Centaur of the North

Friedrich Katz’s “The Life and Times of Pancho Villa” is a masterpiece of contemporary historiography. Together with John Womack’s “Zapata,” it forms a diptych of great biographies of leaders of the Mexican Revolution. We still need books of the same quality about the other major figures: Francisco Madero, Venustiano Carranza, Alvaro Obregon, Plutarco Elias Calles and Lazaro Cardenas. To be sure, several of these have been the objects of notable novelistic incarnations: Madero, for example, in a novel of the same name by Ignacio Solarez, Obregon and Calles in Martin Luis Guzman’s “Shadow of the Caudillo” and Carranza in Fernando Benitez’s wonderful book “The Old King.” Villa, in addition to appearing in Guzman’s tale, was also a character for the writers Nellie Campobello and Rafael F. Mun~oz.

Katz’s biography shares something with these literary works: the enigmatic relationship between language and action. Do the facts unleash the words, or do the words announce the facts? This is a central problem, but most especially in the case of revolutions. No one saw it more clearly than Louis Saint-Just, the young tribune of the French Revolution. When a revolution fights tyranny, it’s epic. When it fights itself, it becomes tragedy. Saint-Just foresaw his own fate: He was guillotined at age 27 by the same revolution he’d bravely defended.

Francisco Villa’s destiny is inscribed within the trajectory that goes from epic to tragedy. To cross the border in 1913 with only eight men and to stand, three months later, at the head of the Northern Division, with a force of 10,000 men, to seize Zacatecas and Torreon and to assure, more than any other armed body, the triumph over President Victoriano Huerta and the federal army: all that belongs to the order of the epic. A folk-epic in which the hero creates his own power, not inheriting it from anyone.

How did Villa use his power? Katz raises all the questions the “myth of Pancho Villa” overlooks. How did the military leader and the reformer coexist in him? As head of the government of Chihuahua, Villa, as Katz tells us, had vast resources at his disposal. He imposed iron discipline on his army; he avoided disorder, endemic in a triumphant people’s army; he carefully avoided destroying property and prohibited all looting; he expropriated the land that belonged to the oligarchy, suspended debt owed to loan sharks and developed public education.

Was Villa, then, an extraordinary example of a revolution in progress that achieved military victories at the same time that it established land reform, education and health programs? What was the full extent and what were the limits of Villa’s revolutionary action? Because the “Centaur of the North” led the Chihuahua government for only four months, his reform activities have to be measured within a very brief time span. Given these limitations, what were the achievements and defects of Villa’s reforms?

Villa was far from being a bloody warlord (were Carranza, Obregon and Calles less bloody?): Katz describes the discipline Villa imposed on the Northern Division. At the same time, he doesn’t exclude the outrages perpetrated by an uncontrollable man, Rodolfo Fierro, the corruption of Tomas Urbina, who was partial to moving into the haciendas of the former Chihuahua oligarchy. (Urbina, by the way, was the model for my character Tomas Arroyo in “The Old Gringo.”)

Most important, Katz does not leave out Villa’s reticence with regard to agrarian reform. If on the one hand Villa respected the tenant farmers who were the victims of the vast latifundia, he very carefully refrained from breaking up those haciendas. Most especially, he didn’t touch, not even with a rose petal, either U.S. citizens or their property. Katz illustrates in complete detail the care with which Villa treated the “gringos.” Why was he so solicitous? Because weapons came into Mexico from the north. And because Villa sought U.S. recognition.

From support for Villa to Washington’s machinations to achieve in Mexico a representative government that would unite all factions, to final support--against his will--for the nationalist Carranza, President Wilson pursued a vacillating policy ultimately determined by the imminence of World War I, the intrigues of Kaiser Wilhelm II in Mexico, and, above all, the pressures brought to bear on the White House by groups variously interested in invading Mexico, annexing it, or turning it into a protectorate. The press magnate William Randolph Hearst, Sen. Albert L. Fall and the Texas Oil Co. were the principal instigators of violent U.S. intervention in Mexico. The occupation of Veracruz and Gen. John Pershing’s punitive expedition were Wilson’s concessions to U.S. interventionism. Abandoning Veracruz and handing over its munitions to Carranza were a broad hint as to what the United States saw as its option in Mexico. Villa’s decision to return to the north instead of attacking Veracruz and Carranza marked the beginning of his fall. Obregon’s tactical and strategic superiority in neutralizing Villa’s triumphant cavalry charges--he used trenches, sniper and artillery--sealed the military defeat of the Northern Division.

Francisco Villa created his own power. He inherited it from no one. The drama of his remarkable story derives from seeing how that power, won by a dispossessed man, is ultimately lost.

It is then that Villa’s second face appears. In victory, he never employed terror. It is in defeat that terror appears. Saint-Just’s observation is all too apt. Revolution against tyranny is epic. Revolution against itself is tragic. “The force of events,” he said, “leads us to results we’d perhaps never imagined. Our purpose is to create an order of things such that a universal tendency toward the good is established. . . .”

Albert Camus reproached revolutions for going beyond their limits. Without revolutions, however, J.M. Domenach, the French Catholic philosopher wondered, how would we know what the limits were? If a revolution is, as St. Just thought, the struggle between the demon of hope and the devil of the irremediable, no one embodies this dilemma better than Francisco Villa. He is from the “other” poor Mexico, which he, with all his fervor and all his defects, represented. The political astuteness of the winners--Obregon and Calles--transformed the irremediable into hope. Cardenas gave real life to that operation, and we Mexicans have lived with his avatars for more than half a century.

Katz admits that once both the epic and the tragedy are finished, what remains of Villa is his myth: the universal fame of this fascinating character; the many books, films, popular songs; the paradox that in spite of his attack on the town of Columbus, N.M., there are monuments to him in the American Southwest.

But, linked forever to his legend, there also remains the hope of the other Mexico, the second country, the country that’s been left behind, which still sings to him, “Listen here, Pancho Villa, what does your heart say?”

Diligent, extremely well-documented, fluid and elegant at all times, Friedrich Katz presents Mexicans with our ghosts--alive.