The General and the Jaguar (10 page)

Villa lived in fear of assassins. He ate only after one of his trusted lieutenants had first sampled his plate of food and
each night went out in the desert to sleep, returning the next morning from a direction opposite that from which he had left.
Defeat and disgrace had only made him more wary and he drew closer to the dwindling cadre of officers who had not deserted
him. They included Candelario Cervantes, wiry, dark eyed, and ruthless; Pablo and Martín López, two brothers who had fought
at Villa’s side since the beginning of the revolution; Francisco Beltrán, once known as
el general de los yaquis,
who, at the age of fifty, was one of Villa’s oldest generals; and Juan Pedrosa, a cheerful and outgoing general from Sonora.

Though Villa’s officers had lost none of their revolutionary zeal, the same could not be said for the rank and file. Many
of the men were veterans of Villa’s earlier campaigns who had returned home exhausted and thoroughly sickened by war. But
Villa had succeeded in getting them to rejoin him after issuing orders such as the following:

I hereby order the immediate mobilization of all soldiers residing in the districts of Namiquipa and Cruces who have had previous
service in the Conventional Army, and their assignment to the detachment in command of Colonel Candelario Cervantes. Those
who fail to join said detachment shall be shot. Those who conceal themselves and are not found, the families of these shall
pay the penalty.

Francisco Villa

Forced conscription, or the
leva,
was something that Díaz and Huerta had relied upon to fill their armies and rid the countryside of troublemakers, and the
threat demonstrated Villa’s dwindling popularity. The conscripts were nothing like the enthusiastic volunteers who had once
filled the ranks of the División del Norte. With no money for wages, Villa’s henchmen used a deadly discipline to keep the
troops from bolting. Stragglers were brutally beaten with the flats of swords and deserters run down in the brush and shot.

One day, when the column was lashed with a cold rain, the Villistas took refuge in the burned-out adobe huts and buildings
that once marked the outskirts of a flourishing farm. The next morning, they wrung out their clothes and laid them in the
sun to dry. In the rain-washed air, Pablo López, thirty-five, tall and angular, bearing little resemblance to his brother,
Martín, who was three years older, could see for many miles and may have let his animal wariness slacken momentarily. At the
time he was the target of an intense manhunt.

O
N SATURDAY, JANUARY
8, 1916, the day that Pancho Villa penned his letter to Emiliano Zapata seeking an alliance, eighteen workers were on their
way to reopen a silver mine in Cusihuíriachic, a small town roughly a hundred miles southwest of Chihuahua City. The mine
had been closed because of the civil unrest, but General Obregón had been in El Paso for a banquet on December 30 and had
urged U.S. businessmen to return to Mexico. “I want you to come down into our territory and open your business enterprises.
I give you my word that you will be given full protection. Our government is in complete control of every important center
in Chihuahua. Nothing will happen to you because the Villistas are whipped. Villa is a thing of the past.”

Charles Rea Watson, a well-built man of forty-eight with a ruddy complexion and a stubby red mustache, was the general manager
of the mining operation. Despite Obregón’s assurances, he had decided to personally investigate whether it was safe to return,
making several trips to Chihuahua City to meet with military authorities. Satisfied, he had obtained safe-conduct passports
for the eighteen members of his party, which guaranteed their protection by Carrancista forces and instructed Mexican officials
to cooperate with them. On the eve of their departure, he also offered to pay Carrancista troops to escort the group to the
mine but was assured that the state of Chihuahua was peaceful and soldiers would not be needed.

The train chugged south to Chihuahua City. The miners disembarked and made their way to the Robinson House, where they spent
the rest of the weekend. At about ten o’clock on Monday morning, the tenth of January, they boarded a train that would take
them to the mining facility. Some of the passengers began playing cards, using a suitcase as a table, while others dozed or
read. In addition to Watson’s party, there were a number of Mexicans on the train who were returning to Cusi. They included
Elena G. de López, whose husband worked for the mining company; Pedro Chacón, formerly an officer in Villa’s army, who had
accepted amnesty from the Carranza government; and Cesar Sala, an Italian by birth and naturalized Mexican citizen, who had
gone to Chihuahua City to buy goods for his store, which had been looted the previous month by Villistas. Also traveling with
the Watson party was Thomas Holmes, a cheerful young American from Keene, New Hampshire, who wore a jaunty straw hat and had
decided to accompany the party in order to check on his own mining enterprises.

At about one o’clock that afternoon, the train pulled into the little station of Santa Isabel, located forty miles west of
Chihuahua City. While it was idling, two armed men rode up, looked inside, and then rode away. After refueling, the train
continued toward Cusi and had gone perhaps five miles when it encountered a railroad car lying diagonally across the tracks.
Thomas Holmes peered out the window to see what was going on. Tom Evans, twenty-nine, a member of the mining party, took his
gold watch from his vest and slipped it inside his underwear, and then stood and looked over Holmes’s shoulder. Evans thought
a train that had preceded them must have jumped the tracks and the two men decided to get off and investigate. Several other
passengers followed them to the rear platform.

The men had gone perhaps ten feet when they heard gunfire. The train had halted inside a narrow railroad cut. To the right
of the tracks was a river and to the left was a steep embankment. Holmes glanced back over his shoulder and saw twelve to
fifteen Mexican soldiers standing on the bank above the train, firing down on them. “How many others were there I could not
say, as my view was obstructed by the train,” Holmes said. “At this time I saw Mr. Watson just leaping off of the rear steps
of the train. He landed right at the entrance of this cut on the river side and ran directly away from the train and at right
angles from the train towards the river.”

Watson did not get far. One of the Mexican passengers, José María Sánchez, ran to a window, where he saw some of the soldiers
dropping to their knees to improve their aim. Watson fell after running about a hundred yards. “He got up, limping, but went
on a short distance farther, when he threw up his arms and fell forward, his body rolling down the bank into the river,” Sánchez
recalled.

Holmes and the other men scattered as the attackers poured down gunfire on the train. The passengers inside dropped to the
floor to protect themselves from the flying glass and bullets. When someone screamed that there were women and children inside,
the firing gradually stopped. Suddenly Pablo López and about thirty soldiers appeared in the doorway of the passenger car.
Cesar Sala, the Italian, was just rising to his feet when López struck him in the face with his revolver.
“Abajo, gringo!”
he snarled. Sala responded that he was not a gringo, but a naturalized Mexican citizen. López then ordered him to sit down
and be quiet.

Then he pointed his Mauser at Pedro Chacón, the ex-Villista and former military commander of Cusihuíriachic when Villa had
controlled the state.
“Está aquí, traidor?”
—“You here, traitor?”

Chacón protested that he was no traitor. “The reason I got my amnesty was that Villa had turned us loose.”

“We will arrange this later,” responded López, motioning him to get out of the car.

Two of the attackers pulled Elena G. de López up from her seat to take her outside with the other Americans, but when she
protested that both she and her husband were Mexican citizens, López ordered the men to release her. To other Mexican passengers,
he hollered, “If you want to see some fun, watch us kill these gringos.
Vámanos, muchachos!
”

As López swaggered through the passenger car, he taunted the Americans. “He was cursing the Americans who were in the car,
the President of the United States, and Carranza, and was telling the Americans in effect, in Spanish, ‘Tell Wilson to come
and save you, and tell Carranza to give you protection. Now is the time to come here and protect you,’ and at the same time
using vulgar expressions and curse words of the President of the United States, of the Americans, and of Carranza,” Cesar
Sala wrote in a sworn affidavit. He continued:

I heard López order the Americans to remove their clothing and get out of the car. Young Maurice Anderson, barefooted and
in his underclothes, passed me from behind, going up the aisle of the car, and getting off the car at the front door, stepping
off to the right hand side toward the river. He was followed by McHatton and an old man (whose name I did not know), who was
bleeding from the side of his face, whom I remember in particular. They also had removed their clothes. After that I heard
the report of guns on the right hand side of the train. I inquired of the Mexicans sitting across the aisle, who could see
out of the window, what was being done, and they told me they were killing the Americans. Becoming more frightened, I kept
quiet.

The soldiers lined up the members of the Watson party on the right side of the railroad tracks just a few feet from the train.
Recalled another Mexican passenger, “Two soldiers using Mausers were told by Colonel López to kill the Americans. One of them
went up to the first foreigner and shot him, and as he died the second one fired his Mauser at the second foreigner, standing
in line. A general confusion began when the first two were killed, but the two men ran along the line, taking turns shooting
the Americans. Some of the foreigners attempted to break away, but they were forced back by the soldiers until the entire
line had been killed. Only two men did the executing. The others stood around cheering and crying, ‘Viva Villa.’”

Within a few minutes, added José María Sánchez, “The Americans lay on the ground, gasping and writhing in the sand and cinders.
The suffering of the Americans seemed to drive the bandits into a frenzy. ‘Viva Villa!’ they cried and ‘Death to the gringos!’
Colonel López ordered the ‘mercy shot’ given to those who were still alive, and the soldiers placed the ends of their rifles
at their victims’ heads and fired, putting the wounded out of misery.”

López and his men moved on to the express car, where they smashed the locks on suitcases and trunks and took what valuables
they could find. They seized eleven small sacks of Mexican silver, valued at approximately 6,518 pesos, and filled their saddlebags
with coffee beans. López ordered the frightened crew to take the train back to Chihuahua City and then he and his soldiers
made their way to a small town, where they went to sleep.

The assailants had inadvertently left one American eyewitness alive: Thomas Holmes. When Holmes had leaped from the train
with Watson, he had tripped and rolled into the bushes. “I lay there perfectly quiet and looked around and could see the Mexicans
shooting in the direction in which Watson was running when I last saw him. I could see that they were not shooting at me and
thinking they believed me already dead I took a chance and crawled into some darker bushes. I crawled through the bushes until
I reached the bank of the stream and made my way to a point probably one hundred yards from the train. There I lay under the
bank for half an hour and heard the shooting as they were evidently finishing the Americans, shots by ones, twos and threes.”

Thirteen bodies lay in a heap next to the railroad tracks. Five more bodies, including Watson’s, lay between the tracks and
the river. Dozens of spent cartridges littered the ground, evidence that the soldiers had continued pumping bullets into their
victims long after they were dead. Young Maurice Anderson was lying on top of the pile, with his arms up before him as if
endeavoring to protect his face. Other bodies had been bayoneted repeatedly or mutilated, genitals crushed, eyes gouged out,
and heads twisted around from the original position in which they fell. Nearly all the victims were stripped of their possessions—right
down to the buttons on their clothing. Only Charles Watson, who was still lying in the river, remained clothed. He was wearing
a threadbare khaki suit so old it was later speculated that even the soldiers didn’t want it.

News of the murders caused an uproar in the United States. U.S. Army officials would write that Villa was far from the scene
and could not have had advance knowledge of the whereabouts of the train carrying the American miners. Yet, there was no doubt
in the press or among the public that he had ordered the atrocity and many people, civilians and politicians alike, wanted
President Wilson to send troops into Mexico to capture the marauders. But the Carrancistas reassured the administration that
the de facto government would bring the culprits to justice and Wilson decided to let Carranza’s government handle it, believing
that intervention by the United States would only bolster Pancho Villa’s popularity and destabilize the fledgling government.

In Chihuahua City, the bodies were placed in pine coffins, which were then draped with black cloth and affixed with small
identification cards, and loaded onto a train bound for El Paso. Several dogs that had accompanied the miners and remained
at the massacre site also rode in the train. The local newspapers were filled with the grisly details of the murders, and
churches and funeral parlors overflowed with grieving relatives and outraged friends. In Juárez, General Gabriel Gavira and
the Mexican consul, Andrés García, a thin, harassed-looking man who was well liked by reporters, had an urgent discussion
about the matter. An El Paso nurse, who could speak Spanish fluently, overheard the conversation: