Pancho Villa

Origins: The Hacienda and the Outlaw

Doroteo Arango — the man the world would know as Pancho Villa — was born on 5 June 1878 on the Hacienda de Río Grande in Durango, to a family of sharecroppers who farmed land they would never own. He received almost no formal education and spent his childhood in the poverty and structural servility of the hacienda system. The event that set him on the road to outlawry is contested by legend — the most persistent story holds that in 1894, at the age of sixteen, he shot a hacendado who had assaulted his sister, took the man's horse, and fled into the Sierra Madre Occidental. He spent the following fifteen years as a bandit in the mountains and valleys of Chihuahua and Durango, cattle-rustling, robbing, evading rurales and Díaz's federal troops, building a network of contacts and loyalties among the poor communities of the northern plateau.

Villa was not an ideologist or a political theorist. He could barely read. He had no programme comparable to Emiliano Zapata's Plan de Ayala or the anarchist politics of Ricardo Flores Magón. What he had was an intimate knowledge of the northern terrain, an extraordinary natural authority over men, a logistical instinct that bordered on genius, and a fury at the social order that had produced his circumstances that never diminished. When Francisco Madero's revolution gave that fury a direction, Villa became one of the most formidable military commanders in the history of the Americas.

The Revolutionary Commander: 1910–1914

Villa joined the Maderista revolution in 1910 as a guerrilla leader in Chihuahua, contributing his knowledge of the territory and his ability to move large numbers of men rapidly across vast distances. After Madero's victory and assassination, and through the chaotic succession of the revolutionary period, Villa emerged as the dominant military figure in northern Mexico. By 1913–1914 his División del Norte had grown from a guerrilla band into a force of 40,000 soldiers — the largest single army in the Mexican Revolution — with its own railways (captured and operated by Villa's people), its own supply chain, its own hospitals, and its own payroll funded partly by cattle seized from haciendas and partly by taxes levied on the territories under his control.

The División del Norte fought with an innovative combination of cavalry speed, massed infantry assault, and artillery coordination that the static defensive tactics of the federal army could not match. Villa's battle at Torreón in October 1913 — the first major Constitutionalist victory of the revolution — demonstrated his operational capacity. His capture of Chihuahua City in December 1913 gave him control of the wealthiest state in northern Mexico. And on 23 June 1914, the División del Norte stormed Zacatecas in what many military historians consider the most decisive single battle of the Mexican Revolution. Against a fortified city defended by 12,000 federal troops and artillery, Villa committed 22,000 men in a coordinated attack from multiple directions. The federal force was destroyed. The route to Mexico City was open. Venustiano Carranza, calculating that Villa's power had become dangerous, used his authority as First Chief of the Constitutionalist forces to order Villa to halt at Zacatecas and divert his coal supply. The battle had been won; the political war had just begun.

Alliance with Zapata: The Convention of Aguascalientes

In October 1914 the Convention of Aguascalientes brought together the major revolutionary factions in an attempt to negotiate a political settlement. The convention produced the only significant political alliance of the revolution: between Villa's División del Norte and Zapata's Liberation Army of the South. The two men met in Xochimilco in December 1914 — a meeting extensively photographed and filmed — before jointly occupying Mexico City. The alliance between the northern bandit-general and the southern peasant-revolutionary was more photogenic than functional. Their programmes were different, their geographical bases were remote from each other, and neither had any particular vision for governing the country they had together captured. Carranza withdrew to Veracruz, consolidated his support among other Constitutionalist generals, and systematically rebuilt his military position.

The Villa-Zapata coalition controlled Mexico City and much of the country for several months in early 1915. It produced one of the most significant social experiments of the revolution: in Morelos, under Zapata's direct authority, village communities reclaimed their lands and began farming them as ejidos. In Chihuahua, under Villa's authority, hacienda lands were redistributed to soldiers and their families, schools were opened, and a functioning — if rough — administrative structure was maintained. Neither experiment survived the military reversal that followed.

The Defeats of 1915 and the Punitive Expedition

In April–June 1915, Carranza's general Álvaro Obregón — who had studied the trench warfare of the First World War from newspaper reports and adapted its defensive principles to Mexican conditions — met the División del Norte in a series of battles at Celaya, León, and Aguascalientes. Obregón dug trenches, strung barbed wire, and waited for Villa's cavalry charges. The charges came. They were devastated by defensive fire. Villa lost perhaps 10,000 men killed, wounded, or captured in the Bajío campaign and the División del Norte never recovered its former power. By the end of 1915 Villa had been reduced from the commander of a 40,000-strong army to a guerrilla leader in Chihuahua with a few hundred followers.

In the early hours of 9 March 1916, Villa led approximately 485 raiders across the U.S. border and attacked Columbus, New Mexico — killing eighteen Americans and burning part of the town before being driven off by U.S. Army troops. The reasons for the attack remain debated: reprisal against arms dealers who had sold him defective ammunition, an attempt to provoke U.S. intervention that would discredit Carranza, or simple desperation. Whatever the motivation, the result was the Punitive Expedition: President Woodrow Wilson dispatched General John "Black Jack" Pershing with an initial force of 10,000 soldiers — eventually expanded to 54,000 — into Mexico to capture Villa. The expedition lasted eleven months. Pershing never caught Villa. The U.S. forces clashed repeatedly with Carranza's troops, came close to triggering a full-scale war between the two countries, and withdrew in January 1917 having accomplished nothing except to enhance Villa's legend as the man who raided the United States and made it look foolish.

Retirement, Assassination, and Legend

After years of guerrilla warfare in Chihuahua, Villa negotiated a peace agreement with the Obregón government in 1920 following the overthrow and assassination of Carranza. He was given a hacienda — the Canutillo estate in Durango — 50,000 pesos, and a bodyguard of fifty men. He spent three years farming, opening a school for the children of his former soldiers and their families, and living something approaching a domestic life. He was assassinated on 20 July 1923 in Hidalgo del Parral, Chihuahua, when gunmen ambushed his car at a street corner. He was forty-five years old. The conspiracy behind his assassination has never been fully established — the most credible theory implicates political figures who feared he would attempt a return to power. He died, according to various accounts, asking those around him to tell the world he had said something. His reported last words are apocryphal; what he had already said and done was enough.

Pancho Villa's legacy is deliberately contradictory and has been fought over for a century. He was a bandit who became a general, a mass murderer who funded schools, a ruthless commander who inspired fierce personal loyalty, a man with no political programme who briefly governed one of Mexico's largest states. He has been claimed by Mexican nationalism, by the revolutionary left, by popular culture, and by the film industry — which was so fascinated by him that he signed a contract in 1914 allowing the Mutual Film Corporation to film his battles and have approval rights over the lighting. Some of his "battles" were refought for the cameras. He is the most documented military commander of the Mexican Revolution and one of the most comprehensively mythologised figures in the political history of the Americas.

His body was buried at Canutillo. Three years later his skull was stolen — by whom and for what purpose remains unknown. In 1976, his remains were moved to the Monument to the Revolution in Mexico City, where he lies alongside the men who were once his enemies: Madero, Carranza, Calles. In death, the Mexican state incorporated him into the national founding myth. Whether that represents the revolution's success or its ultimate betrayal depends on whose perspective you take — and Villa, characteristically, would have had something blunt and unprintable to say about it.