Emiliano Zapata, the revolutionary charro

The picture of Emiliano Zapata with Pancho Villa and their respective lieutenants at the National Palace is the most emblematic Mexican Revolution (1910-1920). It was taken on Sunday, December 6, 1914, after a triumphal parade of their respective armies from Chapultepec Castle to the Zócalo in Mexico City along Paseo La Reforma.

While Zapata looks sullen and suspicious, as if hoping that the camera did not leave a flash but a bullet, according to the historian Enrique Krause, Villa instead appears smiling and relaxed. One with a light suit, with silver decorations and his charro hat from Morelos, with a high crown, wide brim and brim, different from the common one from Jalisco; the other in a blue dress uniform, short-brimmed cap, and riding boots. The two revolutionary leaders shared a humorous moment after having occupied the capital with their peasant militias, a kind of culmination of the social transformation that they had proposed and for which they had fought with blood and fire.

Villa invited Zapata to also take the snapshot in the presidential throne, but he refused to do so, feeling repulsed by the opprobrious symbolism, limiting himself to commenting: “We should burn it to end the ambitions.” He invited Villa to a toast with a glass of cognac, a sip with which this rigorous teetotaler choked, truly oblivious to that image of a bandit who loves drinks.

The narrated historical moment meant the end of the second phase of the revolution and at the same time the beginning of the third, which would be the bloodiest and most decisive. In addition, it would mark the height of his prominence, which would soon enter a cycle of decline.

Both allies had entered into a struggle for power with Venustiano Carranza, leader of Coahuila, who had left the capital for Veracruz, where he would establish his seat of government, waiting to resume the initiative. It lacked the necessary military force to confront Zapata’s Southern and Central Liberation Army, with 20,000 troops, and Villa’s Northern Division, with 40,000. However, he benefited from the support of US President Woodrow Wilson, who ordered the withdrawal of an occupation contingent from the main Mexican port, handing over his park to whom he considered the best option to restore peace and order.

What was Zapata like?

Emiliano Zapata Salazar was born in the town of Anenecuilco, southeast of Cuernavaca, state of Morelos, in 1879. He belonged to a family of small landowners who had been in conflict over the possession of communal land with the large landowners in the area. This ancestral dispute over land would mark their identity, as well as their notion of justice and their determination to act in favor of the most unprotected.

“He was brave, a good rider and shooter, attractive to women, very much in love, fond of cockfighting, bullfighting and rodeo; he liked to drink with his friends, but he was not drunk”, according to his biographer Felipe Ávila. Handsome, of average height (1.70m), he was proud of his large mustache, which he used to say differentiated him from “the effeminate, the bullfighters and the friars”.

“Charro among charros”, spoke Nahuatl as a second mother tongue that was useful to maintain ascendancy over the local native communities. He entered politics as president of the municipal council in 1909, the year in which the seventh re-election of the dictator Porfirio Díaz, who had remained in power since 1876, was taking place.

The first phase of the revolution began on November 20, 1910, when Francisco Ignacio Madero, a politician and prosperous businessman from Coahuila, who had gained fame by publishing a book on the presidential succession, called for an armed uprising that echoed in deep rural Mexico. Zapata was no stranger to this stake, being elected leader of the insurgents in Morelos, with subsequent influence on other bordering states, such as Puebla and Guerrero.

To avoid further bloodshed, Díaz was forced to resign in May 1911, calling a new election in which he was victorious. Madero, who took office in November of the same year. During fifteen months in power, governance was precarious due to armed gangs scattered throughout the national territory, whose leaders pressed for a series of social demands.

The most rebellious of all was Zapata, that he refused to hand over his arms and that he ignored the democratically elected government, proclaiming the Ayala Plan, which promoted a profound agrarian reform in the country. Attempts to subdue him by deploying the federal army failed, forcing him to retreat to the mountains, where he led a relentless guerrilla war against the national authority.

This situation took a turn with the overthrow and assassination of Madero on February 18, 1913, forged by his commander in chief, General Victoriano Huerta, who with deception and hypocrisy managed to succeed him in office with the approval of Congress and a sector of the public opinion that demanded an end to so much conflict.

It was the start of the second stage of the Mexican Revolution. A month later, at the initiative of Carranza, the Guadalupe Plan was proclaimed, which ignored the legitimacy of the Huerta regime, proposing to call new presidential elections, to which Zapata and Villa, among other caudillos, enthusiastically adhered. After 16 months, in July 1914, military defeats on different fronts forced the hated usurper to resign.

The Aguas Calientes Convention he tried to bring the victorious factions to an agreement, but the insistence that Carranza as head of the “constitutionalist” army hold the provisional presidency divided them. Zapata and Villa wanted it to be a third party, being forced to form a “conventionist” army that, clashing with the first, began the last phase of the civil war.

Bad decisions

The “centaur of the north”, as Villa was known, made the mistake of dividing his army into three columns to direct them to strategic targets in the north-central states in order to isolate Carranza in Veracruz. The person in charge of confronting him was the skillful Sonoran general Álvaro Obregón (later president of Mexico), who between April and August 1915, in the two battles of Celaya, Aguas Calientes and León, defeated him without extenuating circumstances and put him on the run.

When his ally was thwarted, Zapata was reduced to a war of resistance in increasingly reduced spaces in his home state, always short of weapons and food for his host, which was slowly and inexorably reduced. Overwhelmed by desertions and feeling lost, he was ambushed by Carrancistas at the Chinameca hacienda, Morelos, on April 10, 1919.

Despite his defeat, posterity would not forget the revolutionary charro whose legacy continues in the imagination of young idealists who continue to dream of a more just and egalitarian society. (I)