Villa and Zapata: A Biography of the Mexican Revolution
By Frank McLynn
Pimlico, 2001
459 pages, $38 (pb)

REVIEW BY PHIL SHANNON

It was an extraordinary moment in Mexico’s history. In elegant teahouses in Mexico City, startled young waitresses served tea to peasant revolutionaries, the Zapatista soldiers’ dusty trousers and broad sombreros making an alarming change from the usual fashions.

Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa, leaders of the peasant armies from south and north which had driven a military junta out of Mexico City, occupied the National Palace and were in control of the capital in 1913. Alas, the moment did not last and seven more years of ferocious civil war finished off the revolution.

Frank McLynn’s biography of Villa and Zapata is the story of a Mexico which was overripe for a social explosion by 1910. Under the reign of dictator Porfirio Diaz, wealthy landowners and US oil and mining capitalists prospered on the foundations of murderous repression of the rest of the population. With a severe economic depression buffeting a peasantry forced into virtual slavery, and a Mexican bourgeoisie (petit and industrial) clamouring for political reform, the spring was coiled for confrontation with Diaz.

The release came when Diaz stole yet another ‘election’ in 1910 and the defeated liberal candidate, Francisco Madero, rebelled and drew all aggrieved classes into his armed insurrection. Among those heeding the call were Villa and Zapata.

The cattle-rustling Villa had become, under the tutelage in prison of Madero liberals, a “social bandit”, a Robin Hood of the northern frontier state of Chihuahua. Through his magnetic personality, bravery and incorruptibility, Villa had won over to his army tens of thousands of peasants, cowboys, unemployed miners, ex-bandits, prospectors and adventurers.

Zapata, a popular village chief in the southern state of Morelos, had a passion for justice for his villagers who had their farms destroyed or stolen by the big landowners. Politically stimulated by anarchist schoolteachers, Zapata led armed peasant occupations of their stolen land and issued a political manifesto, the Plan of Ayala, with its rallying call — “Land and Liberty” (Tierra y Libertad) — for land reform and the dismantling of a repressive state.

Huerta’s reign of terror

With Diaz defeated and Madero in power, the ruling class was desperate to deal with the continuing revolts which threatened to go beyond Madero’s liberal capitalist regime. An army coup in 1911 (masterminded by the US ambassador) despatched Madero, and General Huerta launched a reign of terror against Mexico’s peasants. Mobilising their armies against Huerta’s counter-revolution were Zapata and Villa, who had been won over to an anti-Huerta alliance before escaping from prison by sawing through the bars whilst a band played loud mariarchi music in the street outside his cell.

As Zapata swept through the southern states, restoring land to the peasants, Villa was theatrically throwing open granaries to feed the hungry, executing hated estate managers and otherwise acting as a champion of the oppressed. In 1913 came victory but Villa and Zapata were not the only anti-Huerta rebel leaders.

Venustiano Carranza, a landowner and leader of the Mexican bourgeoisie, realised the importance of national control of the revolution whilst Villa (the Chihuahuan regional autonomist) and Zapata (with anarchist neglect of central state power) were limited by their regional horizons and withdrew from Mexico City to their home states.

Villa became governor of Chihuahua, instituting a primitive welfare state, food subsidies, price controls and selectively redistributing land to his army’s veterans. Other peasants missed out, however, whilst mine workers had their unions outlawed. Villa’s economic policy was to print more money. He ran a draconian law and order policy and his controlled press promoted a cult of personality. Villa was opposed to suffrage in Chihuahua, because he believed that certain people (Indians, the illiterate, women,) could not be trusted with the vote. The radical journalist, John Reed, called Villa’s regime “the socialism of a dictator”.

The political and socio-economic reality in Zapata’s south was vastly different. Genuine land reform underpinned village communes. An open democracy ruled, with illiterate peasants participating directly in decision-making.

Left in charge of the capital, Carranza, “First Chief of the Revolution”, started answering the question of just whose Revolution this was, drawing the battle lines between peasant and landlord. Zapata, more wary of Carranza than Villa — “I see in him much ambition and a disposition to fool people” — formed another alliance with Villa in 1914 which soon collapsed, however, as the Villista troops which remained in Mexico City turned to banditry and terror, often targeting the Zapatistas. Zapata’s decision to again withdraw to his social oasis of Morelos allowed Carranza to seize the hour and make war on Villa.

Villa’s political weaknesses now hastened his defeat. Carranza and his ally, the anti-Huerta rebel, Obregon, promised the world to Mexico’s peasants and workers. It was pure demagoguery but Villa’s banning of unions, opposition to democracy, and failures on land reform, had left the field open for a propaganda strike. The Red Battalion — unionised workers from Mexico City — added to the heavy damage on Villista troops who were further decimated by military errors by Villa whose hostility to theory extended to military science.

As Villista morale and currency collapsed in Chihuahua, Villa increasingly relied on pathological killers to maintain discipline. All his intellectuals and military command deserted or defected. From an army of 50,000, only 200 faithful or fearful took to the hills with Villa to wage guerilla war. Carranza now turned his full attention on Zapata, taking Morelos and turning Zapata, like Villa, into a fugitive guerilla.

US attack

There the revolution might have ended with a whimper but for an audacious bang by Villa. After the US recognised the Carranza regime as the government of Mexico, Villa decided to raid Columbus, a small town across the US border in New Mexico. As Villa anticipated, President Woodrow Wilson launched a major military intervention into Mexico in retaliation and, with memories still fresh from the loss of New Mexico, Texas and Arizona in the 1840s to the US, many Mexicans rallied to Villa’s resurgent army. The revolution sparked into renewed life. Zapata fought back, retaking Morelos in 1917.

The revolutionaries were unable to consolidate their gains, however, as seven years of civil war had created economic and social chaos. Famine undid Zapata’s prospects as Zapatista military commanders fought villagers for food, alienating the peasantry. Charges of betrayal poisoned morale and Zapata became moody and paranoid. Typhus completed the devastation of Zapata’s heartlands.

War, starvation and virus chronically depleted Zapata’s forces and Zapata’s assassination by Carranza agents in 1919 sealed the doom of the Zapatista movement.

Villa, too, faced peasants angered by food requisitions and forced military service, further alienated by Villa’s increasing brutality and atrocities such as gang-rapes and a mass execution of 90 women from a village which had betrayed the Villistas to Carranza.

To the new president of Mexico (General Alvaro Obregon, who had assassinated Carranza), the revolutionaries were, however, proven experts at soaring from the ashes of defeat and so he arranged political settlements. Villa was given 66,000 hectares of land in return for staying quiet. The Zapatistas had their land reform gains in Morelos recognised. For his peasant movement, Zapata had won land from the landlords. Villa ended his political life as a landlord (before Obregon had him assassinated in 1923).

One million dead in 10 years of fighting was a high price to pay for the victory of the emerging industrial and modernising rural bourgeoisies in the Mexican Revolution but Villa and Zapata took the posthumous political honours. Villa’s Robin Hood daring and once-mighty army has passed into legend, a defiant cultural icon to the oppressed. Zapata has become the inspiration of modern rebellion, the Mayan Indian tribes of the Mexican state of Chiapas rising in armed insurgency in 1994 under the Zapatista banner against the pernicious effects of global capitalism.

Despite McLynn’s textbook lectures against the “fruitless” analytical tool of Marxism, he has produced a gripping tale of a mighty class struggle in which Zapata stood his class ground to the end while Villa lost his always shaky class bearings and wrecked an alliance with Zapata that could have turned the Mexican peasants’ magnificent fighting spirit against injustice into the fruits of victory.

From Green Left Weekly, January 16, 2002.
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