by Frank McLynn
Since 1917 was the year of Mexico's allegedly `socialist' constitution, of the Russian Revolution and of the American entry into the First World War, it was not surprising that a brew consisting of strong pro-Allied sentiment and right-wing social nostrums made a strong appeal. A major breakthrough was Diaz's alliance with Manuel Pelaez, which meant that the oil companies paid taxes, officially under protest, to the rebels. In general, property owners were happy to pay levies to Diaz in return for the sort of protection against genuine bandits that Carranza could never provide. The United States viewed the spread of the felicista (after Felix Diaz) revolt with particular satisfaction. Angry with Carranza for his plans to tax US oil interests and the subsoil declaration in the 1917 Constitution, and worried about the threat of German sabotage to the pipelines about which Carranza was maddeningly complacent, Washington covertly backed Diaz and Pelaez, shipped arms to them and even laid contingency plans to occupy the oil fields if Carranza managed to defeat Diaz and Pelaez. Fortunately, perhaps, these schemes remained on the back burner. Washington never actually intervened on the side of Diaz and Pelaez and gradually came to terms with Carranza.
The felicistas proved as hard to defeat as Villa and Zapata. Even though Pelaez did not have the advantage of mobility - he had to defend Tampico - Carranza's forces still could not dislodge him. Although Carranza's propaganda organs lambasted Diaz and his followers as `counter-revolutionaries', the mud would not stick, perhaps because people were so disgusted by the endemic corruption of the Carranza system that they were not prepared to buy that particular bill of goods from him. Some say that Diaz was lucky in that the Indians of the south supported him, when their objective interests seemed to lie with the carrancistas who had promised to abolish debt peonage. However, localism and adherence to the patria chica by the Indians need not have been `false consciousness'. Conflict in the south was always village against village not, as in Morelos, campesinos against hacendados. Choosing the deep south as the headquarters for his trans-class conservative coalition was a shrewd move on Diaz's part.
The felicista movement was at root composed of disaffected conservatives, the last hope of those who had prospered under Porfirio Diaz, but it was also an eclectic mix of all kinds of political adventurers with different power bases in different localities. Some of Diaz's supporters were indistinguishable from bandits, while others identified banditry as Mexico's single biggest curse. It appealed to all who resented Carranza's centralism, all who wanted a loose federal structure and all who thought Carranza and his clique were corrupt land-grabbing opportunists. Most of all, it drew on southern resentment of the north and its dominance in the Revolution and on southern hatred of Carranza's proconsuls. For the same reason, its principal weakness was it had no appeal in the north and could therefore never achieve the critical `take off' point as a genuinely national movement.
The felicista movement was a great help to both Villa and Zapata in the years 1917-20, as it drew off Carranza's forces to deal with a threat considered much more serious. At their most powerful, the felicistas could field more than 20,000 men - up to 15,000 in Veracruz, 2,000 in Chiapas, 2,000 in Tabasco, plus a large force in Puebla. Carranza made as little headway against Diaz as Pablo Gonzalez had made against Zapata in 1916, and for the same reasons: the poor calibre of federal troops, the mistaken use of terror and repression, and the pervasive corruption of the regime, which saw federal generals selling ammunition to the rebels. The result was a stand-off, for Diaz's movement was weakened both by his inability to appeal to the north and by increasing factionalism, with Pelaez only nominally under Diaz's control.
Felix Diaz's rebellion posed particular problems for Zapata, for in many ways the felicistas were in competition with him - in the case of Puebla, literally for the same space. Although ideologically felicismo was not a rival - its leaders were propertied, its concerns local and provincial rather than agrarian, its interest in land reform purely pragmatic - it was an important fact of life in the south. Some zapatista leaders secretly blamed Zapata for not having devoted more attention to Oaxaca earlier, thus providing an opportune gap which Diaz filled. Some also actively lobbied for an informal military alliance with Diaz as the best way to defeat Carranza. Zapata would have none of it. Until the very end of his career, he remained impatient and disdainful of all `popular front' approaches to politics and remained the sea-green incorruptible in his commitment to land reform - but the unlikelihood that Felix Diaz would sign up to Zapata's Plan of Ayala was plain for all to see.
In early 1917 Zapata was again obsessed with getting back to the interrupted work of agrarian reform and local democracy. By now, after seven years of war, the hacienda had ceased to exist as an institution in Morelos. Its labour force had been conscripted, deported or had simply bolted; its buildings had been gutted, its mills and machinery dismantled and removed; its plantations had become a jungle of weeds. More worryingly, the organic community of the village was almost extinguished, agriculture had been neglected and starvation loomed. To boost the morale of demoralised pueblos, Zapata reluctantly set up a centralised administration, in the hope of getting the villages back on their feet. His agents acted like political commissars, whose aim was to raise local elan and encourage the democratic ethos. Education was as much a mania with Zapata as with Villa, and he made huge efforts to benefit the population by introducing schools of all kinds.
On the military front, Zapata abandoned his forward policy of attacks on Mexico City - in any case more dangerous now that Pershing had pulled out and Carranza could redeploy one of his armies - in favour of retrenchment, and tried to throw a ring of steel around Morelos, arranging his armies in a square at the four corners of the state, ready to repel all incursions. However, there were three ominous developments which, seen in retrospect, heralded the first signs of decline for zapatismo. The first was that Zapata's principle of self-help backfired on him. The policy of arming villages to fight Gonzalez boomeranged when these selfdefence units began resisting Zapata's own foraging parties. The defiance of the pueblos rose as Zapata's commanders grew more cynical. By increasingly putting the food supply for their troops above the maintenance of good relations with the villagers, such men jeopardised the careful structure of interlocking rights and duties Zapata had built up.
Allied to this was the problem of banditry. The destruction of Morelos, the years of hard fighting and the multitudinous atrocities had cracked the carapace of civilisation and made it difficult for zapatismo to continue as a pristine, coherent force. More and more zapatista commanders operated like bandits, and more and more genuine bandits operated under the banner of Zapata, to the point where all distinctions between revolutionary guerrillas, so-called `social bandits' and old-style brigands became meaningless. In extreme cases Zapata had to take military action against armed criminal bands within Morelos.
The most serious and threatening problem, however, was the crumbling resolve and disaffection of his chieftains, who seemed to be losing their stomach for the struggle. Since Carranza had proved not to be an evanescent phenomenon but a permanent fixture, did that mean that the zapatistas were now committed to permanent, eternal warfare? Ought they not either to try to cut a deal with Carranza or at least form an alliance with Felix Diaz? Since Zapata set his face against either proposal and stalled, hoping Micawber-like that something would turn up, it is not surprising that the patience of his generals snapped. First to defect was Domingo Arenas, his commander in Puebla. Arenas's loss meant that Zapata had to abandon his next military project: the capture of Puebla City. Zapata went to extraordinary lengths to try to coax Arenas back into the fold, even promising an alliance in Puebla with the felicistas, but Arenas was deaf to all blandishments; he had a good offer of amnesty from Carranza and was now convinced the future lay with the bearded one.
The next round of defections was even more serious. Early in May 1917, in the town of Buenavista de Cuellar, Otilio Montano and Lorenzo Vasquez announced they were forming a breakaway
movement from Zapata. To Zapata this was double-dyed treachery even more serious than Domingo Arenas's, for Montano was one of his earliest compadres, the man who had given him Kropotkin to read, studied all the Anenecuilco land deeds and co-authored the Plan of Ayala. Zapata attacked the town of Buenavista on 5 May and hanged Vasquez without any further ceremony. Over Montano he hesitated, especially when his old comrade argued eloquently that Zapatismo had gone off the rails because of the malign influence of Palafox and Soto y Gama. That pair in turn accused Montano of conspiring to compass Zapata's death and produced some damning circumstantial evidence.
Zapata was reluctant to proceed with the court martial against his old friend, but Palafox insisted that revolutionary justice must take its course. Zapata therefore did another of his disappearing acts and left Tlaltizapan until the trial was over. The evidence against Montano was heard in camera and by all accounts never moved beyond the circumstantial. Montano vigorously denied all the charges and counteraccused Soto y Gama and Palafox of having betrayed the Revolution. Montano was predictably found guilty. In a final act of vindictiveness, Palafox denied him the last rites and even the customary favour of being able to face the firing squad. He died on 18 May with arms outstretched, declaiming his innocence. Palafox had hung a sign about his neck that read: `So die all traitors to the fatherland.'
A curse now seemed to hover over the zapatista movement. Zapata, like Villa, entered a paranoid phase where he saw conspiracy and betrayal everywhere. While Soto y Gama was ordered to compose a proclamation that traitors and all their families and children would be eliminated, Zapata kept repeating his credo: `I can pardon those who kill and steal but I never pardon a traitor.' Despite this, disaffection and factionalism continued. Antonio Barona killed Felipe Neri for trying to disarm some of his men, and then went on to liquidate the zapatista leaders Francisco Estrada and Antonio Silva. Finally Barona crossed a man even more formidable and ferocious than himself: Genovevo de la 0 dragged him to his death at the horse's tail, riding at a gallop through the streets of Cuernavaca.
Signs that the movement was in grave, possibly terminal, confusion could be detected with the rise of Valentin Reyes, who bade fair to become Zapata's Fierro, killing large numbers of people personally - thirty in one batch alone in March 1917. Other zapatista leaders had taken to tearing down sugar mills to start themselves on a career of racketeering, selling the scrap metal on the black market. The unkindest cut was the behaviour of Eufemio Zapata. Always a useless, brutal, foulmouthed alcoholic and lecher, Eufemio was involved in more and more bar-room brawls and alienated more and more people. He had the peculiarity of becoming enraged when anybody was drunk while he was sober. Demanding an apology from a colleague for some trivial slight, he roared at him: `You'll soon have to find out what my machete knows.' He even began to make insulting remarks about his brother. In mid June 1917 he finally went too far. He lost his temper with the father of his second-in-command Sidronio Camacho for being drunk and beat him savagely with a stick until the old man lost consciousness, berating him with each stroke of the rod. Camacho came after Eufemio, gunned him down in the street, and then dragged the dying man on to an anthill of fierce, stinging soldier ants before decamping. He fled to Carranza, who granted him amnesty.
Eufemio's many enemies whispered behind their hands that God's vengeance was just, that finally the zapatistas had managed to kill someone who deserved shooting. Zapata, however, was inconsolable: his paranoid suspicions increased and he spent more and more time in isolation; gone were the heady days of chewing the fat in the plaza. Always taciturn, he now became dark, irascible, neurasthenic, subject to mood swings and violent outbursts, feared by his men for his unpredictability. He sought consolation with his mistresses, especially the new favourite Maria Flores, and continued to beget children on women other than his wife: a son Diego was born in 1916, a daughter Maria Luisa in 1918 and another son Mateo in the same year.
The more Zapata reflected, the more he thought that Otilio Montano had been right after all, that Palafox and Soto y Gama had brought more harm than good to the movement. From autumn 1917 they were out of favour, their influence seriously in decline. No longer would Zapata praise Palafox at the expense of the others, as in his saying: `Martinez and Soto and Serrato made the smoke, but Palafox cooked the meat.' The new favourite, principal adviser and eventual successor to his mantle was Gildardo Magana - aged twenty-six, a native of Michoacan, a natural mediator and reconciler - but Magana's first task for Zapata almost ended in disaster. In August 1917 Domingo Arenas sent a message that he now repented of his decision to seek amnesty with Carranza and wished to return to the fray and secure Puebla for Zapata. Whether suspecting treachery or determined to kill a man he had repeatedly denounced as a traitor, Zapata sent Magana to meet Arenas with a company of armed men. What happened next is disputed. Some say an altercation between Magana and Arenas escalated spontaneously, others that Magana, primed by Zapata, provoked Arenas outrageously. The upshot was that both sides started shooting and Arenas fell, mortally wounded.
Magana advised Zapata that, with the movement in a cul-de-sac, he should try to find allies among Carranza's putative comrades who secretly loathed him. Zapata argued that outside contacts never produced results: on the one hand, a whole bevy of agents in Cuba and the USA had achieved nothing, and on the other, every time he made a move towards an external alliance, some important zapatistas ended up defecting. However, Magana patiently plugged away, and in the end Zapata agreed they should reopen the channel to Villa, making him the first building block in a coalition. Zapata also seemed more amenable to the idea of making contacts with Felix Diaz. (The fact that Diaz had been involved in Madero's downfall and death would have made it impossible for Villa to work with Diaz, but Zapata was not troubled by this consideration, since he had never had any high opinion of Madero.) However, the most interesting of Magana's suggestions was that they should approach Obregon, who had recently criticised Carranza.
Obregon's career since his great military triumph in 1915 had been patchy. He remained in Carranza's Cabinet as minister of war until 1917, working to produce a thoroughly professional Army, but at the constitutional conference at Queretaro he had backed the young radicals while superficially remaining scrupulously loyal to Carranza. As soon as the new constitution was formalised, he resigned as minister of war, married Maria Tapa, his second wife, and withdrew, Cincinnatus-like, to grow chickpeas on his hacienda at Quinta Chilla. He had not abandoned his ambition, however. As he joked later: `I have such good eyesight that from Huatabampo I managed to see the presidential chair.'
The idea of an entente between Obregon and Zapata remains one of those fascinating historical might-have-beens. They were the only two of the great quartet in the Mexican Revolution who never met and never had personal baggage to bring into their relations with each other. Whereas Carranza and Zapata on the one hand, and Obregon and Villa on the other, were consumed by personal hatred and dislike, Obregon and Zapata were terra incognita for each other. Some say the alliance of Zapata and Obregon was just as implausible as an alliance between the classes they represented: the peasantry and the petite-bourgeoisie. Others say class is not the important factor, that a gulf of culture, tradition, mentalite and even religion divided the two men.
The possibility of an understanding between them does seem remote. Obregon emphasised national concerns, Zapata local ones; Obregon was a man of the city, at home with organised labour, Zapata despised the city and thought the proletariat an irrelevance; Obregon was Weber's `rational-legal' man, dedicated to the bureaucratic, the apersonal and the meritocratic, Zapata the charismatic leader linked to the traditions of personalism and caudillismo; in short, Obregon represented the nationalist, urban, literate, secular, bureaucratic, achievement-oriented ethos while Zapata was the champion of the rural, the parochial, the illiterate, the pastoral and the agricultural. At the simplest level, Zapata was a Catholic and Obregon an anticlerical and the latter was a northerner
while the former was a man of the south. Obregon was interested in business, economic diversification and producing a cash crop for export, while Zapata headed an agrarian movement of nostalgia, resisting economic change. So how could the two ever have found common ground?
Zapata's search for allies was overtaken by events when, in November 1917, Carranza again sent Pablo Gonzalez and the Army south to `pacify' Morelos. Gonzalez, making use of the invaluable local knowledge of Sidronio Camacho, who had fled to Carranza after killing Eufemio Zapata, quickly took Cuautla, Jonacatepec and Zacualpan. Facing a serious threat to his position, Zapata was rescued when a major revolt broke out in Coahuila under Lucio Blanco, sending ripples all the way down to Veracruz and triggering an army mutiny there. At last it seemed a national resistance to Carranza was forming, if only Blanco could link up and make common cause with Felix Diaz. In euphoria Zapata wrote to his allies in Hidalgo and Tlaxcala to encourage them to link up with Blanco, but it was yet another false dawn. The revolts in both Veracruz and Coahuila fizzled out.
Magana did not despair, patiently explaining to Zapata that the gulf separating Obregon and Benjamin Hill on the one side from Carranza and Pablo Gonzalez on the other was so wide that in the end a split would have to come. In February 1918 Magana actually proposed making overtures to Carranza; the deal would be that Zapata recognised Carranza as president, and in return Morelos would be granted virtual autonomy. This was something like the proposal Zapata had made to Domingo Arenas when he first broke away, but a deal he was prepared to do with a minnow he would not do with the leviathan himself. For his part, Carranza treated all such proposals with lofty contempt. One of Carranza's best attested remarks was: `I never was a revolutionary, nor am I, nor will I ever be.' He did not reject Magana's overtures; he simply ignored them.