The story of the Mexican revolution, an epic tale of heroes and villains, dynamite and treachery, is confidently reconstructed here by Frank McLynn, an accomplished biographer with several big ones behind him, notably the lives of Napoleon and Jung.
Mexico's complex revolution dragged out over 20 years, destroying the country's infrastructure and tearing the soul of a great nation apart. The spark which blew the powder keg was an issue of presidential campaign intrigue in 1910, but the country was soon engulfed in dozens of violent conflicts, as deep-seated grievances exploded into provincial wars.
The star figures of the era were Francisco Villa and Emiliano Zapata, social bandits or heroic guerrillas, depending on your viewpoint, along with Venustiano Carranza and Alvaro Obregon, cynical repressors or emerging statesmen, depending on your perspective. The story begins with the decline of Porfirio Diaz, Mexico's dictator (18761910) who rounded up beggars and shipped them off to concentration camps as he celebrated his final anniversary in power.
Diaz learned that once he had conciliated key social groups he could repress the rest; but excess greed and economic disaster finally broke his grip on the country. McLynn carefully weaves the story of Villa and Zapata into the broader tale of Mexico's profound social transformation, out of which a ruling party emerged which held power until this month, enjoying 71 years in power.
It is a great irony of history that the Mexican Revolution bled the country dry, leaving upwards of a million dead only to install a political system which merely refined Diaz's "pan o palo" (bread or the stick) regime, whereby a single dictator was replaced with a "perfect dictatorship" which changed figurehead every six years.
Emiliano Zapata launched his guerrilla war to the cry of `'Land or Freedom", inspiring similar uprisings in other Mexican states. An incorruptible hero, Zapata envisioned "village anarchism`' where small farmers would grow subsistence crops rather than sugar cane for export. One memorable passage has legendary journalist John Reed explain communism to the leader; if anyone tried to distribute the fruits of his labour like that, retorted Zapata, "I would fill him full of bullets".
Zapata's partner in crime, distant both in temperament and in his area of influence, was Francisco Villa, still a legend today as the man who led an invasion party northwards into the US. Villa had "badly stained teeth, crinkly black hair and a thick black moustache". A great horseman and a brave fighter, Villa was also a ruthless tyrant who executed friends and enemies alike on a whim, his abuses ultimately undoing the Robin Hood image he sought to cultivate.
In one of his more bizarre moments, Villa signed a contract with a US film corporation in 1914, agreeing to fight all his future battles by day, banning rival film crews and, if necessary, simulating combat or postponing executions from dawn to 7 a.m., to take advantage of the better light.
McLynn's fat book is peppered with such anecdotes, driven by a rigorous approach to truth-telling, his data gleaned from an array of secondary sources which stretch to 33 pages of recommended reading. He readily drops academic language for more colourful phraseology; Henry Lane Wilson, US Ambassador to Mexico at the time, is described as "the maddest of the mad", nurturing hatreds "that could only be explained by a psychologist of the abnormal". Venustiano Carranza, the egocentric military chief "was most of all that sad spectacle, the professor in politics". However Carranza proved more capable at playing one enemy off another and won the day, until his own violent death.
This book is accessible and well-paced, revealing the horrors of the revolution as military leaders turned to mass executions and rape, looting, forced labour and poisoned water supplies. Zapata turned a blind eye as his own troops ran riot on occasion, even as he edged closer to endorsing full-blooded social revolution. As McLynn points out, Zapata's memory remains alive today, reborn in south-east Mexico, where Indian rebels launched an armed uprising against the ruling party (January 1994), emulating the iron soldier's immortal words, "It is better to die on your feet than live on your knees".
If you weren't there at the time, this is essential reading.
Michael McCaughan, a freelance journalist based in Mexico, is the author of True Crimes, the biography of Rodolfo Walsh