Mexican Roulette: From Stable Tyranny to Virtual Anarchy in Early Twentieth Century Mexico

The Mexican Revolution of 1910 was not so different from other revolutions. Prior to the event itself, Mexico suffered under the rule of a despot more concerned with the preservation of his own power and fortune than with the wellbeing of the populace. The revolution began following the end of a phony election. A call to arms swept through the proletariat, and, after being involved in multiple Mexican wars occurring within the previous century, they brought their considerable experience in revolting against the government, and successfully removed the despot from power. Sadly, the power vacuum that followed allowed a new dynasty of corruption to usurp the old. The Mexican Revolution of 1910 stands as one of many revolutions that succeeded in terms of revolting and yet failed to attain its ideals.

On the eve of the Mexican Revolution, the president was Porfirio Diaz. Serving his seventh term, Diaz was a man of action, and certainly not a man to waste valuable time and effort on false modesty. On 15 September 1910, Diaz, nearing his eightieth birthday, hosted a festival in his own honor in Mexico City. During the revelry, “Dìaz bade fair to be a second Moctezuma, king of the Aztecs; 10,000 people had taken part in a historical pageant representing Mexican history from the Aztecs to Dìaz.” The Mexican people took pride in the amazing achievements of the Aztecs, and the president sought to marry his own image to the history of the Aztec people. The guests, including dignitaries from around the world, feasted on a ten-course meal served on plates of silver and gold. Mexico City herself stood as a testament to the spoils of power and exploitation. The city stood on the exact location of Tenochtitlàn, the ancient Aztec capital, and little of this wondrous city remained. The only relic of the Aztec metropolis was “network of canals, along which Indians still travelled into the centre in their distinctive boats or trajineras, bringing flowers and vegetables to the central market.” The old city had been wrapped in European aesthetic and style. It was now home to “heterogeneous and eclectic architecture, symbolized by the Cathedral which, begun in 1573 and completed in 1813, was like a palimpsest or an archaeological site with many strata.” The city was gorgeous, there were myriad bands playing to celebrate the ruler, and fireworks above illuminated the regal excess of the revelry below.

The rest of the country’s 15 million inhabitants were not so lucky. As opposed to the celebration in the palace, the majority of the 471,000 people in Mexico City (according to official census) “were either working class, unemployed, underemployed or in various stages of disguised unemployment, all clustered densely packed slums in the north and east of the city, covered in dust or mud (depending on the season), lacking adequate sanitation...” Despite all the power and influence Diaz put so much effort into portraying, he clearly lacked the power to do his duty as leader and provide the people with work, food, and adequate living conditions. In fact, he was little more than a brutal warlord. By the year 1885, “the Diaz dictatorship was firmly entrenched and the systematic robbing of peasants’ land with the support of the government began.” The peasants, who had been working their land for generations, had never received any sort of deed or proof of ownership to their territories. The good president Diaz “demanded proof of ownership. Those who could not ‘prove’ they ‘owned’ the land were evicted.” When this practice began in the Valley of Papentia in Vera Cruz State, the peasants fought against those who had come to take their land, “but were beaten by a force of several thousand rurales who exterminated the population. The valley that had once supported twenty thousand people then became the ‘property’ of one family.” In this sense, the Mexican government was little more than a feudal system. Diaz’s regime was tyranny, but he lacked the technology to rule absolutely overall, as in a police state. So, in lieu of the surveillance cameras that had not been invented yet, he incentivized the aristocracy to enforce the social order for him.

The best incentive to keep the aristocracy supporting the regime is to keep them drunk with power. Throughout Mexico, the peasants were not just disenfranchised. They were treated as toys. Across Mexico, “jefes politicos allowed themselves the privileges of droit du seigneur in the villages, taking any woman who caught their fancy.” But the perk of free-to-abuse power didn’t stop at the ruling class. Diaz employed a police force with similar privileges known as the rurales. The rurales rode horses, wore suede, and carried the latest Mauser rifles, clearly in the height of police fashion. These well-armed horsemen were “effectively above the law outside Mexico City and were much feared as a consequence.” The rurales were legally able to brutally abuse the peasantry without consequence. One of their choice tools in doling out totalitarian justice “was through the ley fuga, or law for dealing with fugitives from justice: this allowed anyone to be shot dead who ‘tried to escape’. The Houdini-like propensity of Mexicans was evidently high in the Dìaz years, for over 10,000 people died under the ley fuga.” The rurales, well armed with both supplies and the unlimited privileges to disappear people, ensured that the social order remained as it was.

The Diaz regime stood for so long in part because it was so brutally effective in using terror tactics in order to deter would-be revolutionaries. The government brutally crushed insurrections with overwhelming force in order to keep the populace scared and obedient. In one instance, rebellion in Veracruz “by supporters of the exiled Lerdo in 1879 resulted in execution for innocent parties as well as the genuine rebels.” In keeping with a typical trend for oppressive police states, the police force operated with impunity and the full liberties of sadism. When Indians in the state of Hidalgo rebelled after the government unjustly seized their lands, they were “buried in their ancestral lands and trampled to death by the rurales, who rode over them at a gallop.” The government maintained its legitimacy by the use of fear and force. The law was treating as quite fluid and applied as was convenient to the ruling parties. Undesirables, such as those who politically opposed the regime, its officials, or anyone who they didn’t like for any given reason, “were branded ‘criminals’: the penalty for ‘crime’ was to be worked to death on chain-gangs or sent to plantations in the extreme south of Mexico, where the broiling sun or tropical diseases would do the executioner’s job for him.” Under such conditions, the law did not serve to protect the people or their interests, but to ensure subservience to the government and keep the social order as it was, with the wealthy profiting regardless of the underclasses’ misery.

Mexico was also deeply entrenched in racial hegemony, and the president did nothing to alter the arrangement. The government used a typical program of divide and conquer in order to prevent the peasants from uniting and exerting any meaningful pressure. In 1910, half of the Mexican population was mestizo and one third was purely Indian. Experts disagree on how far racism actually extended at the time and place, but it is known that “many oligarchs were racists, despised the benighted Indian as a drag on the national chain, and embraced a change in social philosophy to that of Darwinism whereby Mexico’s future lay in transcending its Indian past…” Hypocritically or not, the Mexican national ethos lauded the grand cultural and technological achievements of the Aztecs and the Mayas, “and on a day-to-day basis overt racial prejudice was rare. Everyone knew, though that whiteness was the supreme ethnic value, and the aim of all aspiring Indians was to be ‘whitened’.” The Indians themselves suffered horrifically under the Diaz regime. For thirty years following 1880, one tribe in particular, the warrior tribe of Yaquis, endured terrible persecution as they valiantly defended their ancestral lands against the government’s geographic gluttony. The Yaquis were skilled fighters, and initially met some success. The government, rather winning one decisive victory, had to wear them down over years of harassment. In the 1890s, after another Yaqui insurrection, Diaz went so far as to turn genocide into an industry. The president offered “a bounty of 100 pesos (about £10) for the ears of all dead Yaqui warriors. This prize-money degenerated into a cruel farce as bounty hunters slaughtered unarmed peasants, cut off their ears, and claimed they were Yaqui organs.” As horrific as the thought might be, this was only one of many atrocities (even if it is a particularly grotesque one). Further atrocity “included the extermination of the entire male population of the town of Navojoa in 1892, and in the same year 200 Yaqui prisoners were taken out in a gunboat into the Pacific Ocean off Guaymas and thrown into the sea to drown or be food for sharks.” The Mexican government targeted the Yaquis in part due to their own reactive aggression. Upon defeat, survivors were often sold into slavery. The Yaquis, desperate, though determined, continued to fight against grossly overwhelming force. Upon another rebellion in 1898, the Yaquis “were slaughtered in droves at Mazacoba by the federal army, now equipped with the most modern Mauser rifles. In 1908, a boatload of Yaquis, bound for slavery in Yucatàn, committed mass suicide.” Native cultures, for all the valiance and their audacity in their resistance, were at an extreme disadvantage against modern technology and the higher population of the civilized (intended in only the literal sense of the word) Mexicans.

President Diaz had a certain gift for social manipulation. His chief social control over other powers within Mexican territory was his tendency to give them agency while never keeping their necks too far from the chopping block. During the Diaz presidency, the conservative sections of the Catholic Church went relatively undisturbed, but it was kept in line by liberal interpretation of existing laws. Diaz ensured that the Catholic Church did not rock the boat “by neither repealing nor implementing the anticlerical Laws of the Reform… he maintained an official stance of anticlericalism while secretly colluding with the Church, especially his close friend Archbishop Eulogio Gillow of Oaxaca.” The Catholic Church was kept in place at the mercy of the government. The aristocracy lorded over the proletariat with impunity. On the eve of the 1910 revolution, the climate of Mexico was anachronistic, clearly resembling the feudal arrangements of Medieval Europe.

In keeping with this anachronism, the economic situation in Mexico was essentially a sharecropping arrangement between the proletariat and the nobility. The peasants would work the land and give large portions of their produce to the landowner. The night before the Revolution, one family, the Terrazas, is estimated to possess in land “between 1,966,184 and 2,679,954 hectares. The largest single hacienda, Encinillas, comprised some 386,000 hectares and was worked by approximately 2,000 inhabitants.” Despite these massive holdings, the Terrazas possessed more than just the land. The family was so fortunate that it “monopolized the banking, industrial, and mercantile enterprises of the state. All of the Terrazas enterprises carried tax-exemption privileges.” The society was structured so that the masses existed for the pleasure of the rich. With every woman in the villages at the mercy of the local lord’s desires, indignation, anger, and a thirst for vengeance were on the rise.

A revolution goes beyond a mere reorganizing of a state as it exist. Revolutions only occur in a perfect storm. All factors must fall into place. The people’s indignation with their government must be enough to overcome the divisions the government imposes upon them. The government, which typically has the greatest control over the resources at the nation’s disposal, must be at some point of vulnerability. A revolution can only succeed when an angry proletariat exploits an opening in their government’s mighty social armor. A revolution hinges on the creation of a new state, “resting on different social groups, new social and political institutions, different legitimating myths, and novel conceptions of the political community.” Revolutions are ultimately violent renegotiations. Revolutions occur within societies when subordinate groups can no longer bring themselves to forgive the dominant groups’ offenses. Class forces “are bound by ties of conflict and cooperation, command and mobilization to the dynamic and partially autonomous activities of states and of state builders.” When these dynamics become completely unacceptable, the house divided crumbles in on itself. So, it was in Mexico when the Twentieth-Century proletariat finally and violently rejected the rule of the anachronistic, Seventeenth-Century style aristocracy.

The burden upon the peasantry was reaching a breaking point. While there had been revolts in the past, the degrading situation of the average worker did a lot to increase the popularity of a proposed full-scale revolution. During the 1890s, industrial workers favored their current lots over what they had endured as hacienda peons. However, the new generation found itself a new standard of comparison: “living conditions of workers in the United States and the rights accorded to foreign workers in Mexico, who received higher wages for similar work. Dissatisfaction alone, however, was far from sufficient to produce a revolutionary climate.” By 1910, Mexico’s middle classes and industrial workers were quickly losing patience with the government as it was. Injustice was rampant throughout the land, and chief concerns included “[l]ack of democracy, which meant lack of access to political power and subordination to an all-powerful state bureaucracy, increasing taxation, and resentment at the privileges accorded to foreigners, in addition to a generational conflict, profoundly affected Mexico’s middle classes.” The Revolution would take significant importance in the state of Chihuahua. Chihuahua was unique in several respects, but, most importantly, it was in a unique economic position. During the first decade of the twentieth century, Chihuahua held “a relatively large middle class of merchants, artisans, coachmen, railroad men, and clerks. There is some evidence to suggest that these middle groups maintained a limited contact with the better-defined middle sector north of the Rio Grande, desired to better their lot.” Because it had a larger middle class, its people controlled more resources. With more resources, they could spend more effort on drawing attention to the less-than-just political situation in Mexico. As word of the matter spread, “the middle groups within the state were especially susceptible to the endless stream of revolutionary propaganda that saturated Chihuahua during the last few years of the Dìaz Dictatorship.” It was to be within the state of Chihuahua that the waves of revolt would begin to spread, going on to engulf the entire nation.

Then the government took its step too far, and then the people galvanized. The straw that broke the burro’s back came on 4 October 1910, when “Porfirio Diaz was re-elected President for the term 1910-1914… the following day, Madero answered this by launching his Draft of San Luis which proclaimed the elections invalid and ordered a call to arms in preparation for a general uprising on 20th November.” The rigged election demonstrated the political impotence of the will of the people in the current system. In order to oppose the continuing rule of the 80-year-old dictator, the revolution began in “the small village of Cuchillo Parado in northeastern Chihuahua. Toribio Ortega, who in 1903 had led the peasants of his native village in their attempt to recover their lands, had become the head of the anti-reelectionist party in Cuchillo Parado.” More uprisings followed. In the neighboring city of Bachiniva, word of the adjacent revolt sparked the rage and passion of the people. Upon hearing of the revolt, the mayor took the men loyal to him and deserted the city before it could spread. The next day, November 20, “under the leadership of Heliodoro Arias Olea, the revolutionaries occupied the municipal palace and set up new authorities. Arias Olea was elected both mayor and military commander, and the town proclaimed its loyalty to Francisco Madero and to the principle of no reelection.” The fall of this second city added momentum to the rebellion that had brewed so long. The tactics were not so different from previous rebellions. Just as the 1890s rebellions had done, “the rebellious villagers attempted to occupy their communities and to replace unpopular local authorities.” However, this time was different in the sheer scale of it. The government could not stand against the waves of rebellion to come.

Abraham Gonzàlez, the leader of the Chihuahuan anti-reelectionist party, recruited the two men who would become the chief leaders of the revolutionary armies in Western Chihuahua: Pascual Orozco and Francisco (Pancho) Villa. In December, the rebel movement suffered in other states, but it continued to flourish in Chihuahua. The federal government could not stem the tide of the people who refused to live as economic cattle. By the end of 1910, Orozco “he had augmented the size of his force to over one thousand men, had scored a number of victories over the Dìaz army, and was planning an attack on Ciudad Juàrez on the United States border.” The spirit and support of the people proved to be an invaluable weapon. In the mining town Parral, the wealthy merchant Guillermo Baca led a forty-man force against the home of the local political boss. Shortly after Baca’s initial advance, 300 men spontaneously joined the attack, most of them lacking weapons. While this sizable force “could not prevail against the town’s well-disciplined police force, they could not be defeated either. Over 100 men joined Baca when he took to the hills to wage a guerrilla struggle against the Porfirian authorities.” Chihuahua came to burn with a fervor for blood of the oppressors. In the town of Namiquipa, the resident rebels gathered to hear their leader speak. He spoke passionately, saying, “‘Our situation is intolerable, our sacred rights have been infringed upon, we have a powerful enemy, but this does not matter. Righteous causes are never defeated.’… there was an enthusiastic response to this speech: ‘Long live the revolution, long live Madero, death to Porfirio Dìaz.’” Democracy in action is a powerful thing. The people were no longer afraid of their dictator, and so the dictator could not hold on to his power.

The Mexican people had long lived in a form of feudalism, in which the peasants would work the land of the lords. Skocpol writes, “Rentier agrarian systems, where smallholder peasant families possess and work the land on their own, are notoriously more susceptible to peasant revolts – in particular… where socioeconomically based community relations tie the individual families together in opposition to the landlords.” The Mexican peasants certainly fit this description. When the revolution came, “the revolutionaries rallied to regional chieftains and waged relentless offensive warfare against government troops.” When the people rallied around removing the dictator from power, they brought guerrilla warfare and sabotage against the Federal government. War is ultimately a game of resources. The player whose resources last the longest wins. Despite having far lower amounts of resources than the federal government, the revolutionaries were able to more efficiently mobilize their own. While lacking much of an advanced infrastructure of their own, the revolutionaries found that of the enemy to be easy targets. The government’s expending valuable resources on decadent celebrations in honor of the dear leader rather than on the defense of the infrastructure proved to be, in the end, beneficial to the rebel cause. The revolution found early success in harassment because “[t]he unprotected railroad lines, over which government troops had to be transported, and mile after mile of unguarded telephone and telegraph lines were easy targets even for small, unorganized revolutionary bands.” The Mexican government encountered a similar problem to the one the United States government faces today: fighting a war on terrorism is effectively impossible due to so many different factions operating independently.

Strangely enough, the land on which the peasants had so long slaved would become their greatest asset. The peasants of Mexico had every reason to be angry. They had been robbed of their land and treasure. The chief obstacle to any revolution is that the government invariably has some massive advantage of resources, logistics, and military hardware, along with the cooperation of the economic institution. If peasants are to successfully revolt, “peasants must have ‘internal leverage’ – some organized capacity for collective action against their exploitative superiors.” The peasantry of Mexico found this leverage in their environment. The Mexican peasants had a similar advantage to that held by the Native Americans in the Indian Wars of the United States: the peasants of Mexico knew the field of play. In addition to this, the Mexican peasants of Chihuahua had an advantage distinctly unlike the Native Americans in their proximity to United States territory. The United States government and its liberal policies towards firearms meant that “after revolutionary sentiment had turned to armed conflict, in November 1910… that arms and munitions could easily be obtained across the border.” Despite the superior resources and technology of federal forces, the inhospitable terrain of Mexico would be the chief ally of the revolution. In decades past, despite the horrific consequences of opposing the regime, many citizens had found the courage to take up arms in hopes of bettering their lot. During the 1890s, “in many parts of Mexico, peasants had risen against the government, but their rebellions had been crushed when no other social groups except a few caudillos supported them.” As a result, perhaps the civilians had on their side one of the greatest assets of all: they had practice.

This combat experience meant that the guerrilla revolutionaries could use the terrain to their distinct advantage. In the case of Chihuahua, where revolutionary operations began, the locals were easily able to exploit the surrounding desert while the climate proved very detrimental to the federal troops. When these troops attempted to pursue these ‘bandits’, they “soon discovered that the Chihuahua desert and the mountain pockets of the Sierra Madre Occidental afforded excellent protection for guerrilleros engaged primarily in hit-and-run warfare.” Pursuit of the rebels tended to be fruitless, as they could practically disappear into the environment. If federal forces put up too strong of a resistance or if their numbers were simply too great, “the rebels would fade into the mountains and wage guerrilla warfare from there.” There were clear differences between this revolution and the revolutions of the past. In 1890, the rural revolts that sprang up across Chihuahua “had been uncoordinated. Each village had acted on its own and had tended to wage defensive rather than offensive warfare. They had retreated into the mountains waiting for government troops to attack them.” The 1910 revolution found itself with much more aggressive rebels. Rather than engage in siege warfare they could not hope to win, the rebels engaged in guerrilla warfare, rapidly hitting the enemy and disappearing into the environment.

The initial revolution was short. Within six months of the outbreak of the revolution, “Porfirio Diaz was defeated and after signing the Declaration of Ciudad Juarez the old dictator, absolute ruler of Mexico for thirty years, left for a life of exile in Europe.” After the dictator’s removal from office, a man who was formerly a political undesirable came back into the political scene. Francisco Madero, who had sent out the initial call to arms, “entered Mexico City on 7th June, was elected President in October and formally sworn in on 6th November.” Interestingly, he had refused to take office until properly elected. The man was not a typical revolutionary. To the contrary, he was “a moderate, bourgeois liberal and wealthy landowner who set himself the impossible task of dismantling the existing corrupt governmental system without throwing out of office all those who had operated and profited from it so handsomely.” The lack of sense to politically clean house would later prove to be his undoing.

A recent study has shown that when a state undergoes a revolutionary regime change as opposed to a purely legal regime change, it is “nearly twice as likely to be involved in war in the initial period following the change as are states that emerge from an ‘evolutionary’ political process.” Sadly, this 1910 Mexican revolution was no exception. For all the sacrifice and the inspiring unity of the people that made the revolution possible, Mexican politics soon devolved into a game of musical chairs that supplanted the chairs with a dictatorship. Shortly after Diaz was deposed, Mexico, which had not long ago been a relatively stable society, was torn apart with political assassination and violence.

Madero did have some integrity for the ideals that elevated him to the presidency. Late in the year 1912, reform of the land laws became clearly inevitable if the administration kept in its current direction. These reforms “would seriously undermine the social, economic, and political position enjoyed by the hacendado class. The hacienda system, and all that it meant to Mexican society, was confronted with ultimate extinction.” In what should be considered a positive step away from the policies of the Diaz regime, Madero was willing to defy the interests of the wealthy for the sake of the proletariat. To the hacendado class, “Madero became a symbol of destruction; the Coahuila visionary, for whom the hacendados had previously held disdain rather than fear, had become a malevolent force that simply had to be removed.” And so were sewn the seeds of yet another revolution.

The Madero administration did not last long. Fifteen months after Madero assumed office, “the various armed movements attempting to radicalize the revolution on the one hand and the constant opposition from the reactionary elements on the other created a climate in which an uprising in Mexico City became inevitable.” On the Sunday morning of 9 February 1913, violence exploded in Mexico City. A new wave of revolutionaries marched on the Presidential Palace, believing allies to have taken it, only to march straight into the sights of Maderist forces. The rebels met “a barrage of fire as they confidently entered the Plaza de la Constitucion. General Bernardo Reyes was killed, and his allies Felix Diaz and Manuel Mondragon fled, taking refuge in the Citadel.” The two parties battled fiercely, claiming thousands of lives of both combatants and civilians. Thus began a horrific and prolonged battle known as “the Decada Tragica during which, for ten bloody days, government forces within their headquarters fought against the reactionary rebels entrenched in the Citadel.” It was this battle that would prove to be the undoing of the Madero administration not from the rebels, but from a traitor within its own ranks.

President Madero personally oversaw the slaughter of the rebels who had come to usurp his new power. General command of the troops found itself in the hands of “General Victoriana Huerta, who had beaten Pascual Orozco at the historic battle of Bachimba.” General Huerta could hardly be considered an idealist. He personally sympathized with the rebels and “wanted the Madero government to fall but he was concerned that he might not be given a prominent position in either the peace negotiations or the interim government that would follow. As a result, he procrastinated.” In order to seize the power he so desired, he was willing to sacrifice countless lives of both civilians and combatants. Huerta directed his soldiers in order to “prolong a stalemate. While the federal forces were operating from an advantageous position of strength, their offensive maneuvers were calculated simply to keep the rebels off balance, not to inflict decisive defeat.” His diversions and flukes bordered on comical. At one point, while the guns were briefly quiet, Huerta “turned his head while the rebels replenished their provisions in the Ciudadela. When General Aureliano Blanquet arrived on the outskirts of Mexico City with reinforcements on February 14, Huerta ordered him to remain where he was rather than to enter the battle.” The man had no sense of duty to his country or his soldiers. He saw them only as means to an end. If Mexico City had to burn to the ground before he could rule it, he seemed perfectly content to see to it.

Thankfully for the city, it did not come to that. On 21 February, 1913, “Huerta betrayed the government, arrested Madero and his Vice-President Pino Suarez and had them killed the next day using the excuse that that they had been shot ‘while attempting to escape from a car taking them to prison.’” The official report, claiming that the two men had died when their supporters attempted to rescue them from the transport, found few believers. After assassinating the president, “General Huerta named himself President and set about establishing a Porfirist style dictatorship.” Hence, in the name of his own ambition, Victoriano Huerta spat in the face of all the Mexican people had suffered through under the previous dictator just so he could taste the fruits of absolute power.

Blatantly usurping the presidency did not do much to endear the people to their new leader. Again, calls of revolution sounded across the land, and “on 5th March 1913 the Governor of the state of Sonora, Ignacio L. Pasqueiro, disavowed Huerta and named General Alvaro Obregon (who had fought against Pascual Orozco) as Minister of War.” As consequence of making a mockery over the hard-fought revolution, Huerta found himself with many powerful enemies.

Mexico once again mobilized for revolution, and the various rebel factions centered on three particular leaders: Emiliano Zapata, Francisco Villa, and Venustiano Carranza. Zapata stood as the poster child of the land reform that had gone awry. He became something of an early Twentieth Century Robin Hood. He was “a warm-hearted emotional man who, although guided by ideals which were a little confused, possessed strong libertarian and judiciary principles. His campaign was concentrated in the state of Morelos, re-distributing the land among the peasants.” Villa, on the other hand, was a hardened warrior who had fought against Diaz’s forces in the initial revolution. The man did not bother to pursue some idea or ethic, “but concentrated mainly on taking revenge on the Establishment who had long kept the Mexican people in misery and ignorance. Although full of genius and valour, Villa’s actions lacked the direction and purpose which developed in Zapata’s struggle.” Carranza was a military commander who rejected the legitimacy of the Huerta regime. The commander of the Constitutionalist Army “was an energetic man who could count on the support of people capable of planning and establishing a new government. With a few minor differences he was the natural heir to the bourgeois, liberal, democratic ideology of Madero.” This could be considered the third Mexican revolution of the decade. At this point, any hope of lasting stability could be considered long gone.

The violence commenced as it had against the old dictator. Considering that he was a military man, one would have thought that Huerta would have considered that he might fall prey to the same tactics that undid Diaz, but he found himself dreadfully unprepared for them. The revolutionaries “seized small towns, burned bridges, cut telegraph wires, and harassed the federal forces wherever they might be found in the western mountains.” The cutting of telegraph lines was of particular importance, as it deprived the federal government of communication and, accordingly, power over long distances. The actual Mexican military itself seemed weary of the violence. In one instance, “Toribio Ortega threatened Ojinaga on the Rìo Grande to such an extent that the federal troops demanded to be mustered out – and promptly joined the rebels.” The rebels resorted to piracy in order to fund their cause. Railroad officials reported that rebels would attack trains and seize shipments of precious metals. They brought utter ruin to the logistical structure of the Mexican military, and “generally wreaked such havoc on the rail and telegraph lines that communication between Chihuahua and Torreòn was nonexistent except for short periods of time.” Blatant acts of terrorism ensured that it was impossible to keep the federal government running smoothly. When repair crews arrived to fix damage to telegraph lines or railroads, they would finish their work “only to see the repairs destroyed and to be forced to scurry back to home base in fear of their lives.” The government could not control anything but the major population centers. The rule of law became impossible in Mexico.

The 1910 Mexican Revolution started as an inspiring bid for freedom, democracy, and justice, a true revolution in every sense of the word. The peasants rose up to fight their oppressors and establish a true democracy to rule fairly over the land. It devolved into a grotesque game of power. Throughout history, one can find thousands of examples of how violence breeds violence, of how power vacuums are the sweetest aromas to vultures who would seize power for their own. Sadly, ideals will only bring the people so far, and it can only take the work of one selfish villain to pervert the whole effort into something monstrous. It is hard to argue that the peasantry was left with any option other than armed revolution, but history shows that betting justice on armed conflict is a round of roulette at best.

Works Cited

Cumberland, Charcles C. Mexican Revolution: The Constitutionalist Years. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1972. Print.

Katz, Friedrich. The Life & Times of Pancho Villa. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Print.

McLynn, Frank. Villa and Zapata: A History of the Mexican Revolution. New York: Carroll & Graf, 200. Print.

Meyer, Michael C. Huerta: A Political Portrait. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1972. Print.

Meyer, Michael C. Mexican Rebel: Pascual Orozco and the Mexican Revolution 1910-1915. Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1967.

Poole, David. “Background: Ricardo Flores Magon and the Mexican Revolution”. Land & Liberty: Anarchist Influences in the Mexican Revolution. By Ricardo Flores Magon. Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1977. 7-28. Print.

Ruiz, B. Cano. “An Historical Outline of the Mexican Revolution”. Land & Liberty: Anarchist Influences in the Mexican Revolution. By Ricardo Flores Magon. Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1977. 34-37. Print.

Skocpol, T. States and Social Revolutions. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1979. Print.

Walt, Stephen M. "Revolution and War." World Politics 44.03 (1992): 321-68. JSTOR. Web. 19 Mar. 2014. http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2010542?uid=3739664&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21103709988007.