by Frank McLynn
Zapata meanwhile became alarmed after an interview with the American tycoon, theosophist and amateur archaeologist William E. Gates, who argued that the USA was certain to intervene in Mexico once the war in Europe ended. Zapata foresaw two dangers: either that Washington would back Carranza to the hilt to crush all dissidents, or that Carranza would fall and in the ensuing chaos the Americans would annex Mexico. He therefore abruptly changed tack. In his 1918 manifestoes he stopped mentioning the Plan of Ayala and started emphasising the common cause of national unity. All Zapata's 1918 utterances were popular front in spirit; the old intransigence had gone and with it the tunnel-vision concentration on agrarian reform. As John Womack puts it: `In his head Zapata had finally learned that the defence of the villages of Morelos was not equivalent to the defence of the nation, that in great crises the local cause was subsidiary. But in his heart it seemed that the two struggles had been one to the end.'
By the summer of 1918 Zapata's popular front mania had reached its apogee. Overtures, feelers and letters went out to almost every conceivable opponent of Carranza: to Villa, to the Americans, to Obregon (who did not respond), to Felix Diaz and to Manuel Pelaez. Pelaez did reply - both he and Zapata agreed to be deputy serving under the other as supremo - but still nothing happened. When four more felicista risings broke out in April 1918, in Tamaulipas, Tlaxcala, Guerrero and Puebla - three of them former zapatista areas - Zapata sent a roving envoy to confer with Diaz's men in each theatre. Ironically, Magana, who had always been for alliances of whatever kidney, now warned Zapata against an alliance with Diaz, arguing that his organisation would very likely be absorbed by the felicistas like a sponge and transformed into an essentially reactionary movement.
Magana was right to be cautious. The reason Morelos had been so long without another visitation from Pablo Gonzalez was that Carranza was obsessed with the threat from Diaz. By 1918 the felicistas had an impressive national network of supporters, not just in Veracruz, Oaxaca and Chiapas, but also in San Luis Potosi, Nuevo Leon and Tamaulipas, to say nothing of Pelaez in Tampico. The worrying thing for Zapata was that Diaz and his allies had supplanted him almost completely in Puebla, Guerrero and Michoacan. In Michoacan indeed, where villages were rare and haciendas and ranches predominated, professional banditry had now completely replaced politically motivated guerrilla warfare. Arising in response to systematic abuses by Carranza's troops and civil authorities, rather in the manner of the endemic banditry in Germany at the end of the Thirty Years War, brigandage swept across Michoacan in three great plagues. In the Balsas region and Tierra Caliente was Jesus Cintora; in the central cities was Michoacan's Al Capone, Jose Altamirano; and worst of all, in the countryside, there was the scourge of Michoacan, Ines Chavez Garcia.
Apart from Felix Diaz himself and Villa, Carranza rated Chavez Garcia the most serious threat to the credibility of his regime, by this time far ahead of Zapata. Informally linked in alliance to the felicistas, Chavez Garcia was the most dreadful monster thrown up in the entire Revolution, a man who made Fierro seem pedestrian. A legendary horseman who could sleep at will in the saddle, he had no home base or the protection of sympathetic locals, but relied on sheer speed to evade capture. Where Villa's thugs clipped ears, Chavez liked to slit throats in person with knives or machetes. In the town of San Jose he killed twenty men to the sound of music, sadistically granting each victim a last request before he twisted the knife. Another great pleasure was to watch his men gang-rape women and force virgins to take part in `daisy-chain' orgies. The terror of Michoacan and the most feared man in Mexico, Chavez Garcia contemptuously brushed aside all attempts by the federals to catch him. He succeeded for a time precisely because zapatismo had abandoned the struggle in Michoacan, and when he died, it was from the 1918 flu pandemic, not in battle or at the hands of a firing squad.
In Morelos, 1918 was notable for the demise of Palafox. For over a year Zapata had been moving away from him under Magafla's influence. In retrospect he now saw the 1914 alliance with Villa - of which Palafox was the architect - as his greatest mistake. Palafox behaved more and more arrogantly even as his influence declined. He told all who would listen that he, not Montano, was the true author of the Plan of Ayala. He insulted Zapata's actual and potential allies and continued with the hardline intransigence. However, what finally brought him down in the macho society of Morelos was a homosexual scandal, and Zapata used this excuse to dismiss him. By this time Zapata was so angry with Palafox that he actually wanted to consign him to the firing squad. Magana advised him against this, saying the execution of Palafox would make him a martyr and pose serious questions of credibility against zapatismo as a whole. Palafox fled to Carranza, spreading scurrilous rumours about his former boss. Palafox said that Zapata's fundamental fault was that he was lazy and was far too interested in `good horses, fighting cocks, flashy women, card games and intoxicating liquors'. He listed the twenty-two women Zapata had had affairs with in the years 1911-18; another disillusioned and mendacious Zapata admirer, H. H. Dunn, later notched the figure up to twenty-six.
Mexico from 1917 on was a country in the grip of famine, pestilence and disease - yet another reason Carranza was not strong enough to attempt a final settling of accounts with Zapata. Dearth and hunger brought the inevitable hoarding, speculating, graft and profiteering in its wake, carried out both by private entrepreneurs and officialdom. With food short, street-cleaning and sanitation non-existent outside the big cities, and squalor everywhere, it was not surprising that deadly diseases laid hold of the population. First to strike was typhus, the time-honoured killer that lurks in the wake of wars and dearth. It claimed 1,000 fatalities a week in 1916-17, and in the south further killers joined in: smallpox, yellow fever and malaria. Nature completed the devastation in Zapata's heartlands that Pablo Gonzalez had begun.
Then in the winter of 1918 a new enemy appeared in Morelos: the Spanish flu that would carry off forty million people worldwide. Its effect in Mexico was devastating: whereas in England the mortality was four in every thousand, south of the Rio Grande it was twenty to the thousand. Total mortality in Mexico from the pandemic was 300,000, almost the only benefit being that the virus disposed of Chavez Garcia. In Morelos the flu bit particularly deep as it impacted on a populace weakened by dislocation, nomadism, starvation, fatigue, impure water and a particularly severe winter. People dropped like stricken flies and died much faster than they could be buried. By December 1918 the once thriving city of Cuautla was a ghost town. Morelos lost a quarter of its population, both from the deadly virus and from the exodus of Morelians into neighbouring Guerrero, reputed to be flu-free. Zapata therefore suffered severe manpower losses in his army at the very time, by sheer unfortunate coincidence, that all his key agents and gunrunners were rounded up in Mexico City.
Zapata's letters in the winter of 1918 betray a great and overdetermined anxiety. He worried about his manpower losses, grieved for the plight of Morelos, fretted about his inability to find allies, and most of all harped on his major preoccupation: that the United States would finally invade Mexico now that the war in Europe was over. Zapata even wrote to Felipe Angeles, asking him to use his presumed influence with Marshal Foch, so that France would restrain the USA. He also wondered if the Allied powers would intervene to prevent chaos in Mexico as they had done against the Bolsheviks in Russia. In a very short while Zapata had gone from a parochial outlook to a national one and then an international one. Here was the man who once said he cared about nothing but the land deeds of Morelos villages playing the international statesman and writing for help to the European powers.
What Zapata feared finally came about. Waiting until the rainy season was over, Pablo Gonzalez came crashing back into Morelos again, this time with 11,000 troops. Facing greatly weakened resistance, he quickly captured Cuautla, Jonacatepec, Yautepec, Jojutla, Tlaltizapan, Tetecala and Cuernavaca. Gonzalez installed garrisons in all the major towns, imposed his own administration in the villages and began bringing in labour
ers from other parts of Mexico on a passage-paid scheme. From mid-December Zapata, de la 0, Mendoza and all the important chiefs were once again on the run. The military commander of Puebla, General Cesareo Castro, one of Carranza's favourites, offered amnesty to Magana and all moderate zapatista leaders, hoping to lure them away from Zapata and leave him isolated. Despite the huge temptations and pressures on them, the chieftains stayed true to each other - not just to de la 0 and Mendoza but all the `second level' leaders.
Despite his jeopardy, Zapata always refused to bow the knee to Carranza. In new manifestoes he excoriated him as the Kaiser's running dog, a supporter of imperialism and an enemy of democracy, hoping thereby to interest the European powers. Meanwhile he saw hope in the minatory notes Washington now began sending Carranza over the mining and oil company laws. He also continued to lobby apparent supporters of the regime who were not in Carranza's inner circle, trying to prise them loose from him. Accepting that he was in some eyes an obstacle to national unity, Zapata offered to step aside as Supreme Chief of the Revolution in favour of Francisco Vasquez Gomez, whom Magana had indicated as the preferred choice of the moderate enemies of Carranza, like Angeles and Villareal. Zapata then made Vasquez Gomez the focus for his hopes for a popular front, even writing to Villa and Pelaez to urge them to rally round this new leader.
Zapata was still one step ahead of Pablo Gonzalez, who in February 1919 sent his troops on a wild-goose chase, supposedly on Zapata's tail, from Jojutla through Jonacatepec to Tochimilco. However, the Pablo Gonzalez who ruled from Cuernavaca in 1919 was a very different animal from the scourge of three years earlier. He now had his sights set on the 1920 presidential election, where he fancied himself a dark-horse candidate, and did not want to blow his chances by making any mistakes in Morelos. In early 1919 there were few armed clashes between zapatistas and the Army, just a few isolated skirmishes. Where once he had looted and destroyed, Gonzalez now tried to bolster his reputation by trying to get Morelos on the move economically. Politically, though, he still faced stalemate, as he was unable to capture a single zapatista chieftain, some of whom were so contemptuous of his garrisons and so sure of protection from the locals that they openly sauntered through the larger towns.
Suddenly Carranza sent word to Gonzalez to make an end to Zapata by whatever means, fair or foul, that he could contrive. Publicly Carranza announced that Zapata was `beyond amnesty'. What provoked this latest outburst was news from his spies that Zapata and Pelaez were on the brink of concluding an alliance, which would in turn open the window for Zapata onto the entire felicista revolt. Pelaez meanwhile published open letters violently contemptuous of `the whiskered one', and sent his brother Octavio to Mexico City to confer with pro-Obregon elements. Carranza was also enraged that he was coming under heavy pressure from Washington even as the propaganda efforts of William Gates and his inspirational journalism were making Zapata a hero to American readers. Carranza hinted to Gonzalez that the demise of Zapata might just be the ticket that secured him the presidential nomination in 1920.
By sheer chance Gonzalez found a way to achieve by treachery what he could never achieve by armed force. It all began with a genuine row between Gonzalez and his ace cavalry commander, Colonel Jesus Guajardo of the 5oth Regiment. Gonzalez had ordered Guajardo to pursue Zapata night and day in the mountains around Cuautla, but then caught him drinking in a bar in the town when he should have been on duty. Despite Guajardo's fine record, Gonzalez jailed him and threatened to have him court-martialled. Hearing of this, Zapata thought he saw a way to destroy Gonzalez's position in Morelos. On 21 March igig he had a note smuggled into Guajardo's cell, asking him to join him with the entire 5oth Regiment. Gonzalez intercepted the letter, waved it in front of Guajardo as proof of his `treachery' and gave him two choices: cooperate in a plot or be shot for treason. Guajardo agreed to cooperate. Gonzalez double-checked with Carranza that an assassination plot would be acceptable as a means of getting rid of Zapata, then implemented his stratagem.
At Gonzalez's direction, Guajardo wrote a note to Zapata, saying he was prepared to come over to him and bring his cavalrymen. To test his sincerity, Zapata asked him to shoot Victoriano Barcenas and his fifty ex- zapatista renegades who were now under the protection of Carranza. Guajardo arranged to meet Zapata at Jonacatepec on 9 April, did so, presented him with a handsome chestnut horse called Ace of Diamonds, and `proved' his sincerity by executing the fifty men. Zapata then asked Guajardo to come on to Pastor station, a halt on the railway line south of Jonacatepec. At 4.30 p.m. on 9 April Guajardo and 6oo of his men mustered at Pastor. Zapata greeted him effusively, giving him the bearhug abrazo and the present of a sorrel horse named Golden Age. Taking thirty men each, they proceeded to Tepalcingo. Further conversation took place, but the suspicious Zapata was still not entirely without misgivings. The two men agreed to meet again next morning at the Chinameca hacienda. Guajardo spent the night there while Zapata camped in the hills.
Early on Thursday io April Zapata and his escort rode slowly down the hills towards the hacienda - familiar territory as it was one of the first places he had taken in early 1911, so familiar that he claimed to know every blade of grass there. There were various shops outside the hacienda, and Zapata and Guajardo conferred there, within earshot of their escorts. Soon word came in that the enemy was approaching. Zapata organised patrols and went on one reconnaissance himself. By the time this alarum had died down, it was 1.30 p.m. So far only one zapatista had ventured inside the hacienda walls: Zapata's ADC Miguel Palacios, who was discussing the handover by Guajardo of 12,ooo rounds of ammunition.
Guajardo then invited Zapata inside the walls for dinner. Zapata was wary but finally, tired and hungry, he accepted and, taking a bodyguard of just ten men, at around 2.10 p.m. he mounted a sorrel horse and rode through the gates. Guajardo's guard of honour stood ready, as if to pay the visitor a compliment. A bugler sounded the honour call three times as the men presented arms. As the last note sounded and Zapata reached the threshold of the hacienda building, the guards opened fire at point-blank range. Zapata fell dead immediately; Palacios and two of the escort were also killed in the hail of bullets. The rest of the zapatistas fled in consternation.
Guajardo's men pulled the body inside the hacienda, loaded it on a mule, and set out for Cuautla. Gonzalez was notified at 7.30 p.m., but suspected a trick. At 9 p.m. Guajardo's men arrived in the dark with the body. A flashlight played on Zapata's face showed that this was indeed the tiger of Morelos. Gonzalez wrote in triumph to Carranza, who rewarded Guajardo with the rank of brigadier-general. However, although Gonzalez organised public viewings of the bullet-strewn corpse, and even had it filmed by a professional crew before it was buried, the people of Morelos stubbornly refused to accept that Zapata was dead. There were various stories: that Zapata had sent a double to the meeting (he was even named as Jesus Delgado), that the body was not Zapata's since the corpse did not possess the unique Zapata distinguishing marks - a mole on his right cheek, a birthmark on his chest, and a missing little finger. Finally and inevitably, Zapata was seen by eyewitnesses riding his sorrel in the Guerrero mountains to the south. The most outlandish story was that Zapata could not have been killed at Chinameca as he shipped out for `Arabia' on 9 April at Acapulco.
There may be truth in the most persistent legend: that Zapata had foreseen his own death and that on the eve of his assassination a curandera came to him and prophesied that if he went to the meeting next day he would be killed. Completely authentic is Zapata's table-talk in which he told his comrades he did not fear death, for great movements grow stronger from martyrdom. He spoke of men who were greater in death than in life, mentioning Benito Juarez, and claimed that the greatest men in history were always murdered - this time he cited Abraham Lincoln and Jesus Christ. Zapata was a shrewd judge. In Morelos he became an icon almost on a level with the Virgin of Guadalupe. His imperishable legend lives on, and even today is the source of inspiration of the Indians of Chiapas as they fight oppr
ession. Viva Zapata!
THE DECLINE OF VILLISMO
When Villa retired to his cave badly wounded and many of the villista detachments were defeated and dispersed in the spring of 1916, everyone thought the Centaur's days were numbered. In June, however, Villa reappeared and called a general rendezvous of all villista bands. Many responded to his call, for the cotton crop was now harvested and they could go on the warpath again with a clear conscience. Villa's reappearance contributed to his legend. Disproving the countless rumours of his death, the great leader none the less initially scarcely made a striking impression. Now sporting a full black beard, he walked on crutches and, even when he discarded them, always limped; he could not wear a shoe on one foot as the leg was swollen from knee to toes. It was very painful for him to ride a horse, so for long journeys henceforth he tried to travel by car.
Since he was still being sought by Pershing and by a large carrancista army, Villa's situation was supremely perilous on paper. However, in the duel with Carranza he enjoyed several advantages that were not immediately apparent. In the first place, Carranza played into his hands by his disastrous policies in the state of Chihuahua, oscillating between letting his corrupt cronies run the state on a spoils system and treating it like occupied territory, under the heel of generals appointed from Mexico City. Whichever tack he followed, it was loathed by the people of Chihuahua. The only mistake Carranza did not make was to bring back the Creel-Terrazas faction, but his own supremo, Ignacio Enriquez, was, if anything, worse than the old guard. Neither Carranza nor Enriquez had any idea how to integrate the amnestied Villa veterans into the state economy; the only offer made to them was to join the federal army, which they all loathed as the ancient enemy. Just as Louis XVIII made the Hundred Days possible by failing to find work for Napoleon's veterans, the clueless Enriquez virtually ensured a recrudescence of villismo. When Villa reappeared, many of his veterans concluded that life in the saddle with him was preferable to languishing in indigent unemployment.