Revolutions - 9.08- The Plan of San Luis

Episode Date: October 8, 2018

Francisco Madero had a plan, but it didn't really work.  Choose Your Own Adventure Game: Can You Save The Republic? Tour Dates! Oct 15 -- Toronto -- Ben McNally's Oct 16 -- NYC -- The Strand  Oct 17 -- Nashville -- Parnassus Books Oct 18 -- Atlanta -- The Carter Library (hosted by A Capella Books) Come! It's fun!  Sponsor: Casper.com/revolutions

And welcome to revolutions. Episode 9.8, the plan of San Luis. Last time, we talked about the little state of Morelos, which was destined to play a big part in the Mexican Revolution. Well, today, we are actually going to start that revolution. And to start that revolution, we must pick up where we left off two episodes back. The election of 1910 had seen reformist, anti-relectionist, and all-around goofy liberal idealist, Francisco Madero, barnstorm around the country speaking to ever larger and more enthusiastic crowds.

So rather than risk, even the slightest chance that Madero might win, the authorities carried out a mass belief sweep in June of 1910. Madero was tossed in prison, as were most of his friends and allies. Today, we will pick back up with Madero, as he makes the decision to not accept being a failed martyr for political reform, and instead become what he always said that he would not become. are revolutionary. After his arrest, Madero had spent about a week in jail in the city of San Luis Potosi. Once all the ballots had been cast or stuffed into the ballot box, whichever, Madero was released on bail, but he was forbidden to leave the city.

For the next two months, he followed the terms of his release. He kept his head down, he did not leave the city. But a conversation began inside Madero's entourage about what to do next. The problem, you see, was not necessarily the re-election of old Porfiro Dias. Everyone had long taken that as a foregone conclusion. It was instead the election of Ramon Corral as vice president that was the real center of the discussion. Now, I haven't gone into too much detail on Corral because he's not really that important, except for what he represented, which was the promise that the authoritarian politics and scientifico economics of the Perfariato were going to continue indefinitely.

There was no light at the end of the tunnel. Even when Diaz died, nothing was going to change. That's what Corral represented. Madero himself was concluding that they were going to have to fight fire with fire, and that if they gave up now, Mexico would never be free. So plans were laid to get Madero out of Mexico, and then to attempt to pull off something that had not been pulled off since 1876, revolutionary regime change.

Now, to say that staging a revolution was anathema to Madero's character, is an understatement. He was a liberal political reformer of the sort we've met over and over again here on the podcast. He had said over and over again in speeches over the course of his speaking tours that he was not a revolutionary, that his presidential campaign was not a revolution, that he was simply accepting the president's invitation to organize a democratic opposition, and this was all true. He was speaking from the heart. His constituency during the campaign had been those educated professional urban middle classes. They were not the illiterate peasants out in the field or rough mule drivers traversing the narrow goat paths of the Sierra Madre.

These guys wore shoes and suits. They read the latest in European literature and economics and philosophy. Most of them had probably never fired a gun in their lives. Now a few of them, of course, trended socialist and communist and anarchists, like the followers of the fabulous Flores Magone brothers, but that was the fringe wing that was kept in very loose and uncomfortable alliance with more respectable liberal maturistas during the campaign of the campaign of the 1910. And if you remember back to our episode on Mexican independence, Francisco Madero would have almost certainly been among those distressed and unnerved by the tsunami of social revolution that was summoned by Father Idago. Madero wanted broader democratic participation and something

resembling the rule of law. He did not want to turn the world upside down. Speaking of Mexican independence, some of you out there may have already noticed that we are fast approaching September 1910. September of 1910 will mark the 100th anniversary of the cry of Dolores. And after this unexpectedly rigorous challenge to his presidency, President Porfario Dias planned to pull out all the stops to celebrate this most auspicious of occasions, hopefully bathing his regime in patriotic enthusiasm and cementing a symbolic link between Dias and the glorious founding of Mexico. Now this was a gimmick. Dias had long, long played to his advantage. And I haven't mentioned this yet, but decades earlier, Dias had pulled

off a little switcheroo. We know that the cry of Dolores was on September the 16th, 1810, and it was celebrated on that day each year until Dias ascended to the presidency. But Don Porfirio's birthday was September the 15th, and so a few years into his reign, the official celebrations for independence were shifted back one day without further explanation. Henceforth, independence would be celebrated each year on September the 15th. This allowed the president and the country to celebrate their birthdays on the same day. And in 1910, that meant that Mexico's 100th birthday coincided with Diasa's 80th birthday. The celebrations were elaborate. There was a huge array of banquets and speeches, parades and ceremonies. Everyone was dressed to the nines with distinguished

dignitaries, both foreign and domestic, strutting about in their best tuxitos, or for Dias, extravagantly ornamented military uniforms. About two and a half weeks after these great festivities celebrating Mexican independence and the birthday of Don Porfirio, the National Congress met on October 5th to formally confirm the elections of Diaz and Corral to the presidency and vice presidency, respectively. This led to more speeches and parties and toasts.

And if you had simply been dropped into the middle of Mexico City at this point, it would be hard not to conclude that Mexico was happy, the president adored, and all future prospects bright. But the day after the victory of Diasan Corral was confirmed, and any last shred of hope that the specter of President Corral might be avoided, the Mataristas decided to take drastic action. On October 6th, 1910, Francisco Madero slipped out of San Luis Potosi, dressed as a laborer. He boarded a train heading north.

He crossed the border with the United States at Laredo on October the 7th, and there he was met by a small group of loyal supporters, most of whom had fled to the United States after the police sweeps that had nab Madero back in June. It was not a large group, and it looked a lot like a Madero family reunion. Remember, Francisco was the eldest of 15 children, and so this initial click of rebels, many of them were brothers and cousins or brothers-in-law. For the rest of October, this little group lived in San Antonio, Texas, and spent most of their time drafting a revolutionary call to arms.

This would be the basic statement of what their rebellion was about, and, at this early stage anyway, a sort of blueprint for how they wanted their friends, allies, and supporters throughout Mexico to carry out the revolution in their own cities and communities. Though it was not ready for publication until early November, for reasons of revolutionary propaganda, this revolutionary declaration, was dateline San Luis Potosi, October 5, 1910. This was the last day Madero had been on Mexican soil, and hence it became known to history as the plan of San Luis. The plan of San Luis declared that the election of 1910 was not legitimate. The officials elected, including President Diaz and Vice President Corral, were not recognized as legitimate.

Madero was to assume the title of provisional president until new elections, free and fair elections, could be held. Rather optimistically, those elections were to be called once the revolutionaries controlled at least half the states in Mexico. As provisional president, Madero also had the authority to appoint provisional governors at the Mexican states, and those provisional governors were in turn empowered to make political appointments and hold real, non-fraudulent elections. They were also empowered to review all laws and statutes and determine which were legitimate and which were unjust.

So on a political level, what Madero's revolution was aiming at was the total overturning of all office holders, a complete regeneration of leadership. Police chiefs, half-faced politicos, mayors, governors, all the way up to the top, the president and his ministers and all their advisors. The plan was to sweep them all out of power. Expecting resistance to this, of course, provisional president Madero also claimed the right to declare war on the usurper Dias, who, at least, according to the plan of San Luis, was now illegally occupying the presidential palace. But the plan also stated forcefully, both to the world and to their own supporters, that in waging this war, they were to maintain strict military discipline and follow all international conventions of warfare.

Those who broke the rules of war on either side would be tried by military courts. So, of course, given Madero's own preoccupations, the plan of San Luis focused almost entirely on political matters. but there was one brief section that would be of enormous importance, a section that said that all recent land acquisitions would also be reviewed, and those deemed fraudulent or unjust, would be nullified, and the land returned to their original owners. This section was thrown in, of course, to curry favor with the rural villagers,

and was never really the focus of Madero's political revolution, but it became very important down the road, and was practically the only part read by some of those who came to support Madero, for example, Emiliano Zapata down in Morelos. Now, the real final point of the plan of San Luis, though, was to announce to the world that a revolution was about to begin. And Madero wrote, fellow citizens, do not hesitate for a moment. Take up arms, throw the usurpers from power, recover your rights as free men, and remember

that our ancestors bequeath us a heritage of glory that we cannot tarnish. Be as they were, invincible in war, and magnanimous in victory. And then the time and date was announced for the beginning of the revolution, November the 20th, 1910 at precisely 6 p.m. While the plan of San Luis was being drafted, more concrete preparations were also being made. Funds at this point were limited, but the Mataristas were not without means. The Maderos were, after all, crazy rich, and Francisco himself controlled considerable wealth. His supporters had managed to arrange for some of that wealth to be made available, but their supply of cash would not be inexhaustible.

Now that Madero and company were fugitives, assets would be seized and access to property in Mexico would be severely curtailed. But they did arrange for the purchase of guns and other weapons. They were able to pay for organizing logistics, and then of course print and distribute the plan of San Luis. Now, given the nature of the coalition that had propelled Madero's presidential campaign, it should come as no surprise that he planned to focus his revolutionary uprising in the cities of Mexico. That is where Madero's strongest partisans were. So the Mataristas in San Antonio started sending men back to Mexico to the various Mexican cities to distribute the plan, discreetly, of course, raise, volunteers, and supporters, and make ready for the November 20th

uprising. Madero also went so far as to appoint provisional governors to states expected to fall early in the revolution, most critically naming Abraham Gonzalez, provisional governor of Chihuahua, and we'll talk more about Gonzalez here in a second. They also sent men, at first two of Madero's brothers, to Washington, D.C. to begin what they hoped would be back-channel talks with the State Department, with an eye on being granted legitimate, belligerent status in the coming civil war. So the plan was to rise up, turn out all the old officials, and replace them with Madero men. Then, after capturing, oh, let's say, a half dozen at least of the principal regional capitals of Mexico, they would hopefully have devastated the legitimacy of President

Dias and lead other cities to join the revolution. The whole thing should be over by about Christmas. Now, through October, everything looked like it was going pretty well, and revolutionary expectations were high. Those expectations were raised even higher in early November, after a Mexican man was lynched in Rock Springs, Texas. The lynching was a scandal in Mexico, and it set off a wave of ostensibly anti-American protests in the second week of November 1910. American property was targeted, vandalized, and destroyed. Demonstrators paraded through the streets. Some rocks got thrown.

There were some mild rioting. All of it, as Madero and his friends noted with satisfaction, was centered in the cities, and it was being led by the students and artisans and middle classes who Madero planned to count on for his revolution. It was also noted with even more satisfaction that though the demonstrations were officially anti-American, a lot of the noise in the street was seamlessly turning into denunciations of President Diaz. So this lulled Madero and his friends into thinking that their strategy was sound and his people were ready. But there was a downside to these street demonstrations erupting just by, before the real revolution was set to begin.

Within a few days, no more than a week or so, the authorities had the situation back in hand. And as they cracked down and restored order, they wound up arresting men and raiding houses that were up to their eyeballs in the Matarista Revolutionary Conspiracy. The police soon had their hands on copies of the Plan of San Luis, which explicitly pinpointed the date of a planned rebellion. They also uncovered correspondence and interrogated witnesses that led to further suspects being identified and detained. So by the third week of November,

the authorities practically knew as much about the state of the revolutionary conspiracy as Madero did up in San Antonio. By November the 16th and 17th and 18th, many of Madero's agents either found themselves arrested and tossed in jail or on the run, their plans in shambles. The first shots of the Mexican Revolution were fired on November the 18th, 1910 in the city of Puebla. A reliably liberal friend and supporter of Madero named Achilles Sardin had been tasked with organizing

the revolution in Puebla and was actually pretty successful. He had about 400 men signed up and ready to go with a cache of arms that they would be able to fight with. But just days before the revolution was to begin, the police sweeps began in earnest, and Sardin was tipped off that on November the 18th the police would raid his house. And when they did, they would find a whole lot of guns incriminating. documents and piles of the plan of San Luis. With very little time to act, Sardin concluded that there was no good way to move everything out of the house and he wasn't just going to run away. Instead, he and a small group of hardcore partisans would stand their ground. So when the police

showed up and forced on November the 18th to raid the house, they were met by a halo gunfire. A fighting standoff ensued with the two sides trading sometimes heavy fire over the next couple of hours. Scores of men wound up wounded or dead, including the police chief of Puebla, who by all accounts was one of the most hated men in the city. But the police outnumbered Sardin and his men, and they were taken out one by one, and eventually the rebels were forced to surrender. Sardin was arrested and executed. This shocking outbreak of rebellious violence only intensified a nationwide crackdown, and the few Madero operatives still out there trying to organize were arrested or forced to abandon their plans.

When November the 20th came along, the revolution was going to be proclaimed, but it did not appear there were going to be many revolutionaries around to fight it. Madero's own adventures in the lead-up to November the 20th only seemed to cement further the idea that this whole project was about to go down in history as a giant spectacular failure. On that same November the 18th, Madero departed San Antonio with a small entourage.

They were to head south, cross the border back into Mexico, and meet up with a company of armed rebels that were expected to be at least a couple of hundred strong. Once this little army had gotten together, they would all ride for Ciudad Porfirio Diaz, a border city right across the Mexican-American line from Eagle Pass, Texas. What is today, and I should mention was before Diaz came along and renamed it, the city of Pietras Negress. A Ciudad Porfrio Diaz was targeted for both strategic and symbolic reasons. strategically, it was going to be important to control a city on the Mexican-American border

to ensure continued access to supplies and weapons purchased in the United States. But symbolically, I mean, seized control of Ciudad Porfirio-Diaz and making it the de facto rebel capital, I mean, that is some A-plus revolutionary trolling. But instead, Madero's party crossed the border and got lost in the dark. They seriously just wandered around blindly until morning came. But when the sun rose, they finally made contact with the men they were trying to meet up with, led by one of Madero's uncles, and Madero discovered to his gut-wrenching horror that his uncle had with him exactly ten men. Yes, ten men. Not only that, it turned out the guns they had paid for had never been delivered. By now, Madero and company were also getting reports that fighting had occurred down in Puebla and that Sardin had been killed. Reality crashed down hard on Madero as he said. stood out there in the desert. This revolution was not going to happen. At least not today. So, the party crossed back into the United States. Tails tucked firmly between their legs.

But we would not be here today if that was the end of it. And there was hope yet. Madero's bacon is about to be saved by a revolutionary uprising in the north of Mexico that he basically had nothing to do with. He was not the mastermind of the uprising, nor were any of its leaders, quote-unquote, mataristas, in any meaningful sense. And it's really quite a funny little historical twist, because if you didn't know all the details, one might infer that what happened over the winter of 1910, 1911 had been the plan all along, because though the urban uprisings were a total bust. Out in the hinterlands, the hill country, and mountains of northern Mexico, in the states of Chihuahua, Durango, and Quaweila, rebellions did break out on November

the 20th, and large rebel bands started growing into small rebel armies, and they started actually taking control of territory. And given the fact that this is all happening in Madero's own backyard, where his family had owned property for decades, it looks like this is the plan, launch a revolution from rural northern Mexico. But it really was not. Madero was as shocked as anyone that his fortunes now rested in the hands of a bunch of ruffians in the high Sierra country. These newly minted rebels were most successful in the state of Chihuahua, under the broad umbrella of the man Madero had appointed provisional governor, Abraham Gonzalez. Gonzalez was about 10 years older than Francisco Madero, and the two men shared a lot in common.

where the Medeiros were one of the richest families in Kuala, the Gonzalez's were one of the richest families in Chihuahua. Like any good rich boy, Gonzalez was educated abroad. He graduated from Notre Dame, and then he returned to join the family business. Gonzalez, however, had more ambitions than simply being the steward of his family's profitable estates. But like the Madero's, the Gonzalez's were outside the political circles of their state. Chihuahua was dominated by the Teresa's and Creel families. So Abraham Gonzalez wanted to run for office and be a political player, but all his ambitions were frustrated. So it's natural that when the Creelman interview came out, Gonzalez gravitated to the anti-relectionist reform program of his fellow northern countryman Francisco Madero. Gonzalez became head of the anti-relectionist party in Chihuahua and became one of Madero's staunchest supporters.

And when Madero went into rebellion, Abraham Gonzalez was amongst those he was counting on. and Madero, very astutely, appointed Abraham Gonzalez provisional governor of Chihuahua. Now, Gonzalez was, of course, a key player in the early revolution in his own right. He was an inner circle materista, but his greatest contribution to the cause was in the realm of recruitment. Gonzalez was very plugged into his state, and he knew which men he ought to try to bring over to the revolutionary cause, what he needed to say to convince those men to join. Now, his most famous recruit, we will talk all about next week when we introduce Jose Doroteo Arango Arambula, who I promise you've all heard of, even if you don't know it yet. But in these critical early weeks and months, there was an even more important man Gonzales won over to the rebel cause.

And that was Pasquale Orozco. Pasquois Orozco was not yet 30 years old in the fall of 1910. He was tall, thin, and strong, with a reputation for being serious to the point of taciturn, but he was also known to be honest in all his dealings. He was born and raised in the rural country to the west of Chihuahua City, and though his father was a shopkeeper who had once attempted to run for a local office, Orozco was only semi-literate and spent most of his time on horseback. On the eve of the revolution, he was making a decent living as a mule tear,

carrying freight through the rough mountainous country around the Sierra Madre Mountains. Like any self-respecting rural cowboy type, Orozco didn't like the government very much, but that was mostly just a matter of natural disposition. It's not like he was fanatically anti-Diaz. Politics in Mexico City was simply far too remote to get worked up about. But what did get him worked up was the state government, which was controlled by the Tarasas and Creel families. Orozco resented having to compete for business with locally approved bosses who got all the best contracts. So when Abraham Gonzalez came around to talk to Orozco about joining the revolution, Orozco made it pretty plain that he didn't care much about Madero one way or the other,

but he would fight to overthrow the local bosses for sure, which was fine by Gonzalez, who was under no illusions that like ideological purity or national ambitions were prerequisites for pointing a gun at the right people. Now, the basic outline of Orozco's story was pretty similar to that of hundreds and then thousands of other men and women in the northern reaches of Mexico who joined the revolution. They cared very little about national politics or high ideals of democratic reform. Most joined for personal and local reasons. Sometimes they wanted a job.

Sometimes they had a personal vendetta. Some saw an opportunity to cloak previous nefarious activities under a more legitimate political banner. Orozco was an honest man, but plenty of the initial recruits into the revolution were transitioning seamlessly from careers in banditry, smuggling, and literal highway robbery. But whoever they were, and why ever they joined, it was a huge surprise to the Matarista sitting tails tucked between their legs up in the United States that organized rebel bands begin to grow and spread. Most especially, these rebel bands spread in the rough terrain of the Sierra Madre and other mountainous, hard-to-reach and hard-to-control areas, a few hundred here, than a couple of thousand over there.

The bulk of these rebels were white or mestizo, and they came from the small towns in Asienas. They were ranchers, farmers, shepherds, mouletiers, guys with no fixed employment at all. Most of them were young and unmarried. And most importantly, they were not the guys who had driven Madero's presidential campaign. Those were the educated liberal middle classes. They, as it turned out, were not cut out to be revolutionaries. So it was left to the ruffians to take over. So over December, and then into the new year, small, mostly self-organized rebel army started

attacking and taking over territory in northern Mexico. Pasquale Orozco proved to be a natural leader, and even though he had no military experience at all, proved to be one of the revolution's most effective tacticians. He certainly knew the country like the back of his hand. And the response to this growing rebel menace by the local federal troops was badly organized. It was sluggish, and it lacked energy. The rank and file of the Federal Army were all conscripts. And as I mentioned briefly last time, conscription into the Army was a form of punishment.

So it's not like these guys made the best soldiers. Desertion rates were high. Morale was low. Officers also had a hard time coordinating with each other. Because thanks to Dias's military reforms, all field reports had to be sent off to Mexico City and all orders had to originate from Mexico City. Now, this was done on purpose so that local regional commanders couldn't rise up in rebellion against Dias, but now that the federal army had to actually fight a grassroots revolution, they were finding it difficult to respond. With the rebels easily leading federal columns into ambushes and traps up in the mountains,

while the cities and rail lines at the valleys and plateaus were exposed, the decision was made by the end of the year to just pull the federal troops out of the mountains altogether and concentrate on garrisoning the main cities and protecting the railroads. When the federal troops pulled out, rebel leaders were able to move in and take over, and when they did, they mostly followed the plan of San Luis. They drove out police chiefs and mayors and Hefe's Politico's and appointed their own men, and they would often also destroy old police records and tax records and throw open the local jails. But this was not total lawlessness, where a quote-unquote rebel government was established, they usually took pains to keep the peace and punish banditry, looting,

and other excesses. This led to plenty of intra-rebel conflicts, but in the main, it was impressed upon those fighting under the plan of San Luis that this was about more than just taking vengeance or stealing some spoils of war. That's not to say vengeance was not taken. Asciendas were attacked and looted, and specific managers were targeted, and many wound up dead as old scores were settled. But there was no widespread, chaotic, indiscriminate rebel terror. In plenty of rebel-held territories, mining, logging, and assyenda operators continued on as if nothing had ever happened. They simply slipped their bribes and kickbacks to the rebel authorities to make sure their operations were not messed with. It's not like the revolution couldn't use the money.

While the rebels were enjoying the success, President Diaz and his ministers remained quite confident that this was all going to peter out. eventually. They had successfully broken Madero's original conspiratorial rings. The cities were peaceful and under control. The jails were stuffed with prisoners. So the regime believed, not unreasonably, that they had stopped the revolution before it even began. The reports coming in from the north were obviously just about some opportunistic bandits and desperadoes. Even the fact that the rebels now controlled some territory was much ado about nothing. Dias himself, who had, after all, made his bones as a rebel general, said in effect, well, of course they're doing well in the mountains. That's just the terrain. Let's see how they do if they ever come down out of the hills.

Dias also had reports from spies in the United States that Madera was broke and bouncing around miserably. Newspapers daily reported that the rebellion was sure to be over any day now, and life would simply return to normal. Now, none of this was really bad analysis. It just turned out to be really super not true. The state of Madero and his entourage, though, did seem to prove that this was going to peter out sooner rather than later. After returning to the United States, Madero had gone over to New Orleans, where he spent most of December attempting to get a plan off the ground where he would return to Mexico by ship and land in one of those coastal cities that had been so supportive of him during the campaign of 1910. But by now, he was very low on money and could logistically not make this plan work either with the help of friends in the United States or Mexico. Mexico. Madero was basically broke, and stories were going around that he was reduced to eating

just one meal a day. So by the end of December, Madero was back in San Antonio, though only for a few days. Regime spies were onto him, and so he slipped north to Dallas, where he was forced to stay incognito with some friends. But one thing Madero had going for him was that the American authorities were not making any move to arrest him or hinder his activities at all. Dias, of course, protested enraged for the Americans to do something about Madero. But the American government declined. They couldn't arrest Madero for saying mean things about Dias. The First Amendment is a thing, you know. They also couldn't arrest him for buying guns. Buying guns was perfectly legal. So as Madero bounced around from San Antonio to New Orleans to Dallas, he was never arrested.

He was never even picked up and brought in for questioning. Now, some have taken this to the further conclusion that the Americans were actually in favor of Madero's revolution, that all the recent anti-American pro-European policies that were pursued by President Diaz and Finance Minister Liemintur, the nationalization of the railroads, favoring British oil companies over Standard Oil and Texaco, meant that business and government officials had grown tired of Diaz and were happy to help Madero put the old man on a boat to France. This all probably goes too far, though. Certainly, there were opportunists in the United States happy to try to help Madero win his revolution. But in terms of broad institutional support, there's just not that much there.

The Matarista request to get recognized belligerent status went literally unanswered by the State Department. The Matarista approached banks in New York about getting loans. They received none. But all that said, this sort of, hey, what can we do about it? Policy of the Taft administration is a bit of a tell that they weren't totally opposed to the pressure Manero was putting on Diaz. You can contrast the American treatment of the Flores Magone brothers. Those guys were left-wing anarchists who threatened not just Diaz, but the American way of life. So they were hounded and followed, and eventually arrested and tossed into jail for violating neutrality laws. Sure, they were printing inflammatory revolutionary newspapers and buying weapons to ship to Mexico, but so is Francisco

Madero, and everybody knew it. Madero was guilty of violating neutrality laws. He was using the United States as a base to organize a rebellion against a recognized friendly government. But at least initially, the Americans just let him do his thing. So you kind of get the feeling that somebody was whispering to someone that maybe we should just wait to see how this all plays out. But the American ability to keep up this pretence of, ah, what can we do? Began to slip away as the rebellion in northern Mexico did not peter out. After the new year, President Diaz bowed a little to this reality by a

attempting to use one of his oldest tactics, replaced unpopular local and state officials with more popular men. This had worked in the past and was simply a continuation of long-standing Porfarian policy to emphasize compromise in negotiation rather than confrontation. But it was too late for that. The changes in the statehouse were dismissed as mere cosmetic fixes. And so a stalemate settled in the north. Rebels held territory in the mountains, but the regime still controlled the plains and the valleys and all the major cities. This stalemate held into early February 1911, when it became clear that if the revolution was going to continue, that the rebels would have to do more than simply hold what the

federal army had conceded. They were going to have to go take something by force and then hold it against the will of the regime, to prove what the plan of San Luis said, that Madero was the legitimate president of Mexico, not Diaz. But as luck would have it for me. Pascual Orozco was leading a couple of thousands of men towards Juarez, which was only garrisoned by a few hundred federal troops. If Orozco could take Juarez, then Madero could reenter Mexico in triumph and really get the revolution moving. Three months later than originally planned, but still, things would be back on track. But the gods continued to conspire against Francisco Madero. Just before Orozco launched his attack, a regiment of federal troops,

arrived in Juarez to reinforce the city just in the nick of time. So despite fierce fighting around Juarez on February 4th and 5th, 1911, Orozco and his rebels were forced to retreat, mostly in the face of superior artillery. Up in Texas, Madero had been waiting anxiously for news of a victory so he could come home and was instead told the attack had failed. And now there was a bit of grumbling that the supposed leader of this revolution was sitting on the other side of the border, not participating at all. He wasn't leading anything.

If he wasn't careful, Madero was going to find himself abandoned by the revolution he himself had started. So it was agreed that, despite the defeat at Juarez, that Madero would still return to Mexico, not to be welcomed with open arms after a great victory, but instead to be the leader who delivered that great victory. So it was decided Madero would return to Mexico. It helped that the American authorities finally decided to issue an arrest warrant for Madero for violating neutrality laws. And on February the 14th, 1911, Francisco Madero crossed the border east of El Paso.

And next week, despite all that had happened, we will see Francisco Madero turn from failed revolutionary into successful revolutionary, an old Don Porfiro put on a boat to France. Now, before we go, I do need to remind you that the... The storm before the storm comes out in paperback on October the 16th, 2018, and I will soon be on tour. Very soon. I will be getting on an airplane back to North America one week after this episode publishes. I will be in Toronto on October the 15th at Ben McNally's. October the 16th in New York City at the Strand.

October the 17th in Nashville at Parnassas Books. And then finally, October the 18th in Atlanta at an event at the Carter Center hosted by Acapel. of books. I also got together with my marketing department, and to help promote the book online and in social media, I have mapped out and written a Choose Your Own Adventure game called Can You Save the Roman Republic? The idea is that you will start where the Romans found themselves in the second century BC and see if you can make a series of decisions that will prevent the collapse of the Republic. Do you want to propose land reform, offer citizenship to the Italians, start a war with some foreign power or just crack down on the whiny plebs, you can choose your own

adventure. Now, I promise you that though the game is practically impossible to win, I mean, saving the Roman Republic is a tall order, my friends, it is actually possible. It is literally possible to save the Republic, at least in terms of the game. So there are links to can you save the Roman Republic up at Revolutionspodcast.com, and I'll be sharing it around on Twitter. So please have fun with it. Probably you're going to fail and wind up dead or an exile. So at least on that score, it is a very realistic simulation.