by Frank McLynn
Obregon wrote to Villa, asking him to give a press interview in which he would explain that he had no desire to re-enter politics. Villa, however, thumbed his nose at Obregon by giving the interview and saying he would do one of two things: either declare himself a presidential candidate or throw his support to de la Huerta. In typical vainglorious mode Villa could not resist telling the reporters that he was still capable of raising 40,000 armed men in forty minutes. Obregon read the interview as a threat that if he tried to impose Calles by manipulated elections, Villa would rise in rebellion. Even de la Huerta was alarmed by Villa's bluster; he met the Centaur on a train between Jimenez and Torreon and urged him to back Calles. Villa took de la Huerta's attitude for weakness, became disillusioned with him and looked elsewhere for a presidential candidate, eventually opting for Raul Madero. Public opinion polls showed Calles very unpopular, miles behind de la Huerta and Madero and only marginally ahead of Villa himself. Angered by the turn of events, Obregon and Calles turned violently against Villa and now perceived him as the greatest threat to their plans.
For some time Villa had been plagued by assassination bids by Jesus Herrera, the sole surviving male of the Herrera clan. Under stress from Herrera's continual murder attempts, and often in pain from the old wound in his leg, Villa the lifelong teetotaller took to the bottle and became insanely jealous of the women in his harem. In May 1923 he sent a long letter to the newspaper El Universal, denouncing Herrera's sustained attempts to murder him, and followed up with letters to Obregon and Galles, urging them to do something about him. Obregon ordered Herrera to desist on pain of execution. The reason was simple: he had had enough of Villa and was now putting together his own assassination plot.
Even for the president of Mexico, this was not an easy thing to compass. Villa never slept in the same place and rarely even rose in the morning from the same bed he had gone to sleep in. He never allowed anyone to walk or stand behind him, and had his fifty dorados keyed to a pitch of eternal vigilance. A handpicked team of assassins went to Parral, but had to wait three months for a chance to strike. This eventually came because Villa grew overconfident and momentarily lowered his guard. He was invited to be godfather at a christening at the village of Rio Florido and decided to make the trip, knowing that he could combine it with a visit to Parral to see his mistress Manuela Casas, who by this time had been removed from Canutillo because of the friction she caused. In an evil hour Villa heeded the foolish advice of his secretary, Miguel Trillo, and did not take his fifty-strong bodyguard with him, but simply a couple of armed retainers. Trillo, playing the wise steward, advised Villa that they could save on the considerable outlay for fifty men and fifty horses if just a small group travelled by car.
The would-be assassins had rented a house on the outskirts of Parral, at the intersection of Benito Juarez and Gabrino Barreda streets, where all traffic to and from Canutillo had to pass. On io July Villa set out for the christening, ignoring a premonition by Austreberta Renteria, who told him that if he left that day she would never see him again. The gunmen planned to intercept him on the way into Parral, but their plan miscarried for, just as Villa's car drove past, hundreds of children came out of a school at the end of lessons; to open fire in such circumstances and kill innocent children might have detonated a scandal big enough to finish Obregon and Calles.
After the christening Villa returned to Parral and spent some days with Manuela Casas. At 8 a.m. on 20 July he and his men left their hotel to drive back to Canutillo. Villa had no sense of danger: his three secret agents in Parral had given him the all-clear and the garrison commander, Felix Lara, had always been effusively friendly. Villa was unaware that Lara and his troops had been sent out of town on a trumped-up military manoeuvre. The old Villa, though, would surely have smelt a rat, for the town seemed oddly deserted and there were no police on duty; his famous intuition should have told him something was wrong, but perhaps drink, complacency or the ravages of time had desensitised his antennae.
Villa took the wheel for the drive back to Canutillo. The car was a large Dodge saloon, but six men were packed into it; apart from Villa himself, there was his chauffeur, Trillo the secretary, his personal assistant Rafael Medrano and two bodyguards, Ramon Contreras and Claro Hurtado. When the car reached the junction of Benito Juarez and Gabrino Barreda, an old man selling candy at a stall called out `Viva Villa!' This was the prearranged signal for the men at the windows of the rented house to open fire. As he turned the corner, Villa ran into a massive fusillade and was killed instantly as nine bullets slammed into him. Also slain were Trillo and the chauffeur. The Dodge careered out of control and hit a tree. The wounded Rafael Medrano managed to crawl under the car and feign death while one of the gunmen ran over to pump more bullets into Villa's lifeless head. Ramon Contreras, though injured, managed to shoot one of the assailants dead before making his escape. Claro Hurtado was less fortunate. He tried to escape by a bridge down to the river bank, found his way blocked, and was then gunned down when he turned back.
The killers made a leisurely escape on horseback. They had pumped over forty shots into Villa's car, using dum-dum bullets. Villa was found doubled up, his right hand still reaching for his gun. At the post-mortem his skull was found to be full of bullet-holes, while his heart had been turned to mush by the internal explosion of the dum-dum bullets. He was buried next day, taken to his resting-place in a carriage drawn by two black horses, accompanied by a military guard of honour, a band and thousands of mourners. Felix Lara, who came galloping back into town once he heard the shooting, filed a report to Obregon, saying he could not pursue the killers because of lack of horses. Obregon, who knew that Lara was in on the plot, minuted that he had never heard such an absurd excuse, but took no action against him.
For several days there was tension in the Parral area. Obregon ordered federal troops to occupy Canutillo to prevent a villista uprising, but they were opposed by the dorados and a nail-biting three-day stand-off ended only when Hipolito arrived at the hacienda on 23 July. He at once cabled Obregon, assured him of his loyalty and promised he would put everything in order. After ten days of dithering, while he tried to gauge public reaction to the assassination, Obregon rescinded the order to the Army to occupy Canutillo, and the crisis passed.
It was obvious to all that Villa had died as the result of a well-hatched conspiracy. The suspicious circumstances were multiple: the entire garrison of Parral had been sent out of town `coincidentally'; there was no pursuit of the killers for forty-five minutes, and throughout they had acted in a self-assured manner, showing no urgency about leaving the scene of the crime; the telegraph line to Canutillo had been cut, so that it took six hours for the news of Villa's death to reach Hipolito and the dorados in the hacienda. The Mexican Chamber of Deputies tried to conduct an investigation into the killing, but were hampered at all points by local military and civilian officials. Since all these people were under the control of the federal government, and hence of Obregon, when no action was taken against them for egregious incompetence, the man in the street soon put two and two together.
There can be no serious doubt that Obregon planned Villa's assassination. Some said Calles had contrived the whole thing, unknown to Obregon, but this never rang true in psychological, political or even logistical terms. A deputy of the Durango state legislature, Jesus Salas Barrazas, claimed he had organised the killing with no help from the federal government, ostensibly letting Obregon off the hook, but Obregon immediately redirected the finger of suspicion back on himself by absurdly claiming he had no authority to arrest Salas Barrazas, as he was a Durango senator. Even more absurdly, Obregon then changed his mind, arrested him and saw him sentenced to twenty years in prison; three months later governor Enriquez of Chihuahua pardoned him. No one else was ever arrested or accused in connection with the murder.
In fact Barrazas was a very small cog in the wheel of conspiracy. The real author was Meliton Lozoya, administrator of the Canutillo hacienda before it was
given to Villa. Lozoya had embezzled huge amounts of money from the estate, and Villa had warned him that he must either make good the losses or take the consequence. Concluding that the only way out of this impasse was to murder him, Lozoya recruited eight men with strong grievances against Villa, rented the house in Parral and set up the ambush. Obregon got wind of the plot and helped to oil the wheels. Through Calles he paid Felix Lara 50,000 pesos to make sure the conspiracy succeeded. Lara not only took all his troops out of town `on manoeuvres' but actually stiffened Lozoya's murder squad by lending him his best sharpshooters.
A mountain of evidence, both documentary and memoir, implicates Obregon in the plot. Adolfo de la Huerta said that the pressure to kill Villa came initially from Calles and secretary of war Joaquin Amaro. At first Obregon was reluctant, arguing that Villa had kept the agreement he made in 1923, but once talked into it by Galles, he became the prime mover, using a string of secondary plotters - Jesus Herrera, Salas Barrazas and Jesus Agustin Castro - to camouflage his role. Obregon gave Calles the nod on the express condition that the conspiracy must never be traced back to him or his government. Jesus Agustin Castro, governor of Durango and a noted Villa-hater, was a key element in the plot, and there is documentary evidence of the conspiracy in a letter from Salas Barrazas to Castro on 7 July 1923. Salas Barrazas agreed to be the `fall guy' for Villa's murder, and this was confirmed in letters by Castro and Amaro.
The conspiracy began to unravel with Salas Barrazas. He was under the clear understanding that his position as a Durango deputy gave him immunity from arrest, but Castro refused to abide by this, fearing that suspicion would then fall on him. Salas Barrazas panicked when arrested and wrote to Amaro for help; Amaro had him transferred to Chihuahua, where Ignacio Enriquez pardoned him. The Obregon archive, when opened, showed the president granting extraordinary favours to both Lozoya and Salas Barrazas. The judicious conclusion is that Obregon's government was not just implicated in Villa's murder but actually organised it. The motive was the 1924 presidential election. Calles and Obregon feared that, if necessary, Villa would back de la Huerta with an armed uprising. If de la Huerta became president, Villa would probably be his strong right arm as governor of Durango, and the two would have taken a tough line against US oil companies. There were also whispers that the price of Washington's recognition of the Obregon government was a final resolution of the `Villa question'.
If Obregon was the main political beneficiary of Villa's death, Hipolito Villa scooped the financial rewards. He inherited Canutillo, appropriated all the revenues and gave Villa's women nothing. Soledad Seanez and Manuela Casas were the obvious losers in the `fight of the harem', for their legal claims could not match those of Luz Corral and Austreberta Renteria. Austreberta, left penniless, appealed to Obregon, but he replied with meaningless bromides; he was not about to take any action against Hipolito that might trigger a villista revolt. Austreberta, refusing to take no for an answer, wrote to Obregon again, but he replied that he had no jurisdiction and referred her to the law courts. When Hipolito later fell foul of the federal government and Austreberta thought her hour had come, Obregon again rebuffed her; his favourite among the Villa women was Luz Corral, who had interceded on his behalf in 1914 when Villa wanted to kill him.
Although Obregon had eliminated Villa to ensure the presidential succession for Calles, his own incumbency still ended in bloodshed. De la Huerta refused to allow Calles to succeed merely on Obregon's patronage and entered the presidential race. Seeing him likely to win in a fair contest, Obregon intervened with intimidation and disruption against the de la Huerta camp. On 4 December 1923 de la Huerta took the familiar route to Veracruz and declared himself in rebellion against Obregon, citing the president's `odious and intolerable violence against the sovereignty of the Mexican people'. The Army split fairly evenly, with about 25,000 troops going over to de la Huerta and 30,000 staying loyal to Obregon. The rebellion lasted until spring 1924, but Obregon gained a decisive victory at Ocotlan. In victory he was as merciless as ever and executed scores of his former comrades, including Maycotte, who joined the long line of anti-Obregon rebels who faced the firing squad - notably Jose Isabel Robles in 1917 and Lucio Blanco in 1922. Obregon was an ingrate: it mattered not a jot to him if he owed his life to another man; execution for rebellion was his inflexible rule. De la Huerta fled to the United States where he made a living as a music teacher, thus fulfilling Obregon's grim prophecy in Chapultepec Park.
Calles succeeded to the presidency, but the years 1924-8 were dark and barbarous. Although the Revolution had officially ended, there was no end to the savagery and the blood-letting. With the nod from Obregon, who had officially retired to pursue his interests as a businessman, Calles began the final campaign against the Yaquis, using all the resources of modern technology, including air power, to finish them off as a military threat. Even as Calles crushed the tribe to whom he had once promised lands and freedom, he had another serious revolt on his hands. The violent anticlericalism of Obregon and Calles had finally provoked a bloody backlash. In the western states of Jalisco, Colima and Michoacan, and eventually in thirteen of Mexico's provinces, Catholic rebels known as Cristeros fought a determined guerrilla war that claimed more than 70,000 lives.
Meanwhile Obregon decided he wanted to be president again. Congress opened the legal door for a second presidential term, and in 1927 he went on the campaign trail. In this bid he was backed by the Army, but bitterly opposed by public opinion and Mexico's intellectuals. One of Jose Vasconcelos's friends expressed the general view: `Calles is not the problem. It is Obregon. You cannot imagine the ambition there is in that man! Don Porfirio was a joke in comparison.'
Obregon found himself opposed by two candidates, General Arnulfo Gomez and an old compadre, Francisco Serrano. Obregon made it clear he was determined to overwhelm his rivals by fair means or foul, and his megalomania became so overt that many sage observers thought he had toppled over the mental precipice into madness. When Gomez and Serrano combined to stymie his blatant intimidation and corruption by plotting to arrest him along with Calles, they were betrayed by their military colleagues to Obregon, who sent them to the firing squad without mercy and then purged their followers. Some historians claim the bloodbath in the late 1920S was even worse than during 1910-20, as during the Revolution people fought, at least ostensibly, for causes and ideals, not simply naked personal ambition. Obregon descended into the darkness of tyranny and took Mexico down with him. During 1926-30 agricultural production declined by 38 per cent, 200,000 people migrated from the countryside to the cities, and a further 450,000 emigrated to the USA. Significantly, Jesus Garza Galin, the man who had stopped Obregon committing suicide in 1915, himself committed suicide in despair.
Obregon now became the target for assassination attempts. The first bid was made by a Catholic engineer who threw a bomb at his car in November 1927. Another group of would-be assassins were caught and executed in Orizaba; pessimists said that Mexico would be one big firing squad if Obregon ever got back to the presidential palace. One of the most determined plotters against him was a woman known as Madre Conchita, who devised a series of attempted killings worthy of a thriller writer, culminating in a bid to inject him with deadly venom from a hypodermic while he was dancing with a nubile young woman. Obregon knew of many of these plots but was contemptuous, doubting whether anyone would accept a suicide mission for, as he said: `I will live until someone trades his life for mine.'
Finally, on 17 July 1928, a killer got through the massive security blanket. Obregon was attending a banquet in his honour at La Bombita restaurant in San Angel, just outside Mexico City. A 26-year-old Catholic fanatic named Jose de Leon Toral, linked to the Cristeros, tailed Obregon to La Bombita and got past the guards at the door by pretending to be an artist commissioned to paint the leader's portrait. Toral sketched an impressive likeness of Obregon, then took it to the top table where he was sitting and showed it to him. Obregon liked the sketch and agreed to allow T
oral to refine the details. As a man played the tune Limoncito, shots suddenly rang out: Toral had pumped five bullets into Obregon's face. He died immediately, two years short of his fiftieth birthday. Toral was executed a few days later. So passed the last of the great leaders of the Mexican Revolution.
CONCLUSION
The Mexican Revolution was a ten-year Iliad, in which Villa, Zapata, Obregon, Carranza and the others played the roles in fact which were played in myth by Agamemnon, Achilles, Hector and Aeneas. The loss of life was frightful as the ever-widening spirals of bloodshed sucked in more and more people. Historians estimate the death toll at anything between a low of 350,000 and a high of i,ooo,ooo, but this excludes the victims of the 1918 flu epidemic, which adds another 300,000 to the list of fatalities. Civilisation's thin veneer was never thinner than in the Mexican Revolution, and the moral is surely that even in advanced societies we skate all the time on the thinnest of ice. A seemingly trivial political crisis can open up the ravening maw of an underworld of chaos.
Apart from the aggregate of fatalities, what strikes the student of the Revolution most forcibly is how few of its major protagonists died in their beds. All the leading figures were assassinated or died violent and sometimes mysterious deaths: not just Villa, Zapata, Carranza, Obregon, Madero and Huerta but most of the second-rank figures too - Orozco, Angeles, Urbina, Hill, Fierro, Chavez Garcia, Martinez, Montano, Eufemio Zapata, Lucio Blanco and scores of others. The only two truly important personalities to survive to old age were Plutarco Calles and Genovevo de la O.
Revolutions are supposed to change things, so the obvious question is: what did the Mexican Revolution change? The cynic will say: very little. Capitalism took a firmer hold, older elites were displaced by newer ones, a handful of men achieved fame and fortune, but the lot of the mass of people was scarcely improved. According to the cynical view, the Revolution simply showed sophisticated elites how to co-opt rivals and enemies into a one-party state, a mesh of corruption called the Partido Revolucionario Nacional, which, by its nods to voting and democracy, escaped the liberal censure directed at one-party states elsewhere. Demands for change could then be countered with an obvious riposte: it is chimerical to ask for revolution because Mexico has already had one.