Mexican Revolution

The Mexican Revolution was a conflict that raged (obviously) over Mexico during all of the 1910 decade, and it's considered the most bloody conflict ever fought on Mexican soil (or, if you take the number of displaced, exiled, and disappeared people into the equation, the bloodiest fought on North American soil), with over one million casualties. And it was the first social revolution of the 20th century. All of this war can be summed up in the following phases:

The Causes

The causes of the war can be summed up as the people being angry with how the aging president Porfirio Díaz was managing the country. To sum it up, he violently put down several revolts of Yaqui and Mayo indians in Sonora, and deported the survivors to plantations at Yucatán, where they were worked to death. Peasants were indebted to their landowners, and had all basic human rights stripped from them. There was no freedom of speech (though the clandestine press was quite big) though to make up for it, Díaz organized several "Democratic clubs" where people could rant about how much he sucked, under strict vigilance. And also, many foreign companies and landowners were allowed to run their lands like feudal kingdoms, able to screw their employees in every way they wanted -- sometimes literally.

When finally, in 1908, Porfirio Díaz announced to the American reporter James Creelman that he was going to hold elections in 1910, the people rejoiced. Francisco Ignacio Madero González, an upper class politician from Coahuila, decided to run for presidency to avenge his brother, who was killed during a democratic revolt in Monterrey, Nuevo León. He founded the Partido Antirreeleccionista (Anti-Reelectionist Party) after selling a lot of his possessions. He was regarded as a Messiah of democracy by the people, who had grown tired of the constant political bullying by Díaz and his cronies. There were also some other Diaz's cronies who wanted to get in the presidential chair, but they weren't as popular as Madero himself.

When the elections rolled around, Díaz again commited electoral fraud, and blatantly rigged the elections. And to make matters worse, he threw Madero into jail, where he started to hatch a plan to reclaim power.

Overthrowing Díaz

On November 20, 1910, Francisco I. Madero called all Mexicans to arms against Díaz's illegal government. This was taken to heart by many factions who were against Díaz's increasingly erratic government policies. The whole conflict against Díaz ended quickly, as no one really wanted him there. At the end, Díaz exiled himself to France (ironically, the country he fought against with such fervour 50 years before), And There Was Much Rejoicing.

Madero's Presidency

People rejoiced when Madero became president, as his youthful image and his charisma managed to bring a lot of the former people who worked for Diaz under his administration. However, due to his ideas being quite erred towards the ills of the time in the country, his presidency sucked. The whole mess wasn't helped due to the fact that these people who worked under Diaz were disliked by many of his fellow revolutionaries, who felt he wasn't putting in the effort to help the country.

Eventually, this made a group of conservative generals plot against him under the auspices of then-Ambassador of the US, Henry Lane Wilson. The original plan was to have Victoriano Huerta, who changed sides to his convenience, and Félix Díaz (former pres. Porfirio Díaz's nephew) make a coup against Madero, then Huerta making elections and making Díaz win.

Decena Trágica

This is the moment when the shit hits the fan in Madero's presidency.

In February 9, several Army detachments revolted in Mexico City, all of them trying to oust Madero from power. However, during the coup, a loyalist Army officer saw many soldiers bringing machine guns into the city, and gave out the alarm to the National Palace. Then, the whole hell broke loose on Mexico City, as every side went paranoid and shot at everything that moved.

At the end, in February 19 at Midnight, Madero and the staff remaining loyal to him was caught due to his sheer idiocy, and most of them got jailed or executed unceremoniously, with Madero's brother suffering a particularly gruesome death. This resulted in the beginning of the government of general Victoriano Huerta, thanks to Pedro Lascurain, a foreign minister that was jammed into the presidency, only to appoint Huerta as Vice President and resign. He was president for less than an hour. After that, Huerta eventually said "Fuck this" and did not make new elections so he got to be in power.

Restart of hostilities

The rest of the revolutionary leaders were pissed off by the fact that a democratically elected president was killed by a coward, so the battles started against Huerta. From one side there was Doroteo Arango A.K.A. Francisco "Pancho" Villa, and Pascual Orozco on the north, Emiliano Zapata on the south, Álvaro Obregón in the east and Venustiano Carranza in the northwest. After sending Huerta on exile the revolutionary leaders started battles against each other on 2 sides: Villa-Zapata (who were fond on educating the people and returning the land to its owners) and Obregón-Carranza (who were more conservative and the latter named his army the "Constitutionalist Army"). Eventually, Huerta exiled himself in July 1914 when he realized that he was facing an unwinnable scenario. Then, while things seemed to be going fine, Pancho Villa had a fall out with his fellow revolutionaries and the U.S. suppliers, and in an act of desperation, he went on arms against all of them. And also, Francisco Villa was unhappy about the fact his land reforms weren't going as fast as expected.

After the Constitution

The whole war more or less died down after 1917, when a new constitution got drafted to the provisional congress led by Venustiano Carranza, since most factions agreed that their demands had been satisfied. However, a few people were not too happy about being excluded from the whole deal, namely Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa.

Those two eventually started to make campaigns against the Government, and Félix Díaz joined the fray once again. All of these campaigns failed, with Villa eventually retiring in 1920, only to get assassinated Gangland-style while on his way to a wedding, Zapata murdered during a False-Flag Operation by the Mexican Government, and Félix Díaz being more of a nuisance until he went back into exile in 1920.

The aftershocks of the revolution were quite strong back in the first half of the 20th century. Depending on who you ask, the conflict ended after the drafting of the Constitution of 1917, in 1924 when Plutarco Elías Calles entered power, a few years later when the Cristero war ended, or until 1936, when then-president Lázaro Cárdenas repossessed all of the foreign oil companies to fund PEMEX, the state petrol company.

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Tropes applied to the Mexican Revolution

• Amazon Brigade: Wives, daughters, and females alike fought hand-in-hand with their male compatriots. Wearing bandoliers over their dresses and armed with rifles, these women were known as "las soldaderas" or "Las Adelitas" after a martyr for the cause.
• And There Was Much Rejoicing: When Díaz got toppled as a president.
  • Subverted when Victoriano Huerta did his coup d'etat. The American diplomatic staff in Mexico (mentioned below), the Germans (who saw Huerta as a convenient buffer on which they could wage war against the U.S. if the situation demanded) and several conservative politicians were the ones happy, but it pissed off every living person in Mexico (and the American government, due to its ambassador's intervention), in spite of how much Madero's presidency sucked.
• Badass Mustache: I dare you to find a single important leader who didn't have one.
  • Badass Beard: Venustiano Carranza had one in addition to his moustache.
• Beam Me Up, Scotty: Pancho Villa is often depicted as a testosterone-poisoned warlord and a trigger happy drunkard. He wasn't nearly as brutal as people thought he was, and he was a teetotaller—watching drunk people was actually one of the easiest way to make him angry—and not to mention that he was a patron of education during his stint as Governor of Chihuahua.
• Non Sequitur Scene: The Flores Magón brother's filibuster invasion of Baja California. It was a pointless invasion to start up an anarchist state in the Baja California Peninsula, and it didn't add anything to the other war theatres, only serving to increase paranoia in the population about an American stealth takeover. And also, it ended with said mercenaries fleeing back to San Diego after a botched attempt at taking Tijuana, and refusing to go back.
• Blood Knight: Victoriano Huerta. For bonus points, he was nicknamed "The Jackal" for his atrocities.
• Bumbling Sidekick: Félix Díaz. His superiors disrespected him, Huerta sent him to Japan as an ambassador just to get rid of him, only to end up in Europe by mistake, his attempts at rebelling against the Constitutionalists failed spectacularly, and he wasn't able to do anything right.
• The Chessmaster: Victoriano Huerta, who played all of the factions during the Decena Trágica to his own ends.
• Child Soldiers: Fielded by all sides.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: Victoriano Huerta, who changed sides more often than he changed uniforms.
  • Almost every major player in the revolution, actually.
  • Melee a Trois probably describes the situation better.
• Church Militant: The Cristeros during the latter half of the 1920's, who fought against Plutarco Elías Calles' government.
• Depopulation Bomb: Mexico had a population of around 13 million people before the war. Due to the whole mess, the next census could be only done in 1921, by which time the population had fallen to 12 million. The whole thing was so violent that many towns ended up deserted, and the Mexican state of Morelos (Emiliano Zapata's birthplace and where he conducted his campaigns) lost a third of its population. Add to that the steadily rising deaths caused by the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, and diminishing food supplies due to the peasants heading to war instead of toiling the fields, and you can guess the rest.
• Dirty Communists: Most of the post-1917 politicians, due to another external event and Trotskyist influence. For example, Tomás Garrido Canabal, whose acts look like a Commie comic villain caricature.
  • False-Flag Operation / Pragmatic Villainy: It is said that Tomás Garrido Canabal used to torch churches. This is not true—burning them would have been a waste of a building that was perfectly good for being taken by force and used as a government facility.
• Ending Fatigue: The Cristero War, the Escobarista rebellion, the Mexican Synarchist movement,^[1] and the Oil Expropiation came to be due to how inconclusive the conflict got and how many things were unresolved in the 1917 Constitution.
• Expository Theme Tune: The many, many Corridos dedicated to the combatants.
• Gray and Grey Morality: While by all means Díaz was a bad president on his late years, in his early periods he was surprisingly efficient, as he destroyed the brigands that plagued Mexico's roads, and set up the country's infrastructure so that it would benefit the country for years to come; his later years sucked due to him being senile and Surrounded by Idiots and yes-men. And many of the factions commited a lot of atrocities to their fellow countrymen for any whimsical reason (or sometimes, without one).
• Man Behind the Man: Plutarco Elías Calles.
• Mexico Called. They Want Texas Back.: The infamous Zimmermann telegram. Subverted since it was the Germans who pitched the proposal without knowing that Mexico was unable to go through the plan.
  • Huerta also attempted to convince a German officer to put him back into power in exchange for waging war against the U.S., but the whole scheme fell apart when the German officer realized there was nothing to win out of it.
• Mighty Gringo: Many American mercenaries ended up serving any of the factions, most of them with Pancho Villa. An example of this can be seen in the film And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself.
  • Porfirio Diaz himself was a Mighty Whitey, being the ruler of Mexico for lots of years.
• Moral Event Horizon: La Decena Trágica.
  • General Guajardo's False-Flag Operation to convince Villa that he would be loyal to him, by ordering a segment of his own men to die in an incredibly obvious ambush set up by the rest of his batallion.
• Semper Fi: U.S. Marines fought in Veracruz against the Huerta government. It only managed to piss off both sides, but they took the city either way.
• Shaggy Dog Story: Too many to list, but here's a few:
  • Zapata's uprising after the drafting of the constitution was rendered moot when his land law proposals went through. But he died before he could see the results when he got ambushed in an hacienda. If he had stayed put, he could have probably seen it.
  • The Punitive Expedition against Pancho Villa by John Pershing and George Smith Patton (yes, that very same Patton). It was a complete waste of time, since they could not find him anywhere. However, an urban legend states that Patton got to kill two of Villa's lieutenants in an unrelated incident.
    • YMMV. It *did* fail to find, much less kill or capture Villa. It did *not*, however, fail to find his military, and the ensuing Curb Stomp Campaign certainly heavily weakened him and paved the way for his final terminal decline starting at Celaya.
• Smug Snake: Félix Díaz and U.S. Ambassador Henry Lane Wilson. The first one "got better", and became a minor nuisance prone to Epic Fail on whatever he could. The latter (fortunately) got sacked of his post when U.S. president Woodrow Wilson found out of his meddling in Mexican Politics.
• Stupid Good: Francisco I. Madero on his presidency years. He allowed Porfiristas (who were mostly a bunch of yes-men with dubious loyalty) to be his Chiefs of Staff. This came to bite him in the ass during the Decena Trágica.
• We ARE Struggling Together!: Many different factions, all first vying to take down Porfirio Díaz, and then at each other's throats due to petty differences on how their ideas were to be carried out.
• With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: Porfirio Díaz on his late years, and almost everyone who got into the presidential chair by the force of arms. Lampshaded by Emiliano Zapata (the only one who refused to get in power, and was horrified when he was asked to sit on the presidential chair for a photograph) in the following quote:

"La silla presidencial está embrujada, cualquier persona buena que se sienta en ella, se convierte en mala".
The presidential chair is accursed! Any good men that sit on it becomes evil.

• Your Terrorists Are Our Freedom Fighters: The Cristeros. While some people, especially hard-line Catholics and right-wing conservatives will praise them as freedom fighters, they were pretty much the Catholic version of the Taliban. Hundreds of teachers had their ears sliced off by Cristeros; they also engaged in dispoportionate retribution against those viewed as pro-Government. YMMV on which side was more brutal.
• Zerg Rush: Villa's strategy consisted on throwing cavalry charges at everything. It was effective in the first years, when the Federal armies were undersupplied, overstretched and low on morale, but when the Constitutionalists started to field machine guns...

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The Mexican Revolution in the media

Film

• And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself (2004): A story about the filming of "The Life of General Villa", the first movie about the Mexican Revolution, starred by Pancho Villa.^[2]
• Zapata: El Sueño del Héroe (2004): A film about Emiliano Zapata. Massively hyped due to having several famous actors from Televisa and because it promised to deliver a new perspective on the hero. It bombed quite badly, thanks to the fact that its director, Alfonso Arau, assaulted historical accuracy (which was what the audience expected) to present a quasi-mythological and larger-than-life Zapata, and terrible special effects. On the other hand, the scenes that didn't involved the samed ruined hacienda were gorgeous.
• The Professionals
• A Fistful of Dynamite features an "idealised" (read: Artistic Licence History) version.
• Three Amigos! takes place in this period, with a German agent as the villain.
• The Wild Bunch is about a group of American bandits trying to take advantage of the chaos.
• Viva Villa! is a biopic about Pancho Villa.
• For Greater Glory, taking place during the Cristero War.

Live Action Television

• The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones have an Episode set during that time, where he encounters the group of Pancho Villa.
  • To which he confirms with Mutt Williams in Crystal Skull while in Peru looking for Oxley.

Soap Operas

• Senda de Gloria (Path of Glory) (1987): The first soap opera that featured the aftershocks of the 1917 constitution as they were, and the events played out, and it was Televisa's first superproduction, and it shows. It plays out the chaotic years after the 1917 constitution and the early years of the then-ruling political party Partido Revolucionario Institucional, from the perspective of a family that sided with Carranza. However, due to Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas' split from the PRI (who is the son of Lázaro Cárdenas, a historical person glorified in that series' last 30 episodes), the soap's last 30 episodes got shafted by orders of the government.
• El Vuelo Del Águila (The flight of the Eagle) (1994): Another historical soap opera from Televisa, about the whole presidency of Porfirio Díaz, told from his perspective. The last half was about the first years of the Mexican Revolution, and the toll it took on him.

Literature

• Los De Abajo (Published from 1914 to 1918).
• Temporada de Zopilotes (2010) (English: Vulture Season): A book by Mexican historian and writer Paco Ignacio Taibo II. It's a factual book about the Decena Trágica. Very well researched.
• Insurgent Mexico (1914): A collection of memoirs from the war correspondant John Reed.
• Pedro Paramo, which deals with the Cristeros War.

1. ↑ Mexico's equivalent of Those Wacky Nazis with some weird Mestizo mythos around it
2. ↑ Said film ended up Lost Forever after a fire consumed the studio it was being kept.