One hundred years ago today, Pancho Villa (1878-1923), one of the most representative leaders of the Mexican Revolution, died in an ambush. His figure can be treated from multiple aspects. One of the most unusual is his famous foray into Texas, attacking the small town of Columbus in the early morning hours of March 9, 1916. No other military force had penetrated the continental United States since the British in the War of 1812-15.
As Eduardo Galeano wrote in Memoria del fuego (Siglo XXI, 1986), that episode was a kind of world turned upside down: “It rains upwards. The hen bites the fox and the hare shoots the hunter. The great Uruguayan writer was referring to the strange reversal of roles: for once, people from a Latin American country attacked the great power, when the usual thing, over a long time, has been the military intervention of the White House in foreign domains.
In 1910, the revolution had broken out in Mexico against the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz. An extremely turbulent period began with this, with civil strife that seemed to never end. Among the military leaders of the time, Pancho Villa is one of the most famous, although he is also one of the most controversial. Hero of the peasant struggle for some, just a simple bandit for others. The fact is that, through a stroke of audacity, he managed to lead the largest revolutionary army in the history of Latin America.
He was, without a doubt, an excessive character in many ways. Brave when it came to commanding, undisciplined when it was his turn to obey, the same thing he would execute someone in cold blood who showed sensitivity to the surface, sometimes to the point of crying. Tender and relentless, he was like two people in one.
Like Emiliano Zapata in the south, he championed the rights of the dispossessed, though without as radical a commitment to land reform. He aspired to create a class of smallholders, not to reinstate the collective use of a land that he was in no hurry to distribute. First, in his opinion, the war had to be won. That is why the legend that makes him a kind of Mexican Robin Hood is exaggerated.
Accustomed to going it alone, this uncontrollable hero maintained a very conflictive relationship with President Venustiano Carranza, who felt threatened by his power and by his permanent tendency to create problems and even international conflicts. They were two strong-willed men, almost incapable of agreeing.
Annoyed with what he judged to be insensitivity to peasant problems, Villa allied himself with Zapata. Both leaders managed to occupy the presidential palace and appeared together in an iconic photograph. The problems, however, had only just begun. Although the two leaders controlled the capital, friction between their respective troops began to multiply. The two armies had opposite priorities: while the Villistas put war issues first, the Zapatistas wanted above all to establish social justice.
Determined to strengthen his authority, Carranza concentrated on neutralizing the “Centauro del Norte”, aware that Zapata remained isolated in the south. He was lucky that an overly impulsive Villa, more charismatic than gifted for organizational issues, began to make mistakes that resulted in serious defeats. The spectacular charges of his army worked against demoralized enemies, not against well-armed, disciplined troops. Thus, in the midst of these continuous failures, desertions multiplied.
It was then that Villa led the first and only Mexican invasion of the United States. Why did he head specifically for Columbus, a small town that didn’t seem to hold much interest, where there were nothing but shacks, mud, and snakes? A possible explanation points to personal revenge: there was Sam Ravel, an arms dealer who would have defrauded him by keeping the money and not delivering the material.
Although it is possible that this motive existed, Friedrich Katz, Villa’s biographer, points out that it could not have been the main issue. In the US intelligence reports about Villa’s actions, Ravel’s name does not appear.
It seems that the Mexicans thought, above all, of an easy operation that, with a low cost, would translate into significant benefits at various levels. The prospect of seizing merchandise to supply the troops, or the weapons of the small garrison protecting Columbus, was tempting. But Villa’s spies made a serious mistake in calculating their size: they thought they would only have fifty men to face, when there were actually about six hundred. The play, therefore, seemed a safe bet.
Villa did not see it clearly at first, but in the end he allowed himself to be convinced by his lieutenants. He believed that if he did not order the attack, his men, in difficult circumstances, could end up demoralized, and in that case, his contingent would eventually disintegrate.
It is possible, on the other hand, that the North Centaur made a refined strategic calculation. If he attacked Columbus, the Americans might respond with an attempted invasion of Mexico. In such a case, he hoped that there would be a nationalist outbreak that would be beneficial to his interests. Perhaps in this way his two great enemies, President Carranza and the United States, would end up facing each other.
Another matter was justifying the attack to his men. Another in his place would have made, perhaps, a political speech. He preferred to appeal to emotional arguments. He first blamed the United States for his recent defeat at Agua Prieta, having supported the Carrancistas. He also blamed the northern neighbor for supplying his troops with faulty ammunition.
But surely his most impressive argument was that of a recent tragedy that had occurred just two days before in El Paso: the Americans had bathed twenty Mexicans in oil to delouse them. Apparently, this racist custom was common at that time. On that occasion, however, the oil caught fire and the victims died horribly.
Accident or murder? Villa’s men had reason to believe that it had been a voluntary act, given the numerous occasions on which their fellow citizens had been lynched on the other side of the border.
So far the most probable version of events. However, some clues point in another direction. What if the North Centaur didn’t bother to tell his men they were headed for US territory? Perhaps the foot soldiers thought they were going to fight against other Mexicans, the Carrancistas, and did not imagine that the fight was going to take place in the territory of another nation.
If the Americans had heeded the coming attack, they would no doubt have been better prepared. But they did not take seriously the reports that reached them, not always entirely consistent. They knew that Villa was going to enter his country, what they did not intuit was his intention. It was rumored that he only wanted to explain to President Woodrow Wilson that he had nothing to do with the Santa Isabel massacre, in which a group of Mexicans had murdered seventeen of their compatriots, technicians who entered the Aztec country to work in the mines.
The fact is that the Villistas were able to benefit from the surprise effect. However, after the initial chaos, they made a few mistakes that ruined their lead. Mistaking the stables for the bedrooms of their enemies, they ended up killing horses. In addition, they burned down a hotel with disastrous results. The glow of the fire allowed the Americans, in the dark, to distinguish their own men from those who were leading the raid. The Mexicans, moreover, had to face more numerous troops than they had anticipated.
For this set of reasons, three hours after the attack began, they were forced to retreat. From a military point of view, the raid had been a disaster: more than a hundred victims of their own, against just seventeen Americans. Nor had weapons or anything to justify the effort been captured.
What was going to happen from then on? In the United States, as was to be expected, there was a clamor in favor of intervention in Mexico. President Wilson did not share this warmongering impulse; he was concerned above all with the war in Europe against German imperialism. But he finally sent an expedition under General Pershing. With the elections drawing nearer, he could not afford to appear weak. Officially, his men were not going to violate the sovereignty of Mexico: they only wanted to capture Villa.
Pershing failed miserably. Not only did he not find the Mexican caudillo, but he found himself increasingly in a hurry, immersed in a country where his presence generated deep hostility. His men, after suffering many casualties, were forced to leave. Curiously, two lieutenants called to become heroes during World War II participated in this failed adventure: Eisenhower and Patton. However, the United States did get something good, by training the army that would later intervene in World War I.
