The General and the Jaguar (3 page)

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 Porfiriato.

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, dreamy-eyed 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.

A
T 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 López
Negrete, in his house and his sister, Martina, in tears and clinging to his mother. “My mother wept but spoke firmly, ‘Leave
my house, Señor. 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.”