Although Mexicans had fought over land since colonial times, during the Porfiriato the unprecedented convergence of land consolidation, population growth, and inflation in food prices resulted in a groundswell of protest that resulted in revolution.
Michael Gonzales, 20022
In October 1910, after fleeing Mexico and taking refuge in San Antonio, Texas, Madero issued his Plan of San Luis Potosi, which declared:
A tyranny, the likes of which we Mexicans have not suffered since we won our independence, oppresses us in a manner which has become intolerable. In exchange for that tyranny we have been offered peace, but it is a shameful peace for the Mexican people. It is based on force, not law. Its goal is not the greatness and prosperity of our homeland, but the enrichment of a small group which, by abusing public positions, has converted them into sources of personal wealth, unscrupulously exploiting concessions and lucrative contracts.3
Madero’s Plan called for a revolt against Diaz on November 20, 1910, free elections, and a legal review of previous land thefts.
Before November 20, the government seized lists of Madero’s urban supporters, which permitted mass arrests in various states, undermining the rebellion. Nevertheless, several uprisings, most of which were suppressed, did occur on November 20.
The most successful uprisings occurred in Chihuahua, where the initial revolt spread. Soon more than 1,000 men were fighting under the command of Pancho Villa and a prosperous muleteer named Pascual Orozco. For nearly two months they held out against the army of what was considered to be one of the strongest states in Latin America.
Rebellion in Chihuahua responded to the Terrazas family having converted the entire state into a virtual company town. In 1907, draught and recession had hit the state especially hard. Many Mexicans returning from the United States, where they had lost jobs, found no employment south of the border. Unlike other parts of Mexico, Chihuahuans opposing Diaz formed a heterogeneous urban-rural, middle - and lower-class coalition because so many had suffered under Terrazas.
Rural lower-class leadership of the revolt in Chihuahua came as a surprise to Madero. He had assumed the November 20 revolt would be an urban affair that would soon topple Diaz and permit
A smooth change at the top—very tidy. However, to the consternation of the better classes, other social groups with other objectives suddenly appeared.4
By December 1910, rebels controlled the Sierra Madre Occidental stretching from Chihuahua towards Zacatecas and Tepic. Then the fighting spread to Durango and the Laguna area on the Durango—Coahuila border, where the rapid increase of cotton production had resulted in peasants being displaced from their fertile, well watered land. The insurgency was overwhelmingly rural, popular, and agrarian. While Diaz had many urban opponents, they were vulnerable to repression and, unlike the Chihuahuans, they lacked ready access to horses and guns.
For months, Diaz failed to take the revolt seriously and referred to the rebels as “bandits.” As the British charge noted, Diaz “quite ignored the very possibility of an imperfection in his administration.”5
On February 14, 1911, Madero returned to Mexico from the United States to assume command of the Revolution. As would be the pattern throughout the Revolution, rebellions continued to spring up without their being tied to any major leaders. By April 1911, insurrection had spread to eighteen states and most of the countryside was in the hands of revolutionaries. Examples of such rebellions include the uprising in the Laguna region and the occupation of Baja California by the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM).6
The army, staffed by aged generals commanding unwilling conscripts, could not stop Madero. Diaz had purposely let the army decline, feeling it might oust him. In 1910, of the 20,000 soldiers serving in the army, only 14,000 were available for counter-guerrilla operations. Money had been budgeted for thousands of additional troops, but rather than recruiting, commanders had simply pocketed their salaries. Between 1877—1878 and 1910—1911, military spending declined from 42 percent of the federal budget to 22 percent. Until 1910, a small number of troops dispatched by rail had been able to quell local uprisings.7
However, when revolts sprang up in many areas early in the Revolution, the army soon became overextended. Ironically, in 1910 and 1911, rebels adopted Diaz’s 1876 strategy—undermine the central government by using guerrillas to start brushfires in as many places as possible. Army commanders failed to form mobile brigades such as those that had successfully reduced the Indian threat in the nineteenth century.8
On May 10, rebel troops under Villa and Orozco captured Ciudad Juarez, across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, even though Madero had ordered that the city should not be attacked. He had feared that stray bullets might cross the river into El Paso and that the resulting damage and deaths might alienate the United States. This unauthorized capture greatly improved Madero’s negotiating position since Ciudad Juarez’s rail links facilitated his obtaining military supplies from the United States.
While Madero was challenging Diaz in the north, opposition was developing in the state of Morelos, just south of Mexico City. There, sugar planters had deprived villages of their water and their land, and peasant demands for restitution were the most threatening. In many cases, the lack of water, not access to land, limited increased sugar production. This appropriation of peasant resources responded to the pressure of the world sugar market and was facilitated by a tight alliance between Morelos’ governors and local planters.9
The railroad arrived in Morelos in the 1880s, facilitating the shipment of sugar out of the state. In the late 1890s, much Cuban and Puerto Rican sugar production capacity was destroyed during the independence struggles there, increasing the demand for sugar from Morelos. Sugar production in Morelos quadrupled between 1880 and 1910.10
The international demand for sugar severely undermined the traditional peasant economy. Then recession led to a decline in world sugar purchases. After the Spanish-American War, Cuban production rebounded. As a result, between 1908 and 1910, sugar production in Morelos declined from 115 million pounds to under 107 million pounds. Layoffs and reduced pay and working hours followed. These layoffs exacerbated an already critical employment situation that had resulted from the installation of labor-saving machinery in sugar mills and Morelos’ 12 percent population increase between 1895 and 1910. A massive enclosure movement by large estates reduced the land area available for traditional uses. Sugar producers fenced irrigation ditches with barbed wire and hired armed guards to prevent villagers from diverting water to the fields they still did retain. Towns filled with displaced agricultural workers—future recruits for the Revolution.11
Resistance erupted in Anenecuilco, Morelos, a village that had appeared on Aztec tribute lists before the Spanish Conquest. The town was the home of Emiliano Zapata, whose family owned horses, mules, and a small plot of land. Although far from being wealthy, Zapata had escaped the grinding poverty of most Morelos residents and had learned to read and write, which was considered enough formal education in his milieu. By 1910, all the lands of his village, in an area where land had traditionally been communally owned, had been appropriated by hacendados. A neighboring hacienda was taking over part of the village, and sugar cane was being planted where homes once stood.12
In 1909, at age thirty, Zapata was chosen as chief of village defense. Zapata, who spoke Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, shared the deeply rooted Indian heritage of Anenecuilco. Along with eighty armed men, he began reclaiming and distributing to villagers land usurped by the hacienda. Previously, those who challenged the theft of land in or out of the courts had been sent to forced labor in Yucatan. However, by 1910, the political climate had changed. Diaz was preoccupied with Madero in the north, so Zapata’s land distribution not only went unchallenged but his example also spread to other parts of the state.13
Early in 1911, Diaz responded to the inexorable spread of the revolution with a series of reforms. In March, he replaced his most unpopular governors and six of his cabinet members. In April, he removed more government officials, promised an independent judiciary, and once again declared there would be no more gubernatorial or presidential reelection. He even called for the subdivision of the great estates on terms that were fair both for the landless and the landowners. With these sweeping reforms, Diaz felt he would undercut Madero and bring the revolt to a close. Had he attempted these measures a year earlier, they might have worked. However, by April 1911, they were viewed as a sign of Diaz’s weakness, not as a harbinger of democracy.14
After the defeat of Diaz’s forces at Ciudad Juarez, his traditional power base began deserting him. The financial elite felt that Diaz’s remaining in office would cause foreigners to lose confidence, thus cutting off investment and low-interest loans. As large parts of the countryside fell under the control of revolutionaries, hacendados decided that they would undercut the more radical rural insurrectos by yielding to the political demands of Madero, who, after all, shared their upper-class background. The guerrillas would win the war, not by overpowering the federal army but by denying Diaz the military supremacy he needed to assure his political base.15
Diaz’s abandonment by his traditional power base led him to agree to the Treaty of Ciudad Juarez, which called for him to resign and go into exile. Francisco Leon de la Barra, his foreign affairs minister, would serve as interim president until elections could be held. The treaty stipulated that Diaz’s federal army would remain intact, while the rebel forces that had supported Madero would be disbanded. This agreement, which sought to end the Revolution, disarm the peasants, and maintain the social system upheld by the federal army, did not mention land reform.16
Diaz agreed to the treaty due to the hemorrhaging of his support and his desire to resign and leave in dignity, rather than facing rebel hordes at the gates of Mexico City. Madero was pressured to bring the revolt to a halt by conservative family members and his desire to avoid a devastating civil war and possible U. S. intervention.17
With the benefit of hindsight, Madero has frequently been criticized for allowing Diaz’s legislature, judiciary, and, most significantly, his army to remain intact. However, a major restructuring was not Madero’s agenda. He sought to reform, not destroy, Mexico’s socioeconomic system. This, he felt, could be brought about by reopening the political process. For this reason, the treaty has been characterized as the triumph of Madero’s idealism over reality. Madero had forced Diaz’s
Figure 15.1 Francisco Madero
Source: El Paso Public Library, Aultman Collection, photo #A 1458
Resignation, but the regime lived on in institutions and behavior patterns with roots too deep to fall with the old caudillo.18
Diaz kept his word, resigned on May 25, 1911, and went into exile. Supposedly, as he was leaving Mexico Diaz commented, “Madero has unleashed a tiger, let’s see if he can control it.” Unlike the typical Latin American dictator, Diaz did not loot the treasury, and he lived to the end on the charity of friends. In 1915, he died in exile in France.
Diaz’s departure was hardly lamented at the time. Subsequent governments had a vested interest in portraying his government as a bad regime that deserved to be overthrown. While this is true, Diaz did lay the foundation of modern Mexico. As revolutionary General Felipe Angeles observed:
Diaz was a glorious soldier who struggled for independence and national sovereignty. He was an able administrator, but took advantage of his prestige as a caudillo and used the army to impose his will on the nation. He did not respect our democratic institutions nor did he obey the law. He usurped authority and became a dictator.19
World History
