Huerta's Late Regime

By October 1915, Venustiano Carranza's Constitutionalist forces effectively had driven a firm wedge between the ideologically allied forces of Emiliano Zapata in Morelos and Francisco "Pancho" Villa north of Mexico City. After the crushing defeats of Villa's Division of the North at the two main battles of Celaya in April, the armies of Carranza and Álvaro Obregón controlled the center of the country, paving the way for a Constitutionalist takeover of the capital. In less than a year after the fractious Convention of Aguascalientes, Carranza's supporters had superseded all their opponents and choked them off into more and more isolated sections of Mexico. Yet, three months still remained in what the scholar William Weber Johnson has described as "perhaps the bloodiest year since the Conquest" in Mexico's history. On October 11, 1915, a portion of Carranza's government transferred to Mexico City from Veracruz, where it had been in exile since its falling out with Provisional President Eulalio Gutierrez and his agrarian reformers and the Villistas and Zapatistas in November 1914. This enabled the U.S. administration of Woodrow Wilson to extend de facto recognition of the Carranza faction as the official government of Mexico. With this recognition came a prohibition by Washington on the sales of arms or provisions to any other group waging war in the countryside. Professionally written essays: request help with Writing essays by trusted essay writers. The best service online! This decision, too, eventually would wear down any political or military opposition to Carranza. The Zapatistas in the south remained strangely passive in reaction to "MisterWilson's" actions. To the scholar John Womack Jr., this attitude is explained as a native skepticism grounded in five years of witnessed desertions and treacheries; simply put, the Zapatistas doubted that Carranza "could retain the loyalty of the genuine revolutionary generals around him." But a more practical reason may be offered: cut off and isolated in the state of Morelos, consistently rebuffed by U.S. authorities as socialists and bandit rebels who would dare to redistribute commercial estates into holdings for peasant villagers, and now denied any access to U.S. arms, Zapata and his chiefs had nowhere to go and no means by which to break out. For the most part, the Zapatistas continued to raid the south but were no longer considered a serious threat to stability by the Constitutionalists and their foreign allies. What Zapata could not clearly see as yet was the reconsolidation of Mexico with Carranza as First Chief. Although the Carranza forces, in Womack's words, "could not yet dominate the whole nation, they could prevent any other factions from displacing them. Henceforth they would rule." Ultimately this would also mean that those who fought "in the interests of the rural poor" would never "become the Mexican state." The glorious unifying visions of Zapata's Plan of Ayala, steadily dimmed by Carranza's elitist regime, never would be realized.

The many different ideas and social backgrounds represented in the Conventionalist forces differed greatly. Villa in his reforms thought of his troops and their families, and also of those peasants whose lands had been taken by the large landowners, but he never included the poor landless peasants, nor did he think of incorporating the laborers in manufacturing processes or even in the administration of the haciendas. One could say that his reforms were based on methods of redistribution of wealth. On the contrary, Zapata's Plan of Ayala demanded immediate possession of all land, water, and hills usurped by the large hacienda owners and recognition of land ownership to the individual who works on it, both of which ideas created an unbridgeable gap between poor peasants and landowners. At the core of their differences was the composition of the troops: whereas Zapata's army was formed mostly of poor, landless peasants, Villa's consisted of former hacienda workers, day laborers, and even miners and railway workers. Their differences are significant even in the military field. Research paper writing for college students. Order Research paper writing by educated research paper writers at this site only! Villa could plan large-scale battles and move his troops and their families throughout the wide open spaces of the northern states, thereby imposing his reforms to those territories that came under his control; Zapata remained localized and sheltered in the central-southern states of Morelos, Guerrero, Puebla, and a part of Veracruz, where he led a highly effective guerrilla war ideally suited to those mountainous regions, and even allowed a rotation of his troops, so that the fighter became a producer and vice versa, thereby guaranteeing the food supply. Neither one offered a viable political alternative to the nation's future. Meanwhile, Carranza made great progress in the political and military future of his forces, consolidating his provisional government in Veracruz and making moves to gain the support of the lower classes, who soon would follow his commands. An example was the Red Battalions, who, promised better labor legislation and the creation of national unions, fought the Villistas in El Ebano, the Zapatistas in Jalapa and Orizaba, and joined Obregón's troops in El Bajío. In October 1915, a radically different panorama from the one seen in December 1914 emerged: defeated Villistas, isolated Zapatistas, and strengthened Constitutionalists with full legal powers under the leadership of Carranza, who then went on a six-month political tour of the country, returning to Mexico City to give it back its status of political capital. A new stage in the history of Mexico had begun.

On August 14, 1914, under the Treaties of Teoloyucan, Mexico City fell under the control of the Constitutionalist forces. Early on, however, differences between the leaders arose, centered on the provisional presidency and the future of the leadership of the Constitutionalist troops. The Treaties of Teoloyucan called for the organization of a national junta, and this implied the hard work of achieving conciliation and planning a national convention where fundamental decisions regarding the political future of the country would be made. Carranza's conception materialized in the first convention that took place on October 1, 1914; the conference was unrepresentative, for it included only the Revolutionary leaders, and not the Zapatistas or representatives of other social groups. By contrast, in the Sovereign Revolutionary Convention of Aguascalientes, which took place from October 10 to November 13 of the same year, all movements, ideas, and philosophies of all national and provincial groups and social classes were well represented. The convention's early calls for unity soon gave way to an irreconcilable split between the Carrancista (whose spokesman there was Obregón) and the more radical factions of Villa and Zapata. Ultimately, the Carrancistas lost control of the proceedings, and Eulalio Gutiérrez was chosen as provisional president, an office Carranza himself assumed he would possess. When news of the events reached him, Carranza withdrew his forces from Mexico City and set up a separate Constitutional government in Veracruz. The convention then followed an erratic course as a result of additional schisms; it moved to Mexico City ( January 1915), Cuernavaca (February), back to Mexico City (July), Toluca (August), and finally back to Cuernavaca (October). As the months passed, the convention gradually was dominated first by Villa's forces, and eventually by Zapata's, so that toward the end the convention lost the original popular representation it had possessed, a fact mirrored by the irrepressible advance of the Constitutionalists throughout the country. custom essays done from scratch by professional essay writers. Get Custom essay service of high quality right now! The triumph of the Revolution's bourgeois wing over the popular armies showed the difficulties of transferring the Revolutionary power as embodied in the convention to effective political power; these difficulties were symbolized by the failure of Villa and Zapata to assume legal executive powers after their triumphant entry into Mexico City in December 1914. Before Villa and Zapata eventually abandoned the capital and retreated to their respective areas of influence, Villa expressed the problem very clearly when, inside the executive office in the National Palace and alternately sharing the presidential chair with Zapata, he exclaimed, "This chair is too big for us."

U.S. president Wilson applied further pressure to the Huerta regime by ordering U.S. companies in Mexico to suspend fiscal payments to the government. He then offered financial support of Carranza, giving him cash in lieu of future taxes. On February 3, 1914, Wilson finally decreed the free flow of arms into Mexico, and the states of Sonora and the border city of Ciudad Juárez became supply centers for the Constitutionalist Army. Wilson found his pretext for military intervention after the brief detention of a U.S. officer and six sailors by a Huertista garrison during their defense of Tampico on April 9, 1914. The U.S. Navy lodged a strong protest and the Mexican commander apologized, ordering the arrest of the unfortunate officer. But the U.S. State Department claimed that the whaleboat from which the shore party had arrived flew a U.S. flag. Wilson demanded that the flag be hoisted above the shoreline with the Mexicans obliged to fire a 21gun salute to it. Well prepared essays: get help with essay services by experienced essay writers. Excellent service online! When Huerta refused to submit to all these demands, Wilson obtained congressional approval to intervene in Mexico. The landing at Veracruz took place on April 21, 1914, and involved 2,000 soldiers supported by 65 ships with almost 30,000 marines on board, and it fully achieved the objective of provoking and dispersing Huerta's troops that until then had been confronting the simultaneous advance of the Villistas and Constitutionalists toward Mexico City. Huerta tried, unsuccessfully, to call for national unity to repeal the foreign invasion, but the armed struggle in the interior did not come to a halt; on the contrary, the Constitutionalists proclaimed themselves defenders of the national territory in case of a declaration of war. One of the main objectives of the U.S. invasion was the attempt to stop the advance of the peasant movement within Carranza's troops (the effects of which were being felt in the United States), rather than bring about the downfall of the Huerta regime. This motivation became evident when the marines did not abandon the country after Huerta left the presidency ( July 1914), but only four months later, on November 22, 1914, when a new stage of the Revolution had already begun, after Obregón's and Carranza's entry into Mexico City (August 15 and 20, respectively).

Huerta's regime soon abandoned its quest for legitimacy and applied dictatorial methods to remain in power, the culmination of a chain of events that included the military advance of the Constitutionalist and the Zapatista Armies, the Huerta regime's financial failure, its political isolation in the capital, and the continuing hostility of the U.S. government. Thus, starting in October 1913, Huerta's government changed in a radical way, starting with the assassinations of Chihuahua governor Abraham González, Representatives Edmundo Pastelín, Adolfo Gurrión, and Serapio Rendón, and Senator Belisario Dominguez. Research paper writing for college students. Order Free research paper by trained research paper writers at this site only! Huerta's new approach continued with the suspension of the legislative and judicial chambers and the introduction of forced conscription in order to augment the federal troops. Needless to say, the second Huerta period was characterized by rule with an iron hand. This sudden turn of events provoked discussion in the U.S. Congress of an armed intervention to protect U.S. interests and investments. The future of Mexican oil production and the imminent beginning of World War I were important factors in the implementation of this plan. While the plan was being discussed, an important event took place: Huerta, denied most external financing by the U.S. refusal to recognize him, sought help from Germany and England, and especially from Sir Weetman Pearson ( Lord Cowdray), founder of the nation's most important oil company, the Compañía Petrolera El Águila (which controlled more than half of Mexico's oil production), who negotiated a loan in England on behalf of the Mexican government, a fact that infuriated the White House. The U.S. president soon issued an ultimatum, declaring that the United States would not tolerate a European outpost in Mexico and would intervene militarily to stop it. England offered neutrality under the condition that the United States eliminate discriminatory tariffs directed against foreign vessels in the Panama Canal, which would allow the British to keep obtaining Mexican oil for the imminent conflagration. Ultimately, the British discovered that the Mexican oil was of too low a quality for their fleet.