For thirty years, Porfirio Díaz had been Mexico’s benefactor and
father, his grizzled head as timeless as the volcanoes that ringed Mexico City.
At the age of eighty he had a mountainous nose, a mustache that rushed from its
base like two white rivers, and mahogany skin that was still taut and smooth.
He had been a firebrand and rebel himself once, sweeping the old guard from
power during a revolution that he had stoked and organized in Brownsville,
Texas. From roughly 1876 until 1911, Díaz had ruled Mexico, using his federal
troops and rural police force to crush rebellions and strengthening his base of
support by creating alliances with the elite. He had a realistic, albeit
cynical, view of his countrymen and maintained control over his clamorous
subjects by using both pan y palo – bread and bludgeon.
By the end of Díaz’s reign, Mexico had a population of fifteen
million. The majority were mestizo – individuals of mixed
blood – but one-third were of pure Indian stock. Chihuahua and
Sonora, two of the northern states that lay along the U.S. border,
were home to the Tarahumara and the Yaquis. The Cora, Huichol,
and Tarascans lived along the Pacific coast and in the hills and valleys
west of Mexico City. The Mazahua, Nahuatl, and Otomí had
settled in the central highlands. The Gulf state of Veracruz was
home to the Huastec and Totonac. The Zapotecs, Mixes, Zoque,
Huave, and Mixtec, Tzeltal, Tojolabal, Chontal, and Tzotzil lived
in the southern states of Oaxaca and Chiapas. And in the Yucatán
peninsula, remnants of the ancient Maya had survived.
In 1521, Hernán Cortés conquered Tenochtitlán, the great center
of the Aztec civilization and the site of what was to become
Mexico City. For the next three centuries, Mexico lived under
Spain’s rule, which could be harsh, benign, or indifferent, depending
upon the financial needs of the mother country and the temperament
of the monarch who happened to be in power at the time.
When Mexico finally gained its independence, in 1821, political
chaos, internal revolts, and repeated clashes with foreign powers
ensued. Texas was lost in 1836 to English-speaking colonizers who
had been encouraged by Spain to settle the far reaches of its empire.
A decade later, following a war with the United States, Mexico lost
another huge chunk of territory to its hungry neighbor – millions
of acres that one day would become New Mexico, Arizona, California,
Nevada, Utah, as well as parts of Colorado and Wyoming.
Exhausted and humiliated, struggling under a huge debt load,
Mexico found itself in 1863 once again under the yoke of a European
power. This time it was France and Napoleon III, who
installed Ferdinand Maximilian von Hapsburg and his wife, Carlota,
as emperor and empress of Mexico. The monarchy survived
less than five years, defeated by an army led by Benito Juárez, a
Zapotec Indian. Afterward, Maximilian was executed, Carlota
went insane, the republic was restored, and Juárez was elected
president. Juárez died of a heart attack in 1872, after winning a
new term in office, and was succeeded by Sebastián Lerdo de
Tejada. Four years later, Porfirio Díaz toppled Lerdo from power
and began a thirty-year authoritarian regime known as the Por-
firiato.
In order to bring Mexico into the twentieth century, Díaz had
opened the doors of his country to foreign investors and through
them came the Guggenheims, Hearsts, and Rockefellers, Standard
Oil and Phelps Dodge, and hundreds of other, smaller land speculators,
wildcatters, miners, ranchers, and farmers. The Americans
built railroads and sank mine shafts, the Spaniards opened small
retail shops, and the French established factories and banks. Vast
cattle ranches emerged along the northern tier of states, and huge
farms devoted to single crops such as sugar, cacao, coffee, and rubber
were carved from the tropical lowlands. For his efforts, Díaz
garnered admiration from industrialists, politicians, and even great
literary figures, such as Leo Tolstoy.
His popularity was greatest in Mexico City, where wealthy
foreigners and daughters and wives of native hacendados lived
in walled compounds fragrant with roses, bougainvillea, and hibiscus.
The melancholy cries of tamale women and scissors grinders
dropped like birdsong into the somnolent quiet of late afternoons,
and in the distant recesses of the lovely old homes, legions of cooks
and nannies and cleaning girls worked soundlessly, faceless and
nameless to the lady of the house. With its colonial languor and lingering
Victorian mannerisms, Mexico City seemed like a metropolis
enclosed in a shining glass bubble, drifting in its own time.
Wearing Paris gowns, London-made tuxedos, or hand-sewn lace,
the wealthy shuttled to luncheons and teas and dinner parties in
horse-drawn carriages and chauffeur-driven cars. They went horseback
riding in Chapultepec Park, organized group outings to the
floating gardens of Xochimilco, and in the evenings flocked to the
opera.
Pouring through their salon windows was a golden sunlight
that made everything seem like a dream. So dreaming, the wealthy
foreigners and their Mexican friends failed to see the horrors in
their midst: the women crouching behind the waiting carriages
picking undigested corn kernels from horse manure; the press
gangs who snatched husbands and sons and young girls off the
street, the men destined for the army and the women for gunpowder
factories; the tubercular Indians who clogged the charity wards
and were fodder for medical experiments; the political victims of
the firing squads, who spun on their heels in the liquid light, the
bullets turning them round and round until they collapsed in front
of adobe walls stained dark with old blood.
The modernization and prosperity that Díaz had presided over
caused grave dislocation among the country’s peasants, factory
workers, and even Mexico’s elite ruling class. By the time the Mexican
Revolution erupted, foreigners controlled most of the country’s
vast natural resources, its railroads and businesses. “By
1910,” writes historian John Mason Hart in a penetrating economic
analysis of the revolution, “American real estate holdings
totaled over 100 million acres and encompassed much of the nation’s
most valuable mining, agricultural and timber properties.”
By contrast, he notes, 90 percent of the Mexican campesino population
was landless.
Henry Lane Wilson, the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, lived at
the epicenter of the elegant Mexico City society. He was a lawyer
by training, patrician in appearance, suave in manners but contemptuous
of anyone who questioned Díaz’s efforts. Wilson was
always immaculately dressed, wearing a silk tie, jeweled stickpin,
and a little derby hat that seemed to accentuate his small head.
Dangling from a ribbon around his neck was his pince-nez, which
he often left perched upon his nose.
Wilson believed that foreign investment had transformed Mexico
from a desert to a paradise, and if those investors made handsome
profits, well, what was wrong with that? In a congressional
hearing held in 1920, after ten years of civil war had left Mexico
exhausted and empty, he laid out the reasons for the fratricide with
an airy matter-of-factness: “Practically all of the railways belonged
to foreigners; practically all of the mines. Practically all of the
banks and all of the factories were owned by the French. A very
considerable part of the soil of Mexico, probably over a third, was
in the hands of foreign-born elements, and practically all the public
utilities were in the hands of Americans or British. Naturally this
foreign ownership excited hostility, which was not lessened by the
circumstance that these interests, or whatever they may have been,
had been honestly acquired.”
In fact, many of the great haciendas and single-crop estates had
been cobbled together from communal lands that had been illegally
seized from small farmers and villagers. The peons on the great
estates worked in conditions that were as hopeless and cruel as any
found in the pre-Civil War South. (The politically connected governor
of Sonora, for example, had a torture chamber on the premises
for the Yaqui Indians who labored for him.) The peons were often
paid in scrip that had to be redeemed at the company stores – the
hated tiendas de rayas – and when they died, their debts were
passed on to their children. An American representative sent to
Mexico in 1913 by President Wilson was deeply shocked by what
he found:
I saw this remarkable situation in the twentieth century of men
being scattered through the corn fields in little groups of 8 or
10, accompanied by a driver, a cacique, an Indian from the
coast, a great big burly fellow with a couple of revolvers
strapped to a belt and a blacksnake that would measure eight
or ten feet, right after the group that were digging and then at
the farther end of the row a man with a sawed off shotgun.
These men were put out in the morning, worked under these
overseers in that manner, and locked up at night in a large shed
with shelves to sleep on. Each had a blanket. They were slaves
to all intents and purposes.
In the state of Chihuahua alone, which was the birthplace of the
Mexican Revolution, U.S. investors owned more than fifteen million
acres. As settlers poured in and put up fences on these lands,
resentment increased and led to attacks on foreign-owned properties
during the peak years of the revolution. “The attacks were frequently
led by local small landowners and other men of note, who
usually called themselves Villistas and Zapatistas but who were in
fact outside any organized authority,” Hart writes.
When disputes emerged between foreign owners and Mexican
citizens, Díaz and his circle of government officials – more often
than not board members of the biggest companies and handsomely
remunerated – sided with the foreigners. In the years leading up
to the revolution, a violent strike broke out at a Rockefeller controlled
copper mine and an even bloodier revolt occurred at a
textile factory in Veracruz. The growing militancy of factory workers
and miners, the resentment among farmers and peasants, and
the inability of Mexico’s elite to compete with the foreign companies
that had gained control of their country created alliances
between classes and cultures. Drought, crop failures, mine closures,
growing unemployment, and a 50 percent decline in the purchasing
power of the peso further contributed to the growing dissatisfaction
with the Díaz regime. Thus, when an ineffectual-looking man
named Francisco Madero in 1908 called for reform, his call was
met with a surprising amount of support.
With the bland features of an accountant, a high-pitched, quavering
voice, and a diminutive frame, Madero seemed an unlikely
figure to spearhead the violent revolt. In Mexico City, the wealthy
tittered behind his back, referring to him as “loco Franco.” His
grandfather likened his campaign to a “microbe’s challenge to an
elephant,” and his brother, Gustavo, would famously remark, “In a
family of clever men, the only fool was President.”
The Maderos ranked among the twelve richest families in Mexico
and represented “the cream of the enterprising, northern Mexican
landed elite,” writes Alan Knight, the author of a multivolume
history of the revolution. They owned cotton and rubber plantations,
mines and lumber mills, textile factories and distilleries.
Madero, who had studied in Paris and at the University of California
in Berkeley, may have been considered an impractical, dreamyeyed
mystic, but in reality he was an enterprising and resourceful
businessman who before the age of thirty had acquired a fortune
that was independent of his family’s great wealth.
Ambassador Wilson had only contempt for Madero and made
no effort to camouflage it when he testified before a congressional
hearing investigating losses suffered by U.S. citizens and companies
during the revolution: “When Madero first attracted my attention
he was engaged in the business of making incendiary speeches, usually
of very little intellectual merit, before audiences in remote parts
of Mexico. These meetings were usually interrupted by the soldiers,
and generally Madero was put in jail, his release following some
days afterwards. He never appealed to popular sympathy in Mexico.
He was a practically unknown person in public affairs who
appeared at the psychological moment.” While conceding that
Madero was a man of “absolute personal honesty” and “of excellent
morals,” Wilson also considered him to be mentally unsound:
“Madero was incoherent and illogical in speech, physically in a
state of continual contortion, unable to elucidate clearly any opinion
which he entertained, easily impressed by fakers and international
confidence men.” And if all that weren’t damning enough,
Wilson also reported that Madero believed in the “spectral appearance”
of deceased people. “Upon one occasion, he said to me,
‘George Washington is sitting right there beside you, listening to
every word that you say.'”
Madero was an adherent of Spiritualism, a religious doctrine
popular in the nineteenth century whose followers believed that the
dead could be contacted. Acting as a “writing medium,” Madero
channeled the thoughts of Benito Juárez, a prince from the Bhagavad
Gita, and his own dead brother. He purified himself by eliminating
meat, alcohol, and tobacco from his diet, and eventually
came to believe that his mission in life was to free his beloved patria
from “oppression, slavery and fanaticism.”
Madero was convinced Mexico’s woes could be traced to a
single phenomenon: the concentration of power in the hands of one
man. In 1909, he gained national recognition with the publication
of an influential book in which he argued that the president of
Mexico should be allowed to remain in office for only one term.
The following year, he began actively campaigning for president as
a member of the Antireelectionist Party. Contrary to what Ambassador
Wilson believed, the Mexican people adored Madero and
dubbed him the “Apostle of Democracy.” In Veracruz, where
Díaz’s troops had brutally suppressed a labor strike, he told cheering
crowds, “You do not want bread, you want only freedom,
because freedom will allow you to win that bread.”
Porfirio Díaz, like Madero’s own family, did not take Madero’s
bid for the presidency seriously. But when he saw the crowds that
Madero was drawing, he threw him in jail. Through the intercession
of his family, Madero was released and fled to San Antonio,
Texas. There, in the dampness of a boardinghouse, he worked out
the details of his revolutionary platform, proclaimed himself as
provisional president, and called upon the Mexican people to overthrow
the aged dictator. If the revolution were to succeed, Madero
knew he would need courageous men to fight the entrenched federal
army. One evening, probably in the late summer or early fall of
1910, Abraham González, a close friend of Madero’s, went to a
darkened house in Chihuahua City to meet with a young man of
dubious background who called himself Francisco Villa.
At first glance, Villa may have struck González as just another
member of the lower classes. He was about thirty-two years old at
the time, five feet ten inches tall, thick through the middle, with a
full head of kinky black hair and a bristly mustache. His eyes were
his most memorable feature and were capable of expressing both a
childlike innocence and a predator’s unblinking cruelty. “His mouth
hangs open, and if he isn’t smiling, he’s looking gentle. All except
for his eyes, which are never still and full of energy and brutality,”
wrote the journalist John Reed, whose articles would make Pancho
Villa into an international hero. Carlos Husk, an American physician
who worked for a mining company in Mexico and had observed
Villa’s behavior for many years, had a similar impression:
“He has the most remarkable pair of prominent brown eyes I have
ever seen. They seem to look through you; he talks with them and
all of his expressions are heralded and dominated by them first, and
when in anger, or trying to impress some particular point, they
seem to burn and spit out sparks and flashes of fire between the
hard-drawn, narrowed and nearly closed lids.”
Villa’s life was such a deeply fused mix of fanciful stories,
myths, and half-truths that even during his lifetime biographers
and writers had a difficult time trying to decipher the facts of his
upbringing. Most historians agree he was born in 1878 on a hacienda
in Durango to sharecropper parents and was baptized with
the name Doroteo Arango. In his memoirs, which tend to portray
him as a heroic figure, Villa says that he came home from the fields
to find the hacienda owner, Agustín L?pez Negrete, in his house
and his sister, Martina, in tears and clinging to his mother. “My
mother wept but spoke firmly, ‘Leave my house, Se?or. Have you
no shame?’ I went to my cousin Romualdo Franco’s for the pistol I
kept there and returned and fired at Don Agustín and hit him three
times.”
(Continues…)
Excerpted from The General and the Jaguar: Pershing’s Hunt for Pancho Villa
by Eileen Welsome
Copyright © 2006 by Eileen Welsome.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
LITTLE, BROWN
Copyright © 2006
Eileen Welsome
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-316-71599-9
