by Frank McLynn
The Centaur himself and his handful of retainers headed for the mountains of Chihuahua, intending to wage guerrilla warfare until the inevitable happened and Obregon and Carranza started to fight each other. Some biographers of Villa think he did so with relief, content to be back in the hills with his most loyal followers, no longer burdened with matters of state and high politics. Unlike most defeated Latin American caudillos, Villa did not go abroad into exile with a vast personal fortune siphoned off over the years, but took to the sierras with just aoo hardcore dorados. His meteoric rise and fall was a textbook case of anomie and would have convulsed many a tough-minded individual; truly he was a man of iron. In three years he had gone from guerrilla fighter to the pinnacle of power and back again. Nobody could have guessed that he was about to launch an endeavour that would make him front-page news across the world.
THE PUNITIVE EXPEDITION
Whatever his qualities as visionary and leader, Zapata was no politician. It almost passes belief that while Villa was engaged in his titanic struggle with Obregon and Carranza, Zapata should have spent his time turning Morelos into a laboratory for land reform, as if he lived in some ShangriLa cut off from the rest of the world. Naturally the temptation was great to do something about what John Womack has called `the utopia of a free association of rural clans', but Zapata's political myopia was egregious. Not only did he take next to no interest in Villa's campaigns, but he could scarcely be bothered with events in Mexico City, right on his doorstep. To some extent Zapata acted out of pique because the Convention was still the official sovereign body. Even though Gutierrez broke out of the capital with io,ooo men, he had left behind the villista Roque Gonzalez de la Garza as his provisional representative - he was endorsed as provisional president by the rump of the Convention on New Year's Day 1915. Since de la Garza loathed Palafox and Soto y Gama and was permanently locked in combat with them, Zapata self-destructively took the line that Mexico City was primarily the Convention's business.
For twelve months, from August 1914 to August 1915, Mexico City went through its darkest hours. First it had been subjected to Obregon's draconian sanctions, then, after a blessed interlude when the innocuous zapatistas roamed the streets, there had been Villa's reign of terror. Then, from 28 January 1915 to 11 March, the capital was once again in Obregon's hands. Obregon proceeded to strip the city of everything valuable that could be carried away to help his war effort. He instituted another savage persecution of the Catholic Church and mulcted its priests and bishops - there was always something crazed and unbalanced about Obregon's anticlericalism, even though the Church had given substantial hostages to fortune by its craven attitude to Diaz before 1910. The worst aspects of the six-week Obregon occupation of the capital were famine and water shortages, caused by the zapatista blockade. When the zapatistas blew up the pumping station at Xochimilco, water was rationed to one hour's supply per day. Sewage and sanitation problems became acute, and cholera threatened. The struggle for daily existence was exacerbated by the constant change of occupying forces, all of whom ruled their predecessors' currency illegal; there was thus no continuing and reliable means of exchange.
So terrible was life in Mexico City during the second Obregon incumbency that when he pulled out on i i March, to move north to Queretaro for the reckoning with Villa, the incoming zapatistas were greeted as deliverers. Church bells were rung as though for liberators, and at first life improved, for the zapatistas restored a full water supply and lifted the blockade so that food could reach the capital. However, this time Zapata's men did not come as naive country bumpkins. They had learned the ways of the city and were less accommodating. More brusque now in their demands for food and money, they began to ape the villistas in mindless looting. Churches, private mansions, gentlemen's clubs, libraries, museums and art galleries were stripped of their precious artefacts, not for resale on the market, but simply out of vandalism. Lovers of horses, the zapatistas made a clean sweep through the stables and studs of the city. Soon the citizens of the capital were complaining that Zapata's men were no better than Obregon's or the villistas. In his eyrie in Morelos Zapata seemed unconcerned at the unsavoury deeds being committed in his name. He called a halt only when a trigger-happy soldier shot dead an American citizen who had resisted a demand for money with menaces. To assuage Woodrow Wilson Zapata had to purge his troops and pay compensation for the murder.
Largely, though, his mind was elsewhere. At his headquarters in an old rice mill in the village of Tlaltizapan he presided over the new experiment with local democracy and communal ownership. There he dispensed justice Solomonically, deciding on land disputes, making small loans to farmers, even arbitrating between men and women in sexual matters. In the evenings he liked to chew the fat with his cronies, sipping brandy, chomping on his ever-present cigar, discussing the finer points of weather, women, horses and gamecocks. During the day he conferred with Palafox about how best to further his social revolution. Palafox frequently commuted to Mexico City after i i March, since he was officially secretary of agriculture in the Convention Cabinet. Acknowledged as the brains behind the detail of land reform in Morelos, he was already attracting hostility, from hedonists who detested his workaholism, from macho zapatistas who despised him for being homosexual and, above all, from the Americans, who, alarmed by his determination to divide up all haciendas, even US-owned ones, regarded him as a dangerous radical. The real power nexus in Morelos was tripartite, running between Zapata as supreme chief of the Revolution, Palafox as secretary of agriculture and Genovevo de la 0, the new governor of Morelos.
Zapata worked on two main principles. One was always to support village leaders against professionals. Even when expert surveyors and university-trained agronomists said that the ancient village boundaries made no sense, Zapata always insisted that village opinion was to prevail. The other principle was that the civilian must always take precedence over the military. Inevitably, in the course of a four-year military struggle, the original village leaders had lost their place to quasiprofessional soldiers but, now that Morelos finally had peace - it was to be the only interlude in the entire period 191o-19 - it was time for the village elders to reassert their authority.
Palafox himself would have liked full-blooded socialism to supplant Zapata's quaint old-fashioned communalism. He it was who set up a National Bank for Rural Loans and used graduates from the National School of Agriculture to implement land reform. Working through the Convention and using national funds, he assigned ninety-five such graduates to agrarian commissions, which were to distribute lands in Guerrero, Puebla, Mexico State, the Federal District and Morelos. The greatest emphasis was on Morelos, where no less than forty-one of these graduates were employed, based on Cuernavaca. The graduate commissioners examined land titles, settled boundary disputes and marked clearly the limits of each village's land. Once it was settled what the extent of a village's land was, the village could decide either to keep it as common land with user rights, or divide it up and give individual title to smallholders; Zapata's line was that only local custom was to be allowed to decide this outcome. No one could sell or rent any of these lands, thus preventing the possibility of collusion between speculators and corrupt villagers.
All land coming into the public domain through confiscation was allocated by Palafox. Private ownership of non-owner-occupied property was outlawed, and all forms of real estate designed for profit instead of use could be expropriated. Palafox's near-socialism meant that the return to Morelos of even moderate liberal planters was impossible. His expropriation of the sugar mills and distilleries particularly angered de la Garza, the president of the Convention, who resented the pretensions of the zapatistas to equal partnership with the villistas and thought they had no right to be putting such emphasis on land reform when they were not pulling their weight in the military struggle. Zapata informed de la Garza, through Palafox and Soto y Gama, that Villa's campaigns were the means and land reform the ends; had he perhaps lost sight of tha
t? Besides, he could not open a second front in the south if Villa did not send him the arms and ammunition promised at the Xochimilco conference.
Zapata showed scant interest in the frenzied in-fighting in Mexico City between de la Garza and Palafox during May and June - which on one occasion saw the two of them almost come to blows. As long as events in the capital did not seriously impinge on Morelos, he was basically insouciant about what happened there. More of a worry for him was his inability to generate an economic surplus. Despite his exhortations to produce exports for the market, the villagers of Morelos, left to their own devices, took the line of least resistance and grew merely subsistence crops. However, he felt moderately content with the social progress of his revolution. The army was decentralised and turned into self-defence units operating on a cell-like structure, each based on an individual village and ready to melt into the countryside if a too-powerful enemy attacked.
Zapata was blasted out of his utopian reverie on II July when, following Obregon's final victory at Trinidad, Pablo Gonzalez occupied Mexico City, forcing the Convention to retire to Toluca. Although Gonzalez pulled out a week later to protect Obregon's lines of communications, and the zapatistas briefly returned, it was clear that, with Villa's defeat, Gonzalez had the whip hand and could return to the capital whenever he chose. At last Zapata roused himself and sent 6,ooo men on a flank attack on the carrancistas north-east of Mexico City on 30 July. However, on 2 August, with the threat from Fierro's cavalry raiders no more, and Villa in headlong retreat north, Gonzalez re-entered the capital, and this time he came to stay. Zapata still remained amazingly complacent, apparently pinning his hopes on an Inter-American Conference in Washington that he somehow thought would lead to Carranza's downfall. He also seems to have harboured Villa's illusion that Obregon and his general would immediately turn and rend Carranza, perhaps even signing up with the Convention. As Zapata saw it, to order an immediate mobilisation was to jump the gun.
Too late he realised the danger he was in and attacked along a wide front in September, pushing into Mexico State and the Federal District. However, although he took many towns, and even the power plant at Necaxa which supplied Mexico City's electricity, he could not hang on to his gains. Hard-pressed by the carrancistas, zapatista chiefs in Puebla and Mexico State started accepting amnesties from Carranza. With Villa in full flight, the Convention finally accepted that it had outlived its usefulness and wound itself up on io October. In Cuernavaca Palafox pointlessly transferred its `sovereignty' to Zapata himself as the one and only legitimate Chief of the Revolution. On ig October Woodrow Wilson showed just what that was worth by recognising Carranza's government and embargoing all arms sales to his enemies.
Even into the autumn of 1915 Zapata continued amazingly complacent. He thought Carranza would be as short-lived a phenomenon as Huerta, and continued to raid over a wide area from Oaxaca to Hidalgo. He now had a plethora of unit leaders, some of them women, who commanded bands from thirty to 200 strong, capable of fighting a war of mobility and even a cavalry blitzkrieg against Carranza. However, even while the zapatistas were scoring flamboyant victories in the southern sector of the war zone, Carranza's forces steadily tightened their grip on Morelos. In November 1915, aware that Zapata was suffering grievously from shortages of ammunition because of the recent US embargo, Carranza announced a `definitive' campaign to end Zapata's hegemony in southern Mexico. Gradually the great social experiment ground to a halt as one by one the agrarian commissioners threw up their posts.
Paranoia and suspicion were suffusing the zapatista movement now, just as they were with the villistas in the north. Brother looked suspiciously on brother; Genovevo de la 0 told Zapata that telegraph operators were betraying all their secrets to Carranza. More and more chiefs, especially in Mexico State and the Federal District, accepted amnesty from Carranza, prising the gateway to Morelos open still wider. In December 1915 Zapata tried a four-pronged counteroffensive, using four armies of 2-3,ooo each. Morelos, southern and central Puebla, southern Mexico State and the Federal District were the arenas for ferocious fighting, as bloody raids were countered with determined carrancista incursions into the heartland of Morelos. Once again Genovevo de la 0 proved to be Zapata's best general. Carranza's troops made a surprise thrust from Acapulco and at first swept all before them, taking Chilpancingo and Iguala and bursting into Morelos. De la 0 drove them back after a brilliant counteroffensive into Guerrero that took him down to the gates of Acapulco by the end of December.
As 1916 opened, Carranza bent all his energies to destroying Zapata for good. He tried to steal his clothes by offering Morelos land reform; he purged his army of all ex-federals who had acted as Zapata's fifth column; he added a further 20,000 troops to his Army of Morelos, making it 30,000 strong; and he even brought in air squadrons to flush the zapatistas from their hideouts in the mountains. Zapata replied with a fiery and uncompromising manifesto, hoping to rally Morelos, but many zapatista chiefs wanted to bargain so as to avoid devastation on the scale achieved by Robles and Huerta. Treachery, betrayal and double-dealing were everywhere in the air, poisoning the atmosphere of the would-be social utopia.
Outstandingly treacherous was the zapatista chieftain Francisco Pacheco. In March Zapata authorised him to put out feelers to Pablo Gonzalez, whom Zapata wished either to suborn or assassinate, but Pacheco double-crossed Zapata and laid his own plans with Gonzalez. Genovevo de la 0 detected Pacheco in his treachery and alerted Zapata, who at first refused to believe him. Soon there was no possibility for denial, since Pacheco without warning or authorisation abandoned Huitzilac to Gonzalez, allowing him within striking distance of Cuernavaca. Although de la 0 saved the crumbling front temporarily, the gravity of the situation was clear. Pacheco actually had the impudence to complain to Zapata about de la O's supposed treachery before he finally revealed his hand openly by capturing Jojutla for Gonzalez. In his moment of triumph he was captured by de la O's guards and summarily executed.
Events now moved rapidly against Zapata. On the eve of a gigantic spring offensive by the carrancistas, he lost one of his most important commanders when Amador Salazar was shot dead by a sniper. Then came the inferno. Gonzalez encircled Morelos with his huge army of 30,000 men and took Cuernavaca on 2 May; Zapata only just made good his escape. Within days Gonzalez's sheer weight of numbers told and he had taken all the major towns in Morelos except Jojutla and Tlaltizapan. On 6 May he felt confident enough to telegraph Carranza that he had completed his mission. Gonzalez taught the lesson that he intended to be another Robles or Huerta. He executed 225 prisoners at Jiutepec on 8 May and sent back 1,300 refugees, who had sought sanctuary in Guerrero, to Mexico City, there to be entrained for forced labour in the Yucatan. The last gasp of the extinguished utopia came in mid June 1916 when Gonzalez took Zapata's headquarters at Tlaltizapan. He looted and sacked the town and executed a further 286 people, including 112 women and forty-two children. Beaten and despondent, the remaining zapatistas took to the hills. Both Zapata and Villa, who little more than a year earlier lorded it in Mexico City, were now fugitive guerrillas in the mountains.
By autumn 1915 Woodrow Wilson had reluctantly decided he had no choice but to recognise Carranza's government in Mexico. The labyrinthine twists and turns of Wilson's Mexican policy and the myriad nuances provided by the plethora of lobbyists and special interests cannot be followed here, but as late as August - when the Washington Conference of ministers from Latin American countries (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Bolivia, Uruguay, Guatemala) convened under the aegis of US secretary of state Robert Lansing - Wilson still hoped he could secure the emergence of a third candidate, neither Carranza nor Villa, as the next president of Mexico. This was the conference on which Zapata set so much store. By that time, however, Carranza had Mexico City in his possession and Villa and Zapata were on the back foot. Carranza remained obdurate and intransigent towards Washington, but gained the backing of US business, labour unions and influential journalists like Lincoln Steffens. A
fter vainly trying to wring special concessions from Carranza, Wilson grudgingly recognised the state of play and extended de facto recognition; de jure did not follow until March 1917. All important countries followed the American lead: Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Japan, Italy, Spain and most of Latin America.
Wilson had no illusions about Carranza's anti-Americanism, but recognition now seemed the merest common sense. After all Carranza (or rather his general Obregon) had defeated Villa, and he had given explicit promises in private about safeguarding US property. (In public he adamantly refused to make any concessions.) For his part Wilson wanted to concentrate his energies on the critical situation in Europe and he was particularly concerned about the penetration of Mexico by German spies and agents.
Villa regarded Wilson's recognition of Carranza as the blackest ingratitude. He issued a violently worded manifesto, declaring that Wilson's recognition of Carranza was a quid pro quo for massive concessions by Carranza, which were tantamount to turning Mexico into an American colony. The bitterness virtually drips from every sardonic cadence: `I emphatically declare that there is much I have to thank Mr Wilson for, because he relieves me from the obligation of giving guarantees to foreigners and especially to those who had at one time been free citizens and are today vassals of an evangelical professor of philosophy ... I take no responsibility for future events.'
After the defeat at Agua Prieta, which Villa blamed on searchlights beamed from the US side of the border, his rage, despair and paranoia knew no bounds. Two American doctors foolishly crossed the border to attend to the villista wounded. In return for this errand of mercy Villa threatened to have them shot in retaliation for Wilson's treachery and ingratitude, and lectured the doctors on his previously favourable attitude to Americans. Announcing that he intended to attack the border town of Douglas, Arizona, he raged: `From this moment on, I will devote my life to the killing of every gringo I can get my hands on and to the destruction of all gringo property.'