The General and the Jaguar (6 page)

The move dismayed the foreign diplomats in Mexico City. But Pancho Villa was thrilled: “I think President Wilson is the most
just man in the world. All Mexicans will love him now, and we will look on the United States as our greatest friend, because
it has done us justice.”

V
ILLA HAD RETURNED
to private life after Madero had been sworn into office, opening four prosperous butcher shops in Chihuahua City. At one
point, President Madero had called upon him to help the then loyal Victoriano Huerta in stamping out local revolts and Villa
had responded with alacrity, rounding up his old troops and placing himself under Huerta’s command. But Huerta had treated
Villa with contempt, referring to him sarcastically as
el general honorario.
Villa, in turn, began referring to Huerta as
el borrachito
—the little drunkard. “Not once in all the times I spoke with him was he altogether sober,” Villa said in his memoirs, “for
he drank morning, afternoon, and night.”

One morning, raging with fever, Villa had been summoned to Huerta’s headquarters, placed under arrest for taking a horse,
and escorted to an adobe wall where a firing squad awaited him. At the last minute he received a reprieve from Madero and
was sent to prison instead. There he languished for months, improving his reading skills and writing long beseeching letters
to Madero in which he begged him for help. Finally, six weeks before Madero was assassinated, Villa disguised himself as a
lawyer and escaped from prison. He walked out the front gate, wearing a black overcoat and dark glasses and carrying a handkerchief
in front of his face.

He made his way to El Paso, where he took up residence at the Hotel Roma, checking in under the name Doroteo Arango. He kept
a box of homing pigeons in his room, telling people that he had a very delicate stomach and had to live on squab, but in reality
used the birds to send messages to friends in Chihuahua. He rode around town on a motorcycle and went to the Emporium, a Greek-owned
bar and club where Mexican expatriates congregated, and to the Elite Confectionery, where he bought ice cream and peanut brittle
and strawberry pop. “He had fallen back into obscurity, wore a bowler hat—no better sign there is of abdication from romantic
dreams—and his career seemed over. But the fates were to give him another chance, and he was the man to take that chance,”
observed James Hopper, a correspondent for
Collier’s,
who wrote many insightful pieces about the Mexican Revolution and the border.

When Villa learned that Huerta had assassinated his beloved “Maderito,” he vowed to topple him. On March 6, 1913, two weeks
after the assassinations, Villa and eight companions splashed across the Rio Grande on horseback, carrying rifles and ammunition,
two pounds of sugar, coffee, and a pound of salt. As Villa made his way south, he recruited men and collected horses and arms
to rebuild his army. Within eight months, the entire state of Chihuahua would be under his control and the uneducated Villa—who
had learned how to sign his name from a store clerk and copied it over and over in the sand until he got the elaborate curves
and flourishes just right—would find himself building schools, printing money, enacting price controls on bread, meat, and
milk, and putting his peon army to work cleaning the streets and operating the local power plant.

In the early months of his campaign, Villa used guerrilla tactics to weaken Huerta’s army, mounting surprise attacks in the
middle of the night and then melting back into the countryside. As his fame spread, other rebel leaders joined his army, anxious
to save themselves from annihilation and convinced that cooperation was the only way to defeat Huerta. Huerta dispatched his
sharpshooters to kill Villa, but no one seemed to be able to hit him. Oblivious to the danger, Villa rode up and down behind
his artillery guns, shouting out directions:
“Mas derecho! Poco mas izquierda!”
—“More to the right! A little more to the left!”

By late September of 1913, the División del Norte had a troop strength of six to eight thousand men and Villa was ready to
lay siege to the city of Torreón, an important source of supplies and a communications hub located in north-central Mexico.
Attacking at night, the Villistas captured the federal army’s artillery and took command of the outlying hills. After a few
days, Torreón weakened and fell.

Villa imposed a rigid discipline upon his troops and began strategizing for his next battle. He set his sights on Ciudad Chihuahua,
the state capital, some 250 miles south of El Paso. On November 5, the Villistas launched their attack. This time the entrenched
federal army fought hard, and successfully repelled Villa’s soldiers. After a five-day siege, the rebel forces withdrew.

Villa then executed a dazzling maneuver that would propel him onto the world stage. Capturing a supply train, he loaded his
troops onto it and proceeded north toward the city of Juárez. Pretending to be the colonel in charge of the captured train,
he sent a message to the federal commander in Juárez informing him that the engine had broken down and asking him to send
another engine and five cars. After receiving them, Villa wired another message to Juárez: “Wires cut between here and Chihuahua.
Large force of rebels approaching from south. What shall I do?” The commander in Juárez instructed him to return and he obeyed,
confirming his whereabouts at every stop along the way. Military authorities in Juárez, thinking Villa’s men were still laying
siege to Chihuahua, enjoyed a leisurely dinner and entertainment. At one o’clock on the morning of November 15, 1913, Villa’s
troops rolled into the city and routed the surprised federal troops with a minimum of bloodshed. Villa immediately shut down
the saloons, swept up the silver from the gambling tables, ordered his men to shoot any looters, and made plans to go to a
cockfight, one of his favorite pastimes.

The capture of Juárez was condemned as “shameful” by Mexico City’s upper class, who still believed war was a gentlemanly pursuit
to be conducted only in daylight hours. But the U.S. Army generals who sat on the American side of the border watching the
revolution were delighted. The War Department’s chief of staff, Brigadier General Hugh Scott, a bluff old Indian fighter with
a walrus mustache and a bad case of lumbago, wrote, “The taking of Juárez by Villa was a beautiful piece of strategy. . .
. Altogether he is the strongest character yet developed in Mexico in the present Revolution, and may yet develop into a ruler,
although he is said to have no ambition to be president of Mexico, on account of his conviction of lack of sufficient education.”

Scott, who prided himself on educating “primitive people,” quickly developed a rapport with Villa, whom he hoped to enroll
one day in military school in Leavenworth. Villa was a great sinner, Scott often said, but he also had been greatly sinned
against.

“Civilized people look upon you as a tiger or a wolf,” Scott once told him.

“Me?” Villa exclaimed.

“Yes, you.”

“How is that?”

“Why, from the way you kill wounded and unarmed prisoners.”

Scott gave Villa a booklet on the rules of engagement, a treatise that amused him no end, wrote journalist John Reed. “It
seems to me a funny thing to make rules about war. It’s not a game,” Villa mused.

Villa was a strong and ruthless leader. Disobedience brought swift and merciless justice. One correspondent watched in amazement
as he stepped onto the balcony of his office and calmly shot one of his soldiers, who was wasting ammunition by firing his
gun into the air. As was the custom on both sides, Villa promptly executed captives but his economical way of doing so horrified
the civilized world: he would line up his prisoners three or four deep and dispatch them with one bullet through the head.
Once he had bent men to his will, however, he treated them with a lofty generosity. He paid his troops whenever possible and
took care of their widows if they were killed.

As Villa’s movement grew, representatives from Venustiano Carranza approached him and asked him to join with them in the fight
to topple Huerta. Villa initially scoffed at Carranza’s overtures, pointing out that Carranza had no military victories to
speak of. But Villa, acutely aware of his own lack of education and political experience and cognizant of the fact that he
needed help to finish off Huerta, eventually decided to ally himself with Carranza.

The two insurgent leaders came from very different backgrounds. Carranza was a former governor and hacendado from Coahuila,
a state that lay east of Chihuahua and south of Texas. Texas had once been part of Coahuila, and Carranza, a voracious reader
of history and highly nationalistic, still resented the loss. He wore tinted glasses, a black frock coat, and a long white
beard, which he combed with his fingers while talking. “Above all, he is white, pure white,” observed writer Vicente Blasco
Ibáñez. “His Spanish ancestors came from the Basque Provinces and from the Basques he inherited the vigorous health and the
silent tenacity of that race.” He was tall and well muscled for his age, but his grandfatherly appearance was marred by a
red-veined, bulbous nose. Two decades older than Villa, Carranza was a shrewd and opportunistic politician who gave lip service
to the revolutionary cause and the slain Madero, but remained fixed upon his own political agenda. Edith O’Shaughnessy, the
wife of the U.S. diplomat, had observed Carranza’s movement with dismay. “Those who have watched Carranza’s long career, say
that a quiet, tireless sleepless greed has been his motive force through life, and his strange lack of friendliness to Washington
is accompanied by the fact that he really hates foreigners, any and all, who prosper in Mexico.”

Villa used long trains to transport his soldiers from city to city. On top of the boxcars rode pigs, chickens, children, and
soldaderas
—wives, daughters, and even grandmothers who served as helpmates and nurses and fellow fighters. His pride and joy was his
hospital train, which consisted of forty enameled boxcars staffed with Mexican and U.S. physicians and supplied with the latest
surgical appliances. With its bright blue crosses and the words
Servicio Sanitario
stenciled on the sides, the hospital train followed Villa’s troops into battle and transported the most severely wounded
back to hospitals in the cities. He had a boxcar for correspondents, a boxcar for moving-picture men, a boxcar for his cannons
and extra railroad ties, and a caboose, which he used for his headquarters. Painted gray and decorated with chintz window
curtains, the caboose was big enough for a couple of bunks and a partitioned area for his cook. In the early days, Villa would
sit in his caboose in his blue underwear while as many as fifteen generals lounged at his feet to argue and plot strategy
for their next campaign. Hanging on the walls above them were pictures of Villa on one of his frothing horses; the querulous
Don Venustiano; and Rodolfo Fierro, Villa’s handsome and ruthless friend, who was christened
el carnicero
—the butcher—after he had made a sport of shooting three hundred prisoners as they tried to escape over a corral wall.

If Fierro represented the dark side of Pancho Villa’s nature, then the aristocratic and exquisitely mannered Felipe Ángeles
represented the good. Ángeles, the army general who had been detained along with Madero and his vice president, had been educated
at the Colegio Militar and excelled at mathematics and artillery science. He was in the federal army when the revolution broke
out and offered to fight against the revolutionaries. But he soon became personal friends with Madero during the latter’s
brief presidency. After Madero was killed, Ángeles joined Don Venustiano’s counterrevolution. Disgusted by Carranza’s opulent
lifestyle and the preening sycophants who surrounded him, Ángeles eventually aligned himself with Pancho Villa’s División
del Norte. Villa revered Ángeles’s intellectual and military capabilities and his rigorous honesty. While he considered himself
far too ignorant and uneducated to govern a turbulent country like Mexico, Villa often thought Ángeles could be the next president.

Writer and revolutionary Martín Luis Guzmán met Villa for the first time in Juárez, in a poorly lit room off a muddy side
street. Surrounded by his Dorados, Villa was resting on a cot in a back room, fully clothed, wearing his hat, coat, pistols,
and ammunition belts. Guzmán studied Villa closely and afterward recorded the strange, unsettled emotions that he felt: “We
came fleeing from Victoriano Huerta, the traitor, the assassin, and this same vital impulse, with everything that was good
and generous in it, flung us into the arms of Pancho Villa, who had more of a jaguar about him than a man. A jaguar tamed,
for the moment, for our work, or for what we believed was our work; a jaguar whose back we stroked with trembling hand, fearful
that at any moment a paw might strike out at us.”

But if Villa was a jaguar, then he was a jaguar with rapidly developing political instincts. From the beginning, he went out
of his way to accommodate U.S. investments and property in Mexico. He knew that he needed to maintain good relations with
the United States in order to sell the crops and cattle from the confiscated estates of the
ricos
—the wealthy—across the border and to purchase the armaments and supplies vital to his army. And, despite the rabid nationalism
of his countrymen, he also understood intuitively that the ultimate victor in the revolution would need the recognition and
support of the U.S. government to survive.

When his soldiers entered Torreón, for example, the residents girded themselves for the looting that inevitably accompanied
the occupying forces. But to everyone’s surprise, Villa issued strict orders against looting and executed those who disobeyed.
George Carothers, a rotund ex-grocer and businessman who eventually was assigned to Villa as a special State Department agent,
remembered: “By 11 o’clock at night the city was very quiet and guards stationed on every street corner. The next morning
at daylight I sent a communication to General Villa asking protection for Americans and their property, and within an hour
a squad of twenty-five men and an officer appeared with a letter from Villa stating that he sent these men to guard American
property and that they would take orders from me as to where to be stationed.” Such protections played extremely well in Washington.