by Frank McLynn
Carranza was not a man of great political vision like Zapata or even Villa, but as a politician he possessed strengths they did not have. He was a technocrat, who could work happily in the impersonal area of bureaucracy, political machines, national newspapers and international diplomacy; Zapata and Villa were always limited by the horizons of the village, the hacienda, the state and the patria chica. Only Obregon had the imagination to comprehend both. The charge that Carranza was the quintessential bourgeois is substantially correct. Age had not withered or softened this ruddy-faced old man with his long beard and blue-tinted glasses, and he still represented the values of what one historian has called `clean linen, breakfast trays ... and ice buckets for wine'.
Yet the middle classes as such did not benefit much in the short term from Carranza. His project was to mobilise the masses to modernise Mexico and create a more stable state than Diaz's, where the `contradictions' between modernisation and the haciendas had been ironed out. To do this he had to employ revolutionary rhetoric if not practice. The effect of this, as of the previous terrible six years, was to make the middle classes keep their heads down. Having seen the emotions that could be aroused by any manifestation of inequality, they no longer paraded in public in fine clothes but tried to camouflage themselves by merging into a grey declasse background. Many had fled abroad, principally to the United States, and would not return while Carranza's precarious statebuilding experiment was going on. It was significant that while the US Marines were in Veracruz, that was the city to which large numbers of the middle classes gravitated. Most had concluded that whoever headed the Revolution, whether Villa or Carranza, it was not for them.
Carranza was a workaholic desiccated calculating machine, who made few friends at either the personal or social level. Hugely unpopular, he was the living embodiment of Weber's rational-legal leadership, as against the charismatic spark of Villa and Zapata. People observed him in silence, without any enthusiasm and never with genuine applause; any cheers heard at his speeches were the stage-managed efforts of the rent-a-mobs hired by his supporters. `Frosty', `cold', `icy', `tepid', `lukewarm', were simply the politer terms to describe him as he vainly travelled the country trying to build a cult of his personality. Kissing babies and pressing the flesh was not for Carranza; he tended to react to human contact with glacial hauteur mixed with petulance. Teetotal, a non-smoker, with no breath of sexual scandal surrounding him, Carranza featured in the revolutionary corridos (notably in La Cucaracha) purely as a figure of fun and a butt for Villa.
Carranza's unpleasant personality was not just the invention of his enemies, of zapatista and villista propaganda, but an objective fact noted by almost all who met or interviewed him. Two judgements from sympathisers, one of them a close supporter, are eloquent: `He resembled an English nonconformist mayor more than a president of revolutionary Mexico' and `General Carranza is not what might be termed an easy, approachable man, or one who might inspire any considerable devotion or personal loyalty.' Those who met him, from the Spanish writer Blasco Ibanez to the American reporter John Reed, went away unimpressed. Conversation with him was always hard going: he had no small talk, no gallery touch, no gift with people. His patriarchal beard was a particular object of irritation. `Bewhiskered old goat,' people whispered in corners, and the famous beard was celebrated in hundreds of jokes and songs, most of them obscene.
Yet one needs to give him grudging admiration for his indomitable willpower. Full of unctuous rectitude, he took on powerful enemy after powerful enemy: socialists, land reformers, US capitalists, the Catholic Church, and a host of rebels and insurgents, and he took them all on simultaneously. The Church had done well under Diaz and even under Madero, but received a rude awakening when Huerta came to power. In his anticlericalism Carranza was the continuation of Huerta by other means. His antipathy towards Catholicism was unfair, in that the Church was by no means monolithic. There certainly were reactionary bishops who deserved the lash from Carranza, but there were also revolutionary clerics whose social thinking was more advanced than Carranza's. The Church, after all, had had no difficulty adapting to the social programmes of Villa and Zapata.
However, Carranza and Obregon both saw Catholicism as fundamentally a reactionary force: it always tried to swim along with whoever held power, it had huge resources and rich lands which it guarded jealously and, most of all, it influenced hearts and minds. As such it was a fetter on a modern dynamic society with a burgeoning economy and needed to be cut down to size - long-term through the education of the masses, shortterm through persecution. This latter took violent and vociferous forms. Carrancistas drank out of chalices, wore priestly vestments as motley, built fires in confessionals, shot up relics and sacred images, converted churches into barracks and carried out mock executions on the statues of saints. In Mexico State they banned sermons, christenings, confessions, masses and even the kissing of priests' rings.
Carranza did not prevent these anticlerical outbursts as they formed a valuable part of his apparatus of centralised control. In his case a personal puritanism and fastidiousness made him look askance at a Church which connived at hedonism, fiestas, drinking, gambling, bullfights and even the sins of the flesh - in Carranza's mind all signs of backwardness and vice. His mouthpieces accused the Church of revelling in the squalor of the peasantry, to the point where it opposed elementary hygiene and washing with soap. Carranza was well aware of the absurdity of some of these charges, but he wanted the Church firmly under his heel, so that it could not emerge as an ideological rival to his version of the Revolution or mobilise its supporters to form a powerful political party. However, he was no anticlerical zealot, for he knew that virulent anti-Catholicism could be dangerous; when such people genuinely came to power in the 1920s, they triggered the bloody Cristero rebellion.
Even as he repressed one powerful institution, he dealt still more firmly with a far more formidable enemy: foreign capitalism championed by the USA. There had been no hostility to foreign investment as such under Madero, simply an insistence that the companies and corporations pay taxes at the proper level, instead of enjoying the bonanza profits of the Diaz years. However, Carranza saw the penetration of the Mexican economy by foreign capitalists as a deep affront to Mexican sovereignty and, even when hard-pressed in Veracruz in late 1914, made clear his determination to reform the basis on which foreign and oil companies operated in Mexico. In March 1915, when Villa was still expected to win the civil war, he raised taxes on foreign mining interests. When Washington protested vigorously, Carranza riposted by granting exemptions for small companies but not the US giants, and continued to resist all pressure from secretary of state Lansing. In August 1915 he passed a new law, making it illegal for foreign companies to defend their interests by diplomatic means - any defence had to be conducted through the Mexican courts - but although Carranza was anti-American, he was no fool. He may have flirted with Germany, but he did not risk Mexican neutrality by overprovoking the Americans, and he resisted all German machinations, especially in the matter of the Zimmermann telegram.
On land reform Carranza was always ambivalent. He accepted a measure of it opportunistically, with absolutely no scintilla of ideological conviction. His proclamation of ii June 1915 virtually froze matters on an `as is' basis with its statement that no land would be confiscated `which had been acquired legitimately from individuals or governments and which did not constitute a special privilege or monopoly'. His National Agrarian Council took a year to get under way and when it finally started work (8 March 1916), proceeded at a snail's pace. Then on 19 September 1916 Carranza suspended all land grants made by the Council. By 1917 the Council had restored lost land to just three villages in the whole of Mexico. It was small wonder that Zapata called Carranza `a sonofabitch'.
While contemptuous of the peasantry, Carranza did listen to Obregon and build bridges to the urban working class. The Casa del Obrero Mundial (The House of the World Worker - Mexico's equivalent of the TUC) signed an agreem
ent with Obregon and Carranza at the beginning of the civil war. In return for preferential treatment, the Casa promised to fight the `forces of reaction' (i.e. Villa and Zapata) and established six `Red Battalions' manned by artisans - carpenters, bricklayers, stonecutters, tailors, typesetters, etc. However, as soon as Villa was defeated and the Battalions had outlived their usefulness, Carranza hit back harshly at workers who had the temerity to strike against his government. His real double-cross of the workers came in August 1916. When the call for a general strike went up, Carranza revived a law of 25 January 1862, under which strikers could be condemned to death, and on 2 August Carranza's police shut down the Casa. The First Chief justified his cynical brutality by inane rhetoric to the effect that the striking workers had denied `the sacred recognition of the fatherland'.
Obregon and the radicals were not happy with Carranza's reactionary stance on labour relations and planned to outwit him at the Constitutional Conference called in Queretaro. With his histrionic sense of the past, Carranza set out for the historic conference at 8 a.m. on 18 November 1916, riding all day on horseback from the capital to Queretaro, where Juarez had executed Maximilian. Carranza confidently expected to be able to build continuity with Juarez's 1857 Constitution, but the young Turks in his movement had other ideas.
Part of what Carranza wanted he got. The Constitution, finally promulgated in early 1917, increased the power of the presidency, abolished the office of vice-president and weakened the legislature. Here was irony indeed. The Revolution had not just devoured its own children but had created a new chief executive with powers greater than Diaz had enjoyed. A seismic national convulsion to oust a dictatorship ended by entrenching an even more authoritarian figure at the head of an even more authoritarian system. This was exactly what Carranza wanted. He did not believe in the pluralism of parties, voters and political participation. He defined democracy as the paternalistic state, with himself as the embodiment of both state and democracy or, as he put it: `Democracy ... cannot be anything other than the government of noble, profound and severe Reason' (with himself as Reason of course).
However, the radicals had their pound of flesh. They and Carranza could agree on Article 27 of the Constitution, as this gave Carranza what he needed in his battle with the US oil and mining companies. Article 27 declared that private property was not an absolute right but one that could be revoked, as the ultimate owner of land, water and subsoil rights was the nation. It was laid down that in any conflict over subsoil rights (clearly the oil companies were envisaged), foreign owners would not be allowed to appeal to their governments but would have to abide by the decision of the Mexican courts. Yet on Article 123 Carranza was clearly outflanked by his radicals. Paradoxically (in view of the prevailing anticlericalism) influenced by Leo XIII's encyclical Rerum Novarum, this article stipulated an eight-hour working day, abolition of child labour, protection for working women and adolescents, holidays, reasonable wages payable in cash, profit-sharing, arbitration and compensation in case of dismissal.
On religion too the radicals at first had their way. In Articles 3 and 130 the Church was refused recognition as a legal entity, priests had to be publicly registered, religious education and all rituals outside churches were prohibited, and the churches themselves were made the property of the state. Carranza had a short way with this. As chief executive he simply refused to implement the articles against religion. He proposed entirely new and conciliatory Articles 3 and 13o, and when Congress rejected these, got snarled up in a constitutional crisis on the matter. Carranza took the line that the radical reforms passed against his will at Queretaro were mistaken and that he had the God-given right to ignore, veto or sabotage them.
Yet overwhelmingly Carranza's main problems were military, in two senses, internal and external. Carranza tried to make the military subordinate to his civilian bureaucracy while ultimately relying on the Army to enforce his will - a difficult juggling act. Moreover, because opposition to his centralism was so intense, Carranza had to make sure the Army was reliable. The most obvious means was bribery, and Carranza paid the military so well that the manpower and establishment budget for the Army was ten times the figure under Diaz. However, because of corruption - the favourite scam was padded payrolls - the tax burden on citizens was out of all proportion to the security the military provided. Carranza knew what was happening, but was prepared to connive at the graft of his generals provided they did not challenge him.
To prevent their making common cause with rebels in their own localities, troops from the north were sent to serve in the south, while southern levies were sent to control the north. This created other problems. Northerners could not deal with the humid climate of the steamy jungles of the south nor the southerners with the cold of the north. Such a high degree of mobilisation into alien areas spread disease, and because of homesickness, the troops tended to rebel or desert. Aggravating the situation was the frequent non-payment of soldiers, as the generals had pocketed their wages. The scale of military and government corruption reached the point where the word carrancear was coined to describe official embezzlement and defalcation. Carranza's bureaucrats and generals were described as being con unas listas (with fingernails at the ready) and there were many plays on words such as sociedad and suciedad ('society' and `filth').
It was with these corrupt and lacklustre officers and men that Carranza hoped to wage war to the knife against a series of determined, deadly and ideologically committed enemies. There were Villa and Zapata, and for a while there was Pershing, but this nowhere near exhausted the list of enemies. There was the formidable private army of Manuel Pelaez, which hired out at US$15,ooo a month and was used by the US-owned Mexican Petroleum at Tampico and by El Aguila, the British oil giant operating at Poza Rica and Papantla. There was endemic banditry - especially in west-central Mexico and Tampico and San Luis - and in the Laguna area guerrilla leaders like Calixto Contreras were active, indirectly helping Villa by their depredations. At various times the towns of Yerbaus, Pedricena, Rodeo, San Juan del Rio and Cuencame all fell to the guerrillas.
In Sonora there were continuing problems with the Yaquis. In December 1915 Obregon tried in person to broker a deal with the Yaqui chiefs, but refused their demand for absolute dominion over their ancestral lands. While the so-called manso (tame) Yaquis surrendered, their bronco brethren fought on. In another ferocious Yaqui war, large numbers of troops drove the Indians into the mountains, from which they raided and spread terror through Sonora state. In spring 1916 they took the defended town of Merichichi, but were unable to make further headway because of shortage of ammunition. After a short period of peace, war broke out again in the summer of 1917. Calles, trying to build a political career for himself in the shadow of Obregon, threatened dire retribution, but the Yaquis, so good at guerrilla warfare, made monkeys of the federal troops, to the point where one American reporter later compared the Yaqui conflict to the Rif war in Morocco.
Most of all, there was Felix Diaz's revolt in Oaxaca. Beginning in 1916, this soon overtook the threat from Villa and Zapata as the most dangerous of all the challenges to Carranza's regime. Diaz, the dictator's nephew, was the Revolution's permanent gadfly. Under his uncle he had been a career soldier and Inspector-General of Police, and in 1911 he had briefly acted as governor of Oaxaca before throwing up the office in pique. In 1912 he first made his mark as a putschist when he headed an abortive rebellion in Veracruz. Imprisoned by Madero when he should have been executed, he collaborated in Reyes's failed coup in February 1913 but after La Decena Tragica thought he had the presidency in his pocket. Huerta double-crossed him and drove him into exile, first in Havana, then New York and New Orleans. On Diaz's return to Texas Huerta gave him another chance, but Diaz refused to collaborate because of Huerta's links with Germany.
Diaz was always lucky, as his amazing adventures in early 1916 proved. He set out to raise rebellion against Carranza and sailed south from Galveston, but his ship was caught in a ferocious storm
in the Gulf; Diaz and his henchmen were shipwrecked and all their papers lost. This proved fortunate when they managed to swim ashore just south of the Mexican border, for they escaped identification when they were stopped by the local police. After a tortuous journey via Mexico City, Diaz finally reached his destination, Oaxaca, in the summer of 1916. Here he raised an army of 3,000 men, but alienated the locals by forced contributions. As a result they collaborated with government troops against Diaz and, after several bad maulings from the federals, he decided to switch his base of operations to Chiapas. After a terrible trek through the steamy jungles of the south-east, he emerged in Chiapas with just loo of his original 3,000.
The year Diaz really came into his own was 1917. This time he found a way to coexist harmoniously with the local rebels and gradually to make them over to his cause. He began raiding over a wide area: Tabasco, Oaxaca, Veracruz. His aim was to do in the south what Carranza had done in the north in 1913-14: head a disparate and heterogeneous coalition of rebels. His manifesto, the Plan of Tierra Colorada, dated i February 1916, had cunningly asserted that legitimacy and constitutional legality lapsed in Mexico in October 1913, when Huerta dissolved Congress; Diaz could hardly have cited February 1913 as the date for the end of legitimacy, for it was his machinations that had triggered Madero's downfall. Cunning, too, was the programme of liberal conservatism in the manifesto with which Diaz tried to hook all the `out' groups: priests, Catholics, Spaniards, ex-federals, ex-Army officers, etc. With an eye to possible support from the Allies, he bitterly denounced Carranza's allegedly pro-German sympathies. The appeal of Diaz was to all those disaffected conservative and reactionary groups who were repelled by the radicalism of Villa and Zapata.