By Keli Holt
On March 9, 1916, Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa led 500 mounted fighters into Columbus, New Mexico, before dawn and set fire to the border town and outpost for the 13th U.S. Cavalry. Villa was angry that his former backers, the Americans, had chosen to recognize his rival, Venustiano Carranza, as the leader of Mexico and were enforcing a strict arms embargo against him. Villa’s raid was quickly repulsed by the Cavalry but not before 18 Americans were killed.
To understand what drove Villa to attack American soil, it’s necessary to look back six years earlier, to the collapse of a regime that had ruled Mexico with an iron fist for three decades.
In 1910, Mexico erupted into civil war. For 30 years, Porfirio Diaz had ruled as a dictator, and like most despotic governments, those select few closest to the rulers had enriched themselves while the average Mexican fell further behind.
Diaz, a ruthless authoritarian who had rigged elections and changed the constitution to stay in power, had nonetheless brought stability to Mexico that pleased investors and trading partners like the U.S. and Europe despite the dearth of democratic principles.
In 1910, however, a coalition of Mexican revolutionaries like Pancho Villa, political reformers like Francisco Madero and Carranza, and peasant leaders like Emiliano Zapata, joined forces and brought down Diaz who was forced into exile in France. The coalition, however, quickly turned their guns on one another as disagreements over land reform, army restructuring and economics led to further outbreaks of violence.
Francisco Madero emerged from the bloodshed as president in 1911, with popular support for his agenda of land redistribution and a weakening of the Mexican spoils system that favored nepotism and corruption. Within a year, however, he began to lose his radical supporters who believed that Madero, who favored legal means of redistributing land, was moving too slowly. At the same time, he alienated conservative supporters, who were fearful that his democratic policies would harm their status and control of government.
During Madero’s time in office (1911-1913), radical peasant revolutionaries, conservative counterrevolutionaries and Madero’s government troops battled all over the country.
Believing that Madero was too weak of a ruler to pull Mexico out of this cycle of violence, several Old Federal Army officers, led by Madero’s most trusted general, Victoriano Huerta, overthrew Madero and assassinated him the next year. Before acting, Huerta had secured the support of the U.S. ambassador to Mexico who believed that the stronger rule of Huerta would stabilize the nation and better protect the large American mining, railroad and ranching interests there.
However, American President Woodrow Wilson, who had assumed office only 11 days after Madero’s murder, was horrified and condemned Huerta’s new regime as “a government by murder.” Wilson, however, did more than just criticize Huerta; he lifted the U.S. arms embargo against Mexico in 1914, two years after it had been established.
Weapons now began to flow across the U.S.-Mexico border and into the hands of revolutionaries like Pancho Villa who were leading the uprisings against Huerta.
Later that year, Wilson went a step further to support the anti-Huerta opposition and sent U.S. Marines to Veracruz to block a suspected large shipment of weapons bound for Huerta from Germany. For six months, the Marines functioned as the local government, collecting taxes and undertaking infrastructure projects as well as disrupting arms shipments to Huerta’s government and distributing weapons to his opposition.
Rather than being treated like liberators as Wilson had intended, the presence of Americans in Mexico upset both Huerta and revolutionaries like Villa who were trying to oust him. At least 19 Americans and 150 Mexicans were killed in clashes on the streets of Veracruz during the American deployment.
Huerta ruled as a dictator in the Porfirio Diaz style, dissolving congress and arresting political opponents. However, he was ousted in June 1914, and sent into exile. But the coalition of Villa, Carranza and Zapata, who had once again set aside their differences and united against Huerta, immediately turned their guns (many of which had been supplied by the U.S.) on one another. Yet another spasm of bloodshed gripped the Mexican nation.
By 1915, Venustiano Carranza, leader of the Constitutionalists who wanted to make legal changes to Mexico’s constitution before enacting widespread reforms, defeated the combined armies of revolutionaries Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata, who favored more aggressive reforms.
Sensing that the more conservative Carranza could bring stability to Mexico, President Wilson recognized his government and angered Villa who invaded America in March 1916.
In response, Wilson sent a “Punitive Expedition” of 5,000 American soldiers under the command of Brig. Gen. John “Black Jack” Pershing into Mexico to hunt down Pancho Villa.
In the next issue we will follow Pershing’s 11-month manhunt that would inflame tensions further between the U.S. and Mexico. We will also explore how Germany would try to use that friction to pull Mexico into World War I on the side of the Central Powers.
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