The General and the Jaguar (4 page)

Following the shooting, Villa fled into the sierra, where he eventually joined up with a group of bandits, changed his name
to Francisco Villa, and committed a number of crimes. For more than fifteen years he lived an outlaw’s life, always on the
run, sleeping on the hard ground, a hunted coyote—a fate he once told a friend he would not wish on his worst enemy. But Mexico
was on the verge of vast upheaval and the visit from Abraham González would propel him into history as one of the best-known
revolutionary leaders of the twentieth century.

Villa would become an idol in his country and the hero of leftists and radicals throughout the world, but the fame would leave
him curiously untouched. He was nearly always disheveled looking, as if he had just risen from a nap, and had no use for pomp
or show of any kind. When he was not on a military campaign, he was most often seen in a tan, shapeless sweater and the small-brimmed
Stetson that he wore pushed back on the crown of his head. Sitting hunched over a newspaper, muttering the words under his
breath, Villa seemed like an ordinary man, even a simple one, and such is what he often professed to be to journalists. But,
in reality, he was extremely complex and his volatile personality was largely forged in the crucible of humiliation he had
endured as a youth. In Porfirio Díaz’s class-conscious society, there was no place for smart, ambitious, and penniless boys,
and the degradation and shame that Villa and his family endured had created a great, smoldering rage in him. A mocking question,
the slightest whiff of condescension, could ignite the fire.

The Spaniards, he believed, had exploited and enslaved the Mexican people; the Chinese were leeches who sent their profits
back to China instead of investing in Mexico; and the Catholic priests were simply corrupt. “I believe in God but not in religion,”
Villa once confided to a magazine journalist. “I have recognized the priests as hypocrites ever since when I was twenty I
took part in a drunken orgy with a priest and two women he had ruined. They are all frauds, the priests, and their cloth,
which is supposed to be a protection, they use to entice the innocent.”

He loved canned asparagus and soda pop and sweets of all kinds, especially peanut brittle, which made his brown, ruined teeth
flare with pain. He enjoyed ribald jokes, scratched his feet in public, loved to dance, and shunned intoxicating liquors—a
fact that had endeared him to President Woodrow Wilson’s venerable secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan, who had had
the temerity to serve grape juice at a social function and had earned the undying contempt of the diplomatic corps. Villa
suffered from rheumatism caused by years of sleeping on the cold, hard ground and his muscles had been shortened by years
of horseback riding, which gave him a shallow stride halfway between a shuffle and a glide. But he was a superb horseman,
full of energy and possessing a genuine charisma, and on the battlefield, amid the dust and smoke, his galloping figure would
so inspire his men that they would hurl themselves willingly into the withering machine-gun fire of their enemies. He was
also a man who kept his word and never forgot a favor.

W
RAPPED IN HIS
serape, the yellow lantern light flickering, Abraham González described to Villa the inequities that had befallen the people
of Mexico. González hardly seemed a revolutionary figure himself. Tall, portly, bespectacled, he was the impoverished son
of a wealthy family and had the air of a bumbling but gentle college professor. The transition to violent revolutionary had
been an arduous one and González was convinced that his life would be short.
“Yo muero en la raya”
—“I will die on the firing line,” he often told friends. His voice was absent of the condescension that Villa was keenly attuned
to and by the time he was finished talking, Villa was no longer a bandit but a committed revolutionary:

There I learned one night how my long struggle with the exploiters, the persecutors, the seducers, could be of benefit to
others who were persecuted and humiliated as I had been. There I felt the anxiety and hate built up in my soul during years
of struggle and suffering change into the belief that the evil could be ended, and this strengthened my determination to relieve
our hardships at the price of life and blood if necessary. I understood without explanation—for nobody explains anything to
the poor—how our country, which until then had been for me no more than fields, ravines, and mountains to hide in, could become
the inspiration for our best actions and the object of our finest sentiments.

From his exile in the United States, Madero instructed his followers to begin the uprising on November 20, 1910. The initial
revolts, small and relatively mild, occurred in small villages and towns of Chihuahua. Eventually the rebellion spread throughout
the country. In February of 1911, Madero returned to Mexico from Texas to take charge of the revolution himself. In one of
his first armed confrontations, at the town of Casas Grandes, which is about one hundred miles south of the New Mexico border,
Madero was soundly defeated, but his followers had witnessed his indomitable courage and their devotion to him grew. He set
up his provisional headquarters at Hacienda de Bustillos, west of Chihuahua City, and summoned Villa to a meeting.

Villa was deeply impressed by Madero and maintained affection and loyalty toward him for the rest of his life. “I thought
to myself, ‘Here is one rich man who fights for the people. He is a little fellow, but he has a great soul. If all the rich
and powerful in Mexico were like him, there would be no struggle and no suffering, for all of us would be doing our duty.
And what else is there for the rich to do if not to relieve the poor of their misery?’”

On April 7, 1911, Madero and his boisterous army of
insurrectos
began marching toward Ciudad Juárez—a railway hub, port of entry, and conduit for contraband flowing to and from the United
States. As the army approached the border town, it swelled with new recruits. Pancho Villa led a column of five hundred soldiers.
Pascual Orozco, another revolutionary leader, led a second column of equal strength. “Maderito,” as Villa would fondly call
him, brought up the rear with fifteen hundred horsemen. With its crowded saloons, gambling dens, and brothels, Juárez was
considered one of the most wicked—and exciting—cities in North America. Martín Luis Guzmán, a Mexican writer who participated
in the revolution and later wrote a brilliant book describing that period, observed that going from the United States to Juárez
was

one of the greatest sacrifices, not to say humiliations, that human geography had imposed on the sons of Mexico traveling
on that part of the border. . . . Streetcars clanged by. People and shapes resembling people crowded the streets. Occasionally
above the mass of noise in Spanish—spoken with the soft accent of the north—phrases of cowboy English exploded. The hellish
music of the automatic pianos went on incessantly. Everything smelled of mud and whisky. Up and down the streets, rubbing
against us, walked cheap prostitutes, ugly and unhappy if they were Mexican; ugly and brazen if they were Yankees; and all
this intermingled with the racket and noise of the gambling machines that came from the saloons and taverns.

The
insurrectos
surrounded Juárez on three sides. Instead of pressing forward and attacking the city, the gentle Madero, at the urging of
his family, implemented a cease-fire while he tried to negotiate a peaceful settlement with the Díaz government. During the
interlude, young boys from El Paso crossed the swaying bridges and sold sardines, cookies, candy, pop, and Washington State
canned salmon to the revolutionaries. Similarly,
insurrectos
crossed into El Paso and outfitted themselves with khaki campaign uniforms, underwear, and shoes. “It was estimated some
five hundred men outfitted themselves in one day,” Mardee Belding de Wetter, an El Paso writer, noted. A Mexican restaurant
opened to standing-room-only crowds on San Antonio Street in downtown El Paso and some of the profits were set aside to pay
for Red Cross doctors and nurses who would be treating the
insurrectos.

As the cease-fire continued into its third week, Madero’s troops grew restless and their revolutionary fervor began to fade.
Some soldiers slipped away in the darkness to return home to their families. In an effort to prevent further demoralization,
Pancho Villa and Pascual Orozco decided to attack Juárez without Madero’s express approval, figuring that he would join the
assault when he saw that their side was winning.

An advance group of about forty men started into Juárez. When a sentry spotted the invaders and fired at them, the battle
began. To shield themselves from bullets, the
insurrectos
hacked their way house to house toward the center of the city, blowing out the adobe walls with bombs made from tin cans
and gunpowder. Carrying rifles, pistols, machetes, and dull swords, they moved silently down the narrow alleys and unguarded
side streets. Crouching behind the cover of buildings and doorways, they would spend a few hours firing at the federal troops
and then drift back to the rear for food and a few hours of rest before returning once more to the fighting. Across the river
in El Paso, hundreds of spectators flocked to rooftops and the tops of boxcars to observe the battle. The exploding shrapnel
was a “beautiful sight,” remembered one local judge. Five observers were killed by stray bullets and another twelve wounded,
but the casualties did not dampen the crowd’s enthusiasm. In the battles to come, enterprising capitalists sold reserved seats
on the top of buildings for a dollar a chair and views for twenty-five cents. (If the fight did not materialize, refunds were
promised.)

Madero did try to stop the fighting, sending out a white flag and even going so far as to ask the federal commander to order
his own men to stop shooting, but when the federal troops obliged, the
insurrectos
kept firing and the opposition had no choice but to pick up their guns again. After several days of heavy casualties on both
sides, the federal army surrendered on May 10, 1911.

Afterward Villa went to a local bakery and instructed the baker to begin making bread. At four o’clock in the morning, he
returned and gathered up the loaves and first distributed them to the federal prisoners and then took what was left to his
own men.

While the victors broke bread with their enemies, an unruly mob in Mexico City halted under the windows of an apartment in
the National Palace where Porfirio Díaz lay suffering from a badly ulcerated tooth. “Death to Díaz!” they screamed. The aging
dictator, who had created modern Mexico, knew his time had come. With the help of a loyal general named Victoriano Huerta,
he was smuggled out of the city with his family and taken to Veracruz, from where he left for Europe.

M
ADERO WAS SWORN IN
as the new president in the fall of 1911. On the day that he made his triumphant entry into Mexico City, Ambassador Wilson
sent a telegram to the State Department in which he predicted continued uprisings and the eventual overthrow of the newly
elected leader. “The revolution never ceased,” he would say later. “The revolution begun against Díaz continued without any
interruption whatever through the time of Madero.” Indeed, the flames of rebellion Madero had helped stoke were nearly impossible
to quench and fighting broke out again throughout the country. One of the gravest threats came from Emiliano Zapata, a committed
revolutionary in Morelos, a small state south of Mexico City. In other parts of the country, frustrated peasants also took
land, looted homes, and murdered the wealthy hacendados who had so oppressed them.

In Mexico City, the wives and daughters of those hacendados sipped tea and ate jelly sandwiches and spoke in nervous whispers
of the unrest. One lovely woman was forced to flee her plantation when the peons revolted: “They were all right until they
suddenly threatened to kill all of us and set fire to the house. My husband frightened them thoroughly with his Mauser pistol.
I think he killed one or two. But of course I couldn’t stay there.”

Madero made many tactical errors as he attempted to restore order. He demobilized the revolutionary troops that had brought
him to power, including Villa and his men, yet left the federal army in place. Similarly, he did not purge his administration
of the Díaz loyalists. By the end of 1912, writes Hart,

the Madero government had entered a state of deep crisis. The president could not satisfy the aspirations of the campesino
and industrial working classes without betraying himself and his closest associates. He lost the support of the leftist intellectuals
who were at the forefront of the ideological debate with Díaz. He failed to maintain law and order in the countryside and
city and therefore could satisfy neither the investors, the industrial elite, nor the great landowners. His open investment
policy and reassurances to foreign investors were blunted by his inability to protect their properties from attack. The army
officer corps remained hostile toward what it regarded as his upstart and weak leadership.

But perhaps one of his worst decisions was to use Victoriano Huerta, a ruthless holdover from the Díaz regime, to quell the
dissent. Then in his late fifties, Huerta was a Huichol Indian born in an adobe hut in the state of Jalisco, located on the
Pacific coast. He was a handsome man, with a hard body and hard face, and hands that were soft as kitten paws. Huerta seemed
destined for a life of poverty, but in a twist of fate an army general passing through his village hired him as an assistant.
With the general as his mentor, Huerta was eventually able to enroll in the prestigious Colegio Militar and embark upon a
military career. Among his countrymen, Huerta developed the reputation of a “bloodthirsty animal,” but to the foreign diplomats
he seemed a gallant and tragically misunderstood figure. A heavy drinker, he favored pulque in his youth, but switched to
brandy as his career flourished and his tastes grew more refined. He showed no signs of dissipation from alcohol and friends
noticed that the more he drank the clearer his brain seemed to become. “To even his intimates, Huerta was always a silent
man,” the
New York Times
wrote: