Titans of History

VILLA & ZAPATA

1878–1923 & 1819–1919

It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees!

Emiliano Zapata

Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata were Mexico’s two most celebrated and notorious revolutionary warlords: they were blood-thirsty brigands or murderous psychopaths to some, romantic heroes or radical reformers to others: both were gifted and charismatic but both were also brutal, cold-blooded and ambitious. Both died violently.

Born as Doroteo Arango, somewhere near San Juan del Río, Durango, in 1878, Pancho Villa hailed from peasant stock. After working as a sharecropper in his late childhood, he moved to the city of Chihuahua when he was sixteen, hoping to make his fortune, but when a landowner from his village sexually assaulted his sister, he returned home immediately and killed her assailant in cold blood. With that one act, he consigned himself to a life of banditry and fled for the Sierra Madre mountains. For the next seventeen years, he terrorized those living within or passing through his mountain fiefdom: cattle rustling, bank robbery and murder were his specialties.

Mexico at the time was ruled by the corrupt dictator Porfirio Díaz. Much of the country’s land was ruthlessly exploited by the wealthy owners of large estates (haciendas), leaving the bulk of the population to labor under political repression and grinding poverty. In 1910, the long-serving Díaz stood for “re-election” as president. Opposition to his rule, however, had crystallized around Francisco Madero, the “apostle of democracy,” supported by volunteers known as antirreeleccionista (antireelectionists). When Díaz inevitably claimed victory, Madero proclaimed his Plan of San Luis Potosi, declaring the election fraudulent and calling for an armed uprising. The Mexican Revolution had begun. Villa threw in his lot with the revolution, capturing the towns of both Chihuahua and Ciudad Juárez for the Maderoists. Though he claimed a political “awakening,” it is hard to tell whether he believed in the cause or simply sensed which way the wind was blowing, but whatever one believes, the revolution proved to be a turning point in his life.

By 1911, Díaz had been swept from power and forced into exile. Hopes for the establishment of genuine democracy in Mexico, however, were dashed when, in 1913, President Madero was assassinated by loyalists to the old regime. Victoriano Huerta, the head of the Mexican armed forces, seized power in a bloody coup. Formerly allies in the Maderoist cause, Huerta and Villa were by now bitter enemies, Huerta having even conspired to have Villa sentenced to death for stealing and insubordination. Only Madero’s personal intervention had prevented that sentence from being carried out.

Villa unsurprisingly committed himself to support the forces of Venustiano Carranza—leader of the opposition to Huerta—and secured a string of military victories, defeating Huerta’s forces at Ciudad Juárez, Tierra Blanca, Chihuahua, Ojinaga, Torreón, Saltillo and Zacatecas. These successes played a major part in bringing about Huerta’s eventual downfall in July 1914, and made Villa a hero of the revolution. They came, however, at a cost. At Zacatecas, 7000 people were killed and 5000 wounded—many of them civilians. Villa seemed to revel in the killing and was reluctant to accept any authority other than his own.

By 1915, Villa—once the darling of the revolution—had become an erratic renegade. He declared open revolt against Carranza and aligned himself ever more closely with the extremist fringe of the revolution around Emiliano Zapata, a leading figure in the struggle against President Díaz. In Carranza’s chief general, Álvaro Obregón, though, Villa had met his military match. He was defeated in two battles at Celaya in 1915, Obregón’s more modern techniques and weapons of war proving decisive.

Villa withdrew to Chihuahua and there instituted a reign of fear, imposing his own brand of law and recruiting new members (however reluctant) for his bandit brigades. Faced with growing economic problems, he ruthlessly requisitioned funds from the once loyal people of the region—a move that served only to impoverish them further. He even issued his own money, anyone who refused to accept the currency being shot for “betraying the revolution.”

Hemmed in by government forces, and increasingly enraged by what he saw as American interference (President Woodrow Wilson had opted to back Carranza’s government as the most likely way of establishing stable government in Mexico), Villa turned his attentions to the United States. In January 1916, he attacked a train on the Mexico North Western Railway, near Santa Isabel, Chihuahua, killing eighteen Americans. In March, Villa raided Columbus, New Mexico, killing ten soldiers and eight civilians.

In response, President Wilson sent some 6000 troops into Mexico under General John “Black Jack” Pershing, but this punitive expedition to find Pancho Villa proved unsuccessful.

Though he had shared in many of the same struggles as Villa, Zapata would follow a different path to him after Diaz had been ousted. Madero’s regime proved too conservative for Zapata and he refused to disband the force of guerrillas he had first assembled to take on Díaz. Instead, in 1911 he proclaimed the Plan de Ayala and promised to carry forward the revolution. The plan called for radical land reform in Mexico to improve the lot of the ordinary peasant. Zapata wanted to break down the estates by returning the land to Mexico’s impoverished indigenous communities. The ethos of his program was summed up in its rallying cry, “Tierra y Libertad!” (Land and Freedom!), which came to define Zapata and his supporters.

After Madero had been deposed by General Huerta, Zapata took part in the struggle against the new dictatorship. When Huerta was in turn ousted, to be replaced by the constitutionalist Carranza, history repeated itself. Zapata again found himself in opposition to the government, and once more resolved that the agrarian revolution he desired could only be secured by armed struggle. Lands were burned and opponents murdered by the rampaging Zapatistas—now styling themselves the Liberation Army of the South.

Carranza placed a sizeable bounty placed on the revolutionary’s head and once Villa had been defeated, Zapata became increasingly isolated. In April 1919 he was assassinated. He remains an even more iconic figure than Villa in Mexico. Villa was on the run until 1920, when he finally negotiated a peace deal with Carranza’s successor, President Adolfo de la Huerta. For three years afterward he lived in semi-retirement on his estates in Chihuahua, before he was assassinated in 1923.

At his death, Villa was reputed to have told his assassins, “Don’t let it end like this. Tell them I said something.”