The General and the Jaguar (7 page)

A
S THE REBEL ARMIES
gained strength, Victoriano Huerta’s hold on Mexico began to weaken. But the United States was not the only country that
was monitoring the Mexican civil war; Germany, too, had been studying the anarchy, and rather than trying to bring about a
peaceful resolution, saw the strife as an opportunity. (“Whenever war occurs in any part of the world, we in Germany sit down
and make a plan,” historian Barbara Tuchman quotes Kaiser Wilhelm as saying.) The German ambassador to Mexico offered to supply
Huerta with munitions provided Huerta would cut off oil to Great Britain if war in Europe broke out. Huerta agreed and three
ships were loaded with arms and began chugging toward Veracruz. It would prove to be an extremely risky move—one that would
lead to a full-scale invasion.

T
HE MORNING OF
A
PRIL 9, 1914
, dawned calm in Tampico, a malodorous and malaria-ridden port on the Gulf coast bristling with
smokestacks and tank farms and refineries belonging to the world’s largest oil companies. Although the city had been the scene
of sporadic fighting between the federal troops and rebels, everything appeared quiet as Ensign Charles Copp and crew members
from the warship
USS Dolphin
rowed toward the shore, the only sound the flutter of two American flags hanging from the front and rear of the boat.

Upon reaching shore, the sailors tied up, retrieved supplies from a warehouse, returned to the dock, and began loading them
into the boat. Suddenly a squad of federal soldiers surrounded them and placed them under arrest for being in a military zone.
When a higher-ranking Huertista officer learned of the capture, he was dismayed, and instructed that the Americans be escorted
at once back to the landing. Their release soon followed, along with profuse apologies for the incident.

The matter might have ended there, but the irascible American admiral Henry T. Mayo, whose eyes appeared to have been crushed
into a permanent squint by the weight of his huge forehead, was infuriated. Two of his sailors had been ordered from a boat
flying the American flag, which under international law was considered roughly equal to abducting them from the territory
of a sovereign nation. Mayo demanded a formal apology, severe punishment for the officer who committed the “hostile act,”
and a twenty-one-gun salute to the American flag. Afterward, he said, the U.S. ship would return the salute.

In a matter of hours, the situation escalated into an international crisis. President Wilson interpreted the event as another
example of Huerta’s contempt for the United States. Claiming it was not an “isolated case,” he asked Congress for approval
to use armed force to “obtain from General Huerta and his adherents the fullest recognition of the rights and dignity of the
United States.” Desperate to avoid a showdown, Huerta mulled over ways that he could comply with the U.S. demand and still
hold on to his pride and his presidency. After nearly two weeks. Huerta finally capitulated and agreed to salute the U.S.
flag provided the United States signed a protocol promising to salute the Mexican flag in return. But Secretary of State Bryan
refused, saying that “it might be construed as recognition of the Huerta government.”

The stalemate grew more complicated when the United States learned that the
Ypiranga,
a ship carrying weapons and millions of rounds of ammunition for Huerta, was on its way to Veracruz.

V
ERACRUZ, WRITES
Martín Luis Guzmán, was a city periodically swept by “impotence, humiliation, and tragedy.” During its four-hundred-year
history, it had been sacked by buccaneers, bombarded by foreign powers, and had suffered through periodic bouts of cholera
and yellow fever and malaria. In 1519, it had served as the launching point for Hernán Cortés. In 1847, U.S. General Winfield
Scott waded ashore with his troops, killed thousands of civilians, then marched on to Mexico City. And in 1864, the French
arrived, intent upon establishing a monarchy. Through it all, Veracruz had survived, and by 1914 the population had grown
to roughly forty thousand. Located on the Gulf coast, south of Tampico and about two hundred miles east of Mexico City, Veracruz
seemed picturesque, with its glowing pastel houses, green wooden balconies, and graceful, colonial-style buildings. Coconut
palms waved in the salty air and the great, snowy peak of Citlaltépetl, fifty miles inland, offered a shimmering vision to
those below of something dreamed about on hot summer days: cool air and free ice. Each evening an excellent brass band played
in Plaza Constitución and the soothing, sweet sound of mandolins and guitars spilled from open windows. Surrounding the plaza
were the Municipal Palace, the Parochial Church, and the Hotel Diligencias. Flower girls, picture postcard sellers, and young
bootblacks threaded their way among diners and the coffee drinkers who sat at tables beneath the shaded porticoes.

But Veracruz’s charm was quickly lost on foreign visitors, especially those from the soap-crazed land of the Great Puritan,
who minced through the streets, swatting flies and holding their breath. “Veracruz was filthy, foul smelling and incredibly
ill kept,” writes author Jack Sweetman. “Waste disposal was left entirely to the zopilotes, the great, black vultures by which
Veracruz was overrun. Protected by a municipal ordinance imposing a fine of five pesos on anyone doing a zopilote harm, they
flocked along the seawall, perched on the cupolas of the Municipal Palace and vied with packs of mongrel dogs at the refuse
heaps which littered the city.” Near the entrance to the harbor was the lugubrious Castillo San Juan de Ulúa, a decaying edifice
built by Cortés’s troops that was still being used to house prisoners, most of whom had merely tried to escape conscription.
Edith O’Shaughnessy had walked the parapets in her black Jeanne Hallé hobble skirt and a black tulle hat. “Peering down in
the darkness, thirty feet or so of any one of these, there would be, at first, no sound, only a horrible indescribable stench
mingling with the salt air. But as we threw boxes of cigarettes into the foul blackness there came vague, human groans and
rumbling noises, and we could see, in the blackness, human hands upstretched or the gleam of an eye. If above, in that strong
norther, we could scarcely stand the stench that arose, what must it have been in the depths below?”

Rear Admiral Frank F. Fletcher, a trim Annapolis graduate with melancholia-tinged eyes, commanded the U.S. naval forces at
Veracruz. He was a humane and cultivated man, who, unlike his predecessors, wanted to avoid bloodshed and prevent the lovely
old town from being bombarded into rubble. As he studied Veracruz through his binoculars, he noticed dirty white waves racing
toward the shore and the sky filling with clouds. Far out in the harbor, buoys began to clang. A storm was blowing in. Fletcher
realized that if he was going to take the customhouse, he would have to do it quickly. The plan, transmitted to Fletcher from
Washington, was to take control of the town and prevent the munitions from reaching Huerta’s troops. At eleven o’clock, eight
hundred heavily armed U.S. marines and sailors began rowing toward the shore. The Veracruzaños, unaware that anything was
amiss, went about their late-morning chores. Donkeys laden with milk jars clip-clopped through the cobblestoned streets,
tortilleras
fired up their braziers, and the café-goers turned the sea-damp pages of their newspapers.

General Gustavo Maass, the military commander of Veracruz, wired Mexico City for instructions on how to handle the invasion
and then hurried to the military barracks where two infantry battalions were stationed. Maass suspected that his superiors
in Mexico City would order him to withdraw after putting up a respectable fight, so he dispatched a small contingent of soldiers
in the direction of the harbor, freed some captives being held at a local prison, and armed the militia. As he suspected,
orders soon came for him to fall back to a village ten miles inland and he obeyed, leaving the volunteers, prisoners, and
a small contingent of soldiers to defend the city.

The Veracruzaños distributed themselves through the town with no plan other than to kill as many of the foreigners as they
could. Armed with Mausers and machine guns and ancient dueling pistols, they climbed up onto the roofs and took up positions
around the plaza. Silently, they watched as American sailors and marines disembarked and advanced slowly, passing by cantinas
and pulquerias. The marines were dressed in floppy hats and khakis and the sailors had dyed their navy whites with coffee
grounds so that they would make less conspicuous targets.

The marines were to take the railroad station, the cable office, and the ice plant. The sailors were charged with securing
the telegraph office, post office, and the Hotel Terminal, where they would set up a semaphore on the roof to communicate
with Admiral Fletcher. A young naval officer named George Lowry was given the plum assignment of capturing the customhouse.
As he and a small contingent of men advanced across the broad promenade toward the building, the warmth seemed to have gone
out of the air and an eerie silence reigned. Then a sniper’s bullet whizzed through the air. All at once, gunfire roared from
parapets and rooftops, windows, doors and alleys. One sailor was shot in the head and toppled over dead. Several others were
wounded and fell to the pavement, writhing and screaming in agony. Lowry and his men raced for cover, dragging their injured
and bleeding comrades with them. They broke a window on the side of the customhouse and heaved themselves inside. Fletcher,
monitoring the battle from the deck of one of the battleships, heard the small-arms fire and sent four hundred additional
men ashore. Over the next two days, another three thousand men would be ordered into the city.

The U.S. forces fought block by block, house to house, basement to rooftop. One Veracruzaño sat on his balcony and calmly
read his newspaper, periodically stopping midsentence to shoot at the passing Americans. Other residents fired at the passing
troops from their basements. Both sides fought with extraordinary bravery.

In the midst of all this, the
Ypiranga
arrived. An American officer boarded the ship and explained that the customhouse had been seized to prevent the ship’s huge
cache of arms from reaching the Huerta government. The German captain agreed to remain in the outer harbor and then he quietly
set sail for another Mexican port, where he unloaded more than a thousand crates of munitions. Ironically, the munitions had
been purchased from the Remington Arms Company in the United States and then routed through Hamburg to escape the embargo,
since lifted.

The fighting in Veracruz continued for nearly two days. By the time the U.S. forces gained control of the town, 126 Mexicans
lay dead and another 195 wounded. The Americans also suffered significant losses: 17 marines or sailors were killed and 63
wounded. In Washington, members of the press corps noticed that President Wilson appeared to become almost physically ill
as reports of the carnage rolled in.

Carranza condemned the invasion as an attack upon Mexico’s sovereignty. But Villa reassured George Carothers that he wasn’t
going to let Huerta draw him into the conflict. “As far as he was concerned,” Carothers reported, “we could keep Veracruz.
. . . He said that no drunkard, meaning Huerta, was going to draw him into war with his friend.” To his followers, Villa gave
a more practical and less obsequious explanation: “It is Huerta’s bull that is being gored.”

Losing a million pesos a day in revenue, his army demoralized by losses, Victoriano Huerta finally resigned his post in July
of 1914 and departed for Europe, arriving just in time to witness the outbreak of World War I. The resignation may have saved
both his dignity and his neck. “By precipitating a conflict with the United States,” wrote one observer, “he retires with
a shred of honor; beaten by the Constitutionalists, he would have been disgraced definitely, if not hanged with the same finality.”

But Huerta’s departure did not bring peace to Mexico or the stability that President Wilson had hoped for. The relationship
between Villa and Carranza was unraveling quickly and on September 23, 1914, Villa publicly repudiated Carranza. In an effort
to avoid more bloodshed, 150 revolutionary leaders from throughout Mexico held a convention beginning in October of 1914 in
Aguascalientes, a small city located in the center of the country known for its hot springs and beautiful textiles. The participants
included Villistas, Carrancistas, and a third block of revolutionaries who favored neither side, but were intent upon their
own agendas.

At the urging of Felipe Ángeles, Emiliano Zapata, who controlled the state of Morelos, located south of Mexico City, sent
twenty-six representatives to the convention. Land was at the heart of Zapata’s rebellion. The residents of his village, Anenecuilco,
had grievances that went back to 1607, when they received a land grant from the Spanish viceroy. The owners of a nearby hacienda
immediately seized the property, and the villagers had been fighting to get it back ever since. At the outbreak of the revolution,
Zapata had issued his Plan de Ayala, which had three major points: restitution for villages and citizens whose property and
water had been illegally seized; expropriation of one-third of the disputed lands accompanied by compensation to current owners;
and finally, seizure of the remaining two-thirds for “war indemnities” if the owners failed to cooperate.

Although Zapata was wary of making alliances with other revolutionary leaders, he was partial to Villa because Villa had also
shown himself to be in favor of land reform, confiscating huge estates in northern Mexico and promising to divide the land
between villagers and his soldiers when the revolution was over. The convention delegates overwhelmingly adopted the Plan
de Ayala—a move that Zapata undoubtedly found gratifying—but the primary focus remained on preventing a new civil war. After
numerous debates and emotional speeches, the delegates concluded that the only way to restore peace to Mexico was to have
both Villa and Carranza resign. Villa agreed and took the idea one step further: Why not have both him and Carranza shot?