot-out Villa found a wounded Urbina unsteadily pointing a gun at him, disarmed him, and talked privately with him for a long time. The frustrated Fierro saw Villa apparently on the point of pardoning Urbina. Villa made to leave and ordered Fierro to bring Urbina along to headquarters. Fierro took Villa aside and whispered in his ear, reminding him of his promise that Fierro could `have' Urbina. Villa agreed this was the only solution. On the way back to Parral Fierro stopped the train, took Urbina off and executed him in his usual cold-blooded manner.

  Urbina's execution was very popular with the other villista leaders, who had always resented Villa's partiality for him. However, Urbina's gold turned out to be a curse every bit as potent as that of the loot in Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale or Traven's treasure of the Sierra Madre. Villa delegated the task of finding the gold bars to an officer named Ramirez, saying he would split the treasure trove fifty-fifty with him. Ramirez used great skill in locating the ingots - sunk in various wells - but then reflected that Villa would probably kill him so as not to have to share the loot. He deserted to the carrancistas, taking the gold with him, offering them a fifty-fifty share in return for amnesty. The carrancistas agreed, then double-crossed Ramirez, leaving him with nothing.

  Cast down by all the defections, Villa set out for Sonora. Instead of the 50,ooo-strong ebullient Division del Norte that had won Torreon and Zacatecas, he was now reduced to 12,ooo demoralis
ed troops, short of money, ammunition and food; many remained in the army only for fear of what Villa would do to their families if they deserted. They also had to ride or walk through the steep mountain passes linking Chihuahua and Sonora - there were no railways - and the trek through the Sierra Madre turned into a veritable via dolorosa. Manhauling wagons through icy defiles, with little water en route and no haciendas on the line of march where they could revictual, the men suffered abominably, and were additionally deprived by Villa's orders that all women had to stay behind in Chihuahua.

  The one event to lighten the men's hearts was the death of Fierro, the butcher. While negotiating the treacherous sierras, on 14 October 1915, Fierro came to Casas Grandes Lagoon. It seems he was wearing a waistcoat stuffed with gold coins. When his men seemed reluctant to enter the muddy waters, Fierro spurred his horse forward. To his horror he soon found himself in quicksands and called to his men to fetch a rope and pull him out. Fierro was universally hated, so some of his men prolonged his agony by appearing to help but deliberately casting the lassos short. Soon they abandoned even the pretence of helping him, though Fierro screamed in terror and promised his entire crock of gold to the man who would save him. Nobody lifted a finger and all eyes were filled with delight as the detested murderer slowly sank under the maneating sands.

  It had been a bad year for murderous heavies: first Urbina killed, now Fierro. Then came more dramatic news featuring the Grim Reaper. In the spring of 1915, as Villa confronted Obregon, the exiled dictator Huerta had thought he saw a chance for restoration and sailed from exile in Spain to the United States. He proceeded from New York to El Paso to plan a new rising with Pascual Orozco, hoping to energise a counterrevolutionary nucleus around the hordes of exiled generals, landlords, politicians and other disgruntled Mexican emigres, possibly with assistance from Germany. However, the German factor was also on the minds of US federal agents, who swooped when Orozco met Huerta in New Mexico. Orozco escaped and remained at large for two months before being tracked down and shot dead by Texas Rangers. Huerta was imprisoned for five months in Fort Bliss, morose, drunk and ill. He died in January 1916 after undergoing two surgical operations. The official cause of death was the combined effect of jaundice, cirrhosis and gallstones, but there were persistent rumours that the Americans had poisoned him. He was buried alongside Orozco in Concordia cemetery.

  Villa arrived in Sonora to yet another debacle. Carranza and Obregon, guessing his intentions, had sent two armies to invade Sonora, one seaborne, the other via Sinaloa. The Sonorans, dejected by Maytorena's flight to the USA, put up no resistance. The upshot was that after all his exertions in the mountains, Villa found Carranza in possession of the capital, Hermosillo, and the chief port, Guaymas. Bitterly disappointed, he felt he had no choice, for reasons of credibility, but to proceed with his plan of attacking the 13,ooo-strong carrancista garrison at Agua Prieta. The plan was always a forlorn hope, for in the meantime Woodrow Wilson had recognised Carranza as the legitimate ruler of Mexico and allowed him to reinforce Agua Prieta by sending troops from Coahuila to Sonora across US territory. Thus it was that veterans of Celaya arrived at Agua Prieta via Arizona, eager for another crack at the man they had humiliated in April.

  Knowing nothing of these reinforcements, Villa closed in for the assault on Agua Prieta. On I November he gave an interview to an American reporter, full of bombast and braggadocio, which Martin Guzman, Villa's secretary and biographer reported as follows:

  REPORTER: General Villa, will you attack Agua Prieta?

  VILLA: Yes, and the United States if necessary.

  REPORTER: When?

  VILLA: I'll decide that.

  REPORTER: How many cannon do you have?

  VILLA: Count them when they're roaring.

  It was unfortunate for Villa that Calles, one of Obregon's best generals, was commanding at Agua Prieta. Like his mentor a master of planning, detail and terrain, Calles had constructed a labyrinthine defence of ditches, fences, trenches, barbed wire, mines and machine-gun nests. Villa tried to nullify this by one of his famous night-time attacks, but Calles was ready for this and turned on a battery of searchlights. In the intersecting beams the villistas were easy prey. After just three hours bloody fighting, 223 lay dead around the trenches. Villa, never able to acknowledge that he had been beaten in a fair fight, was adamant that the searchlights were beamed on the battlefield from the American side of the border, and his hatred for Woodrow Wilson grew. Calles wrote laconically to Obregon: `The chief of the attacking forces did not carry out his pompous promises of the evening before.'

  Villa somehow got to hear of Calles's contemptuous remarks about him. Days later, in an act of transmogrified revenge, he slaughtered all sixty males in the small town of San Pedro de la Cuevas, allegedly because many of them had the patronymic Calles. There may be more to the incident than that. Villista sources say that the villagers fired on Villa's men, mistaking them for bandits, and that Villa ordered the massacre in retaliation. He would hear nothing of `mistakes'; there had been too many of them and they all, conveniently, favoured Carranza. He spared a few males on the intercession of the parish priest, on the express condition that the priest did not nag him again. The foolish cleric pushed his luck; Villa pulled out his pistol, shot him dead, and then ordered the reprieved ones executed. Seven men were said to have survived by lying under dead bodies and feigning death.

  Yet, however many reverses he sustained, Villa simply would not give up. Hearing that 2,000 Yaquis previously loyal to Maytorena were ready to join him, he decided to attack Hermosillo. Leaving 6,ooo men to cover him against a surprise sortie from Agua Prieta, he struck south-west and attacked the Sonoran capital, incredibly still using the discredited method of frontal cavalry charges. Since Hermosillo was heavily defended with trenches and machine-gun nests, it was no surprise that he was once again beaten off with heavy losses. The carrancistas then cut the ground from under Villa by a mass kidnapping of the Yaquis' families; the Yaquis gave in, deserted Villa and came to terms with Carranza to save their loved ones. Then came news that the second army he had left behind to prevent a sneak attack from Agua Prieta had been soundly beaten twice, at El Fuerte and Jaguara. There was now nothing for it but that Villa return in defeat and disgrace to Chihuahua.

  The return crossing of the Sierra Madre was even more terrible than the outward journey. Men fell into crevasses and ravines, abandoned the artillery in snowdrifts and deserted in thousands. Villa limped back into Chihuahua City on 17 December; this time there was no rapturous welcome for him, just an escort of ten of his dorados. Down to just 2,000 men by now, he continued to live in a fantasy world and summoned his commanders to discuss another great campaign against Obregon. To his stupefaction, one by one his generals spoke out against him, denouncing his ideas as dangerous illusions and, in effect, going on strike. Almost speechless with anger, Villa made an emotional appeal to them and offered to resign as their chief. To his horror, his commanders ignored the histrionics and seemed quite happy with exactly that outcome. Finally convinced of the seriousness of the situation by private conversation, Villa announced that all who wanted to leave him might do so; he would meanwhile arrange for the peaceful surrender of Chihuahua City and Ciudad Juarez.

  Villa spent his last days in Chihuahua City executing all those of his followers whom he suspected of wanting to seek sanctuary in the United States. He nearly executed Silvestre Terrazas on suspicion of putting out feelers to Carranza, but Silvestre was conspicuously loyal and was able to prove it to Villa. Paranoia was now a dominant aspect of Villa's psychology. He was convinced that he had lost to Obregon only because he had been betrayed, and harboured fantasies of treachery, fuelled by the many cases where he had actually- been forsaken. Before executing Mateo Almanza, a villista who had defected to Eulalio Gutierrez early in 1915, Villa told him the firing squad was too good for him, so he would suffer death by hanging instead. Possibly the `we wuz robbed' fantasy was the only way Villa could keep his purcha
se on reality; he could rationalise his catastrophic failure in 1915 on the basis that all his setbacks were because someone had let him down or betrayed him.

  The last days of December 1915 also saw the last days of the once mighty Division del Norte. At a conference at the Hacienda de Bustillos Villa made a final attempt to persuade his generals to stay with him and fight. All but four of the twenty-seven present shortly afterwards made their peace with Carranza. Obregon entered into negotiations with these generals for the peaceful surrender of Ciudad Juarez, offering to amnesty all villistas except Villa himself, his brother Hipolito and thirteen topranking villista bureaucrats. No less than forty generals, 5,046 officers and 11,128 soldiers took advantage of Obregon's offer of amnesty and mustering-out'pay. Many of these, including Panfilo Natera, promptly joined Carranza's army and fought their ex-comrades.

  Chihuahua was now a wasteland, thronged with the wounded, the desperate and the starving. There were signs of a Hobbesian war of all against all, with kidnapping, murder and rape all at epidemic levels. Many ex-villistas decided they could no longer trust Villa and his whims, and retreated to mountain fastnesses to eke out a precarious living as individual bandits or guerrillas. They might have opted for Carranza, but too many local carrancista commanders used the pretext of amnesty to invite villistas to parleys and then slaughtered them. So it was that Calixto Contreras, once Zapata's white hope among the villistas, became the local caudillo in Cuencame; Tiburcio Cuevas set up as a warlord dominating the area between Durango and Mazatlan; and Miguel Canales became the new bandit chief of Durango. Sometimes these men turned the tables on the treacherous carrancistas by offering to surrender and then massacring the enemy when they arrived at the rendezvous to accept the surrender.