1968 - Mark Kurlansky [190]
By the end of 1914 the combined forces of the revolutionary armies of Carranza and Pancho Villa and Zapata had secured control of Mexico and defeated the federal army that Porfirio Díaz had left behind. Zapata and Villa moved their armies into the capital as a new revolutionary government was formed. Carranza declared himself president and reluctantly and under great pressure adopted Zapata’s land reform program, though he did little to put it into action.
Álvaro Obregón, who, like most leading figures of the period, held the title of general, was a schoolteacher from the northern state of Sonora who had started out with a guerrilla army but had learned the modern warfare of machine guns and trenches. He had military advisers from Europe’s “Great War.” His temperament and politics, which had a huge influence on the shaping of modern Mexico, were resolutely moderate. He had sympathy for workers and peasants but was not about to do anything too revolutionary. He had considerable worker support and enlisted them in his army as “Red Battalions.” In April 1915 Villa had a showdown with Obregón, who surrounded the mounted bandits with barbed wire and trenches with machine-gun emplacements. Villa used his field artillery effectively and fought furiously, but he never understood modern tactics. His men were cut down by the machine guns and cut up by the barbed wire. Obregón himself had an arm blown off, and the partial limb in a pickling jar became the emblem of Obregón’s Red Battalions, which was later fashioned into the Revolutionary Army of Mexico, supposedly an “Army of the People” that embodied the ideals of the revolution.
Zapata stuck to his land reform goals. Such stubborn local chieftains could usually be bought off. But Zapata would not take money or accept compromise. His organization was infiltrated by an army double agent who was allowed to carry out several sneak attacks, killing large numbers of soldiers, to prove his authenticity to Zapata. Once Zapata trusted him, the agent led Zapata, looking splendid as always in his dark riding clothes on his sorrel horse, into six hundred army rifles that opened fire. Upon his death in 1919, the murdered revolutionary became the Che of his day, the youthful poster boy for a new revolutionary government that had killed him rather than carry out his revolution.
There was a lot of killing going on in Mexico—so much so that from 1910 to 1920 the total population of the country declined by several hundred thousand. In November 1920 the one-armed Obregón became president. He legalized all the land confiscations that had taken place, something Carranza had refused to do. By this act, along with having the man who set up Zapata’s murder shot, he finally obtained a peace settlement with Zapata’s fighters in Morelos, even though most of the land was getting distributed to generals and only small patches to the poor. Villa was bought off and agreed to spend the rest of his days as a comfortable rancher. But in 1923, friends and family of people he had murdered and raped over the years shot him as he passed by in his new automobile.
Some can be bought off, and some have to be shot. That became the Mexican way. “No general can withstand a cannonade of a hundred thousand pesos,” Obregón once said. By 1924 a fourth of the national budget went to paying off generals. But many other “generals,” local chieftains with their bands of armed followers, were shot.
Starting with the 1917 constitution, a system of government was established