madero and zapata--4/28/2026

28 Apr 2026

madero and zapata--4/28/2026

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Today's selection-- from Mexico by Paul Gillingham. Relations between the victorious revolutionaries Francisco Madero and Emiliano Zapata after the signing of the Treaty of Ciudad Juárez, the document that ended that revolution:

“Madero won in a landslide in October and then ruled for just over a year amid the rubble of central power. His progress southward after signing the Treaty of Ciudad Juárez was a triumphant procession; by one account nearly half the population of Mexico City turned out to greet him on June 7. So, unpropitiously, did one of the valley's frequent earthquakes. Madero was doomed from the start by the botched peace treaty and the politics that made it, one of fundamental division between those who fought the revolution and those who ruled afterward. Madero didn't take over as president until November, so he spent the first months in Mexico City with great responsibility and little power. In that time the pattern for the rest of his regime was set: in the cities, subversion by Porfirian survivors, armed with a newly free press; in an embittered countryside, wars with ex-allies.

“The two were linked. Riots broke out across Mexico in the weeks after the treaty signing as local revolutionaries realized that neither Porfirian officials nor Porfirian property boundaries would move. The Terrazas would come home and their peons would still get paid fifty centavos a day in scrip for the company store. Contracts that caciques had taken from small businessmen like Orozco remained valid. Soldiers in places like Puebla were still ready to shoot protesters, as they did with machine guns in July, surpassing the death tolls of the great Porfirian massacres at Cananea and Río Blanco. Peasants in Morelos who took their lands back from planters were criminalized. Even in Coahuila, where Madero had the local knowledge to know better, federal soldiers were favored over local militiamen, hacendados over peasants, family and friends over the upwardly mobile. Three weeks after Madero took office Emiliano Zapata summed up the widespread sense of betrayal.

"The so-called Chief of the Liberating Revolution of Mexico, Don Francisco I. Madero, did not bring to a happy end the revolution which he gloriously initiated with the help of God and the pueblo, since he left standing most of the governing powers and corrupt elements of oppression of the dictatorial government of Porfirio Diaz ... [while] the immense majority of Mexican pueblos and citizens are owners of no more than the land they walk on, suffering the horrors of poverty.

Francisco Madero arriving in Pachuca in 1912

“Zapata was in many ways the ideal rural Maderista. He was thirty; of impeccable liberal stock, his ancestors fighters against the Spanish, the conservatives, and the French. The family were rich smallholders and traders in the village of Anenecuilco. They were important in mediating between a peasant world stocked by countryfolk they understood and a broader world that they made comprehensible. His elder brother Eufemia was, like so many other revolutionaries, a muleteer, with the regional networks of merchants and remote villages that that implied. Emiliano had also dabbled as a muleteer and bred horses; he had been as far as Mexico City; where he briefly looked after the stables of a big planter, Díaz's son-in-law Ignacio de la Torrey Mier. He had taken a minor part in a failed gubernatorial campaign. When he went back to Anenecuilco in 1909, he was elected president of the village council.

“Emiliano Zapata was more than a local worthy; he had the experience and legitimacy of a fugitive, arrested at seventeen for protesting against a neighboring hacienda's land grab. He was charismatic, an . excellent horseman who despite showy, silver-trimmed riding clothes remained a straightforward man who enjoyed women, cockfights, and corridas. The combination made him a useful leader as Morelos's villages disappeared beneath the seas of sugarcane, and in the spring of 1910, with maize planting urgent, he organized the occupation of ancestral fields taken over by the neighboring hacienda. By late autumn he was adjudicating land disputes at the municipal level in Villa de Ayala, a village defense fund supporting a growing militia, the authorities intimidated into acquiescence. In late November the Zapatistas began conspiring to join Madero's revolution; in March 1911 they finally did. In May they took the major town of Cuautla and then, the war supposedly won, began the business of agrarian reform. Peasants with guns took over hacienda fields, and Zapata, chief of the revolutionary army in Morelos, backed them up.

“A Maderista regime with a chance of working would have confirmed Zapata in power, allowed the people of Morelos to elect him governor, and granted him the autonomy to administer institutional land reform. But in the summer of 1911 Madero couldn't support Zapata, as this would have undermined reconciliation with the enduring Porfirians in government; he could only try and fail at mediation. President León de la Barra appointed first a planter and then a federal policeman to the governorship, sent in the counterinsurgency veteran General Victoriano Huerta, canceled the state elections, and declared martial law. Madero tried to negotiate by going to Morelos. He was not as well-meaningly myopic as all that, and knew that he was witnessing a microcosm of events across Mexico. On August 25 he wrote to León de la Barra with a list of complaints. Soldiers had jailed revolutionaries in Guadalajara, and Porfirian state legislatures had toppled revolutionary governors in Aguascalientes and Tlaxcala. Across Mexico interim governors were treating revolutionaries with contempt and violence as they took away their guns; of their triumphant forces only forty-eight hundred had been allowed to remain in arms; meanwhile Leon de la Barra's inactivity was allowing reyistas (supporters of Bernardo Reyes) to prepare counterrevolution. Madero ended with a threat and a demand: León de la Barra should remember the revolution's power and sack the hardline interior minister Alberto García Granados. Otherwise a civil war, for which he himself would prepare, was 'almost certain.'

“Yet in the end he backed the interim government. He had already supported the dismissal of Emilio Vázquez Gómez, the cabinet's main defender of the popular revolutionaries. In mid-August Huerta launched an offensive, burning ranches and executing more than sixty people. Yet as late as August 27, Zapata was still proclaiming loyalty. Only when the attorney general issued an arrest warrant did Zapata finally take to the mountains with his followers, growing in number and identifying themselves as rebel Zapatistas; the government called them 'ridiculously pretentious bandits.'

“Bandido and abigeo, cattle rustler, were terms long used to delegitimize rebels, branding them thieves–abigeos being the sort of thieves countryfolk particularly loathed–instead of political opponents. The Zapatista rebellion was the first of three such risings against the new regime, all branded banditry, all overtly political. In November the Zapatistas made the distinction clear with a manifesto, the Plan de Ayala, which called for peasants to get their lands back and for científicos and caciques to lose their own should they get in the way. Madero was to step down in favor of Pascual Orozco. In December they were followed in Oaxaca by the mayor of juchitan–a troublesome city, fiercely autonomous–Che Gomez, who led five thousand men into renewed rebellion. Once again Madero tried to mediate and failed, the governor murdering Gomez–the classic ley fuga, 'shot while running away' – as he prepared for talks with the president. In February disillusioned Maderistas briefly took Ciudad Juárez. And among multiple smaller outbursts–some manned by proper bandits, scofflaw opportunists–the most serious came in March 1912, when Orozco rebelled in Chihuahua."