Revolutions - 9.13- The Plan of Ayala

Episode Date: November 12, 2018

After becoming President, Madero decided to alienate his old friends. 

Hello, and welcome to revolutions. Episode 9.13, The Plan of Ayala. We begin this week back in Morelos, to expand on the story we started last week about the many rebellions Francisco Madero faced when he finally became president of Mexico on November 6th, 1911. The most persistent of these rebellions was in Morelos, and it was now being led by Emiliano Zapata. And though Madero himself, and every historian sense, correctly laid the blame for this continued rebellion in Morelos on the reactionary army officers like General Werta, who seemed to be pursuing their own agendas, it's also clear that President Madero bungled bringing Sapata in from the cold now that he finally had executive authority. A similar story was playing out in the north, where Madero also badly bungled his relationship with Pasquo Orozco. And so, as we saw last week, drove the most effective Matarista general of them all back into rebellion. For some reason, Madero's indomitable faith was now being placed not with his old friends, but with his old enemies.

It was a huge reason Mexico refused to stabilize in 1912, and it was a huge reason Madero's life is a tragedy rather than a triumph. So to jump back into Morelos, remember that in the period in 1911 when Madero was not quite yet president, the federal troops led by General Victoriano Huerta were aggressively hounding the Morelos revolutionaries until they were forced. forced back into, well, revolution. Despite Madero and Sepata coming to an agreement, and Sapata demobilizing his forces, mostly, Werta aggressively advanced anyway, and Sepata was forced to flee with a small entourage into the mountainous borderlands. From this new headquarters, Zapata restarted his revolutionary movement.

Now, aside from Werta's conduct, one of Sapata's main beefs was that in October of 1911, the governorship of Morelos was handed to Ambrosio Figurio, Figuerocius. The ambitious Figueroa brothers had already tried to kill Sepata a couple of times now, and they continued to treat Morelos as something of a family colony. Their first acquisition in what they figured would be a triumphant post-revolutionary career running South Central Mexico, and then, hopefully, all of Mexico. They had cut deals with the powerful Oscendados to protect their interests, and they were in satisfactory alliance, if not outright agreement with General Werta. And combined, The Figueroa's authority over the local police, combined with General Huerta's authority over the federal army troops, created a powerful anti-Zapatista coalition.

So by the time the election came around in October of 1911, it looked like Zapata and his few remaining allies were boxed in and had nowhere to go. But remember our old Revolution's podcast adage, that yesterday's civilian becomes tomorrow's insurgent, thanks to today's atrocity. And this is Morelos in a nutshell. General Werta continued to rampage around trying to capture Zapata and break the last vestiges of rebellion, and instead he breathed new life into that rebellion. And Sapata himself was not feeling boxed in at all. In fact, he was playing a little bit of calculated ropa dope. He and his still fairly small crew backed away and retreated as Werta continued to come after them.

They moved southeast, they crossed the state lines and were now in the neighboring state of Puebla. Werta, sensing blood in the water kept charging. Apparently never considering that he was not chasing prey so much as being lured into a trap. And once Wirta crossed the state border, Sapata and his men executed a perfect end run. With guides familiar with every nook and trail in the region, Sapata and his more than expert fellow revolutionary horsemen rode more than 200 miles through basically goat trails until they reappeared suddenly deep inside of Morelos, not far from Kwautla and way, way in Werta's rear.

and they did not stop there. Zapata and his men continued to push north, and unlike Bernardo Reyes, whose ill-fated rebellion we talked about last week, as Zapata and his men wrote, they gained new recruits. From a small ban of maybe a couple of dozen, they were soon back up to 1500.

By the last week of October, just after Madero won his election, but just before he was inaugurated, Sapanta and his army were camped in villages less than 20 miles from Mexico City. This was a huge, personal embarrassment for General Werta, who just a week or two earlier, had been sending confident messages that Morelos was totally pacified. For his failure to actually totally

pacify Morelos, General Huerta was stripped of his command and replaced. And that, my friends, is the last time we will meet General Werta. I'm just kidding. That's ironic foreshadowing. Now, really, after Madero became president, that should have been the end of the rebellion in Morelos. Even Madero, him himself believed that now that the election was over, that the rebellion would also be over. He had, after all, engaged in personal negotiations with Sepata for months and only been foiled by the fact that because he wasn't president yet, he wasn't able to force the settlement that he himself had agreed to. And Madero said as much after the election. In response to the Zapatista

as being so close to the capital at the end of October, Madero issued a long statement that said, in effect, this is no big deal. I'm about to be sworn in as president, and there won't be any reason for them to be in rebellion anymore. And that all seemed true. On November 1st, Governor Figueroa, almost certainly in consultation with Madero, issued blanket pardons to all rebels who handed in their guns within two weeks. Then a few days later, Madero was sworn into office, and he immediately sent a trusted agent up to Ayala to negotiate with Sapata directly. These face-to-face talks with Sapata only seemed to confirm the goodwill and understanding from the previous summer remained in place. The deal struck by Madero's agent was that the federal troops would evacuate Marilos. Agrarian reform,

if not outright agrarian justice, would get rolling. The Figueroa faction, who had just tried to take over Marelos, would be removed, and Zapata-approved native sons would take over the state government. And then finally, the last six months of violent insurrection by the Zapatistas would also be reclassified as a legitimate protest to an illegitimate regime. Okay, so far so good. But as But as these talks were going on, the new general of the thousand-man federal column, whose name I won't trouble you with, decided on his own initiative to make sure Sapata did not get up to any funny business. He advanced his troops on Ayala and commenced a wide encirclement. Sepata instantly detected treachery. Now, Madero's agent swore that this was all a misunderstanding and he tried to race back to Mexico City for further assurances from the president, but even he was now blocked from leaving Ayala. It was not until the next day he was able to slip through the federal lines and get back to talk to Madero to confirm that this was not some kind of trap. But President Madero now adopted a very different tone. Apparently he was becoming acutely aware of the responsibilities and weight of his

new office, and Madero had decided that time had come to be authoritative, if not authoritarian. His only official response to Sepata was that Sapata needed to surrender unconditionally. Only then could Madero, now as president of Mexico, pardoned Zapata and begin talks. Admission of subservience to the official sovereign government had to precede everything. Now, in a vacuum, this is an understandable position to take, but in the actual circumstances, this is a very weird hill to die on. Madero is insisting on an abstract principle, but doing nothing to address concrete reality. And even when his agent got back, the agent was not allowed to pass through the lines again,

so Sapata only got this official notice. If there were auxiliary verbal assurances, the president meant to pass along to Sapata, they never got through. So when Sapata surveyed the federal troops surrounding him while reading Madero's note that he expected nothing less than unconditional surrender, the reality of treachery and betrayal set in. Madero was the one man Sapata had decided he could trust, and now he was being knifed in the back. So Sapata broke off negotiations and once again slipped out of town with his closest allies.

They headed south, back up into the mountains. A few weeks later, Sepata issued what has become one of the most famous revolutionary proclamations of them all, the plan of Ayala. If the plan of San Luis was a stirring call for political revolution, the plan of Ayala was a stirring call for social revolution. signed and promulgated on November the 28th, 1911, it was about to become the sacred text of the agrarian revolutionaries and would continue to be a sacred text of agrarian revolutionaries everywhere, right up to the present day. The planet of Iola came in 15 points.

The first and longest was a denunciation of Madero and his treacherous treatment of his old friends. It called for Mexicans everywhere to continue the revolution Madero had abandoned. And then it moved on to say that to lead this rebellion, the plan of Ayala specifically called on Pasquale Orozco. But if he declined, then Zapata would take overall command of a renewed national revolution. And what was the point of this revolution? Not mere political reform, but land and justice.

Points six, seven, and eight are the heart of the plan of Ayala, and so I'm just going to read them in full right now. Point six, as an additional part of the plan, we invoke, we give notice that regarding the fields, timber, and water which the landlords, Scientificos, or bosses have usurped, the Puebloes or citizens who have the titles corresponding to those properties will immediately enter into possession of that real estate of which they have been despoiled by the bad faith of our oppressors to maintain at any cost with arms in hand the mentioned possession. And the usurpers who consider themselves with a right to them will deduce it before the special tribunals which will be established on the triumph of the revolution.

Point seven, in virtue of the fact that the immense majority of Mexican pueblos and citizens are owners of no more than the land they walk on, suffering the horrors of poverty without being able to improve their social condition in any way or to dedicate themselves to industry or agriculture, because lands, timber, and water are monopolized in a few hands. For this cause, there will be expropriated the third part of those monopolies from the power powerful proprietors of them, with prior indemnization, in order that the pueblos and citizens of Mexico may obtain agitos, colonies, and foundations for pueblos, or fields for sewing or laboring, and the Mexican's lack of prosperity and well-being may improve in all and for all.

Point eight, regarding the landlords, Scientificos, or bosses who oppose the present plan directly or indirectly, their goods will be nationalized, and the two-thirds part which otherwise would belong to them, will go for indemnizations of war, pensions for widows and orphans of the victims who succumb in the struggle for the present plan. And the rest of the plan of IOLIT was mostly about how to arrange the government after revolutionary victory. But in total, the plan was an uncompromising statement of social revolution and is rightly famous as one of the most famous revolutionary proclamations of all time. Now, by this point, Madero was also digging his heels in and offering only half-hearted attempts at further negotiation. All he could now promise Sapata was safe passage to

exile if the rebel leader laid down his arms. Sapata did not even consider this, especially since just a few weeks earlier another independent rebel chief and neighboring Kuebla had accepted just such an offer, only to be shot, quote unquote, while trying to escape, which had a long and distinguished history in the Porfariato as a euphemism for summary execution. To gauge Sapata's new feelings about Madera, I will turn now to a long quote taken from an interview with some government commissioners that Zapata gave and is republished in John Womack's excellent biography of Zapata. Sapata said, I've been senior Madero's most faithful partisan.

I've given infinite proofs of it, but I'm not anymore. Madero has betrayed me as well as my army, the people of Morelos and the whole nation. Most of his original supporters are in jail or persecuted. Then he went on to say, nobody trusts him any longer because he's violated all his promises. He's the most fickle, vacill, vacillating man I've ever known. When the commissioners asked him what message he would like to give to the president,

Zapata said, tell him this for me, to take off for Havana, because if not, he can count the days as they go by, and in a month I'll be in Mexico City with 20,000 men and have the pleasure of going up to the presidential palace and dragging him out of there and hanging him from one of the highest trees in the park. So this is the permanent divorce between Zapata and Madero. Zapata, as we will see, can be frustratingly rigid and uncompromised, but Madero bungled this badly. He took the wrong approach.

He prioritized the wrong issues. He trusted the wrong people. Emiliano Zapata and then also Pasquale Orozco, were the two most formidable leaders of Madero's own revolution at the beginning of 1911, and he is now alienated them both. The situation in South Central Mexico over the winter of 1911, 1912, was precarious. Revoltz inspired by the plan of Ayala got going in Puebla, in Mexico State, in Guerrero, in Wajaka, and then of course in Marelos. And this was all very embarrassing for Madero, who, of course, is also dealing with all that other stuff we talked about last week. Things became unstable enough that Ambrosio Figueroa actually resigned as governor of Marelos in mid-January because things in his home state were falling upon. part and the Figueroas needed to re-concentrate on securing their home base.

In Morelos, though, there remained in the state about a thousand regular army troops, but there were also now upwards of 5,000 deputized rurales, federal police officers, tasked with maintaining order and hunting down rebels. But as is so often the case, these guys were confined to the towns and the cities and exerted almost no control whatsoever in the rural areas. But it's not like Zapato was king of the peasants now. The rebels he led were a highly decentralized group, and though this is right around the time that the word Zapatista is really starting to gain traction, it was still very much a loose alliance of independent leaders, each commanding a couple of hundred men, rather than some highly organized structure. Now, of these independent leaders, there is one I want to bring attention to, and that is Heneuvevo de la O.

De La O, and that's just the letter O, De La O, was born in 1876 in Morelos, so he's about the same age as Zapata, and also had only ever known life under the Porfariato. He came from a poorer share-cropping family, but also like Zapata, De La O had joined early in the defense of his village's rights and prerogatives against encroaching assyendas. He was well-known enough that when the plan of San Luis dropped in November of 1910, De Laos was a very good. early leader of a rebel group that was allied with the Ayalan faction. De Laot proved to be one of the most tenacious and aggressive of the rebels in Morelos. He conducted campaigns against federal forces that forced them to basically cede whatever territory he happened to be holding like, oh, don't even bother going over there. That's where De Laot is. He was amongst that small group ever ready to hop back into revolt. And after the plan of Ayala revolution began, De LaO

got even more ambitious and aggressive. Probably hoping to take advantage of government instability after the resignation of Governor Figueroa, De La O launched an offensive that aimed at capturing nothing less than the state capital of Kornavaca. For one solid week at the end of January and beginning of February 1912, De La O's little army kept up a constant attack that went on practically around the clock. But the rebels never managed to actually push their way into the city. Partly to end the fighting, but also partly to take vengeance on the rebels, Federal forces identified the nearby village of Santa Maria as De La O's principal base of operations,

and they sent up a column, and they burned the village to the ground. De La O was outraged by the destruction of this village, and then he found out that one of his young daughters had died in the fire. He was furious with grief that the Federals had so blatantly violated the rules of war. De La O kept up the fight for as long as he could, but finally a lack of ammunition forced him to pull back. The destruction of Santa Maria was the beginning of a new brutal phase in the conflict in Morelos, because right at this same moment, February of 1912, President Madero appointed a new general to take over the campaign. It was an infamous choice. General Juvencio Robles. Robles was old enough to have fought in the last stages of the patriotic war against the French way back in the 1860s.

But he had really learned his trade fighting the Yaqui tribes in Sonora when the federal government started surveying and selling off land that had been the Yaqui's since the beginning of time. The Yaqui had been in more or less permanent revolt ever since. And Robles embraced the more sadistic methods of suppression. Remember that during the Porfuriato, there was the old adage, right? Pan Opalo, bread or stick. Well, Robles was all stick and no bread. He arrived in Morelos in the first week of February 1912 and immediately started rounding up family members of the rebel chiefs.

For Sepata, that meant his sister, his mother-in-law, and two sisters-in-law. All of them were now hostages. Then, Robles ordered the executions of a bunch of captured peasant insurgents, not leaders, just villagers, the types who were usually amnestyed or pardoned. Not anymore. Robles' message was clear, if you get caught, I am going to kill you, not just your boss. And then he introduced a new tactic that had recently been pioneered by various imperial forces, in their colonial wars, the British in South Africa, the Americans in the Philippines, and the Spanish

in Cuba. And that was concentration camps. The idea was to take a village that seemed to be a hotbed of rebel activity. You would round up the inhabitants, relocate them into patrolled and possibly fenced camps near a larger city, and then destroy the village itself. Once you had concentrated all the civilians, at least allegedly, anytime you went on patrol, anyone you met could be treated as a combatant, and you could shoot them on site. Now, most of the villagers resettled in these concentration camps, though, were women, children and old folks, as the men of fighting age tended to flee up into the hills. So rather than cowing Morelos and beating its people into submission with these punitive and destructive tactics, the ranks of the Zapatistas actually swelled. Now, a lot of mataristas in

Morelos, that is, people still allied with the president, were very queasy about all of this, and they sent back messages to Mexico City saying, I don't think this is such a good idea, but Madero let it all go on, partly because he was more worried about the situation in the north, where Pasqual Orosco had finally decided to publicly break with his erstwhile chief in March of 1912. So, for the moment, we are going to leave Morelos and head back north. Okay, so as we established last week, Arosco's bitterness, combined with the overtures of anti-Modero elements in the north, like the Vasquez-Gomez brothers, and he went back into open revolt in the first week of March 1912. His first action, which served as his official notice that he was now back in revolt,

was chasing off a small army of 500 cavalry, led by Arosco's former lieutenant who did not follow him into rebellion, Poncho Villa. On March the 6th, Orozco then released a public statement denouncing Madero. But this declaration offered practically nothing in the way of a political or social platform. This is not the plan of Ayala. It was just a tax on Madero, mostly reminding everybody that Madero had abandoned the people who put him into power. The statement also made some pretty far out and, frankly, untrue accusations. Orozco claimed that Madero's revolution had all been organized and financed by the Americans, and that Madero was now planning to sell Mexico to the Yankees, which is like not even close to true.

He also made much of the fact that Gustavo Madero had submitted a bill to the government for 700,000 pesos to reimburse him for money he had ponied up for the Matarista revolution, while Gustavo was instantly reimbursed, while all other claims, IOUs and debts incurred by other rebel leaders on behalf of Madero still went unpaid. But that was about all Orozco had to justify going back into rebellion. Anger and resentment at the chief, which sure will move some people out there, but, but isn't exactly the stuff large-scale popular insurrections are made of. Folks are going to need a bit more than that. They're going to need land. They're going to need justice. They're going to need something.

But the real problem here is that the guys backing Orozco, the guys who had flattered him back into rebellion, were actually conservative Ossandados trying to undermine Madero's limited social and political reforms. Whether he knew it or whether he even cared, Orozco was now turning into a reactionary. But at least at first, things continued to go well for Orozco. By the time he sided with this new rebellion, they actually controlled most of Chihuahua, including its most important cities. They were not just confined to the rural hinterlands. And then Orozco won a grim personal victory. With civil war in the north finally erupting, the minister of war, guy named Jose Gonzalez-Salus,

resigned the cabinet and took back up his mantle as a brigadier general to lead the federal campaign. Gonzalez Salas was the guy who had gotten the minister of war job. Orozco believed should have been his. That was the beginning of the breach between him and Madero. So it was enormously satisfying for Orozco that in the first big battle at Rialmo on March the 23rd, Orozco and the rebels routed the federal troops. Gonzalez Salas was so ashamed of this defeat that he committed suicide two days later. And the suicide of solace was a tragic twist of fate.

needing an experienced officer to take over. Lots of conservative military voices in Mexico City urged President Madero to recall General Huerta. Madero, fatefully, agreed. Werto was recalled to service and put in charge of the Army of the North. Despite the rebels' ascendancy, though, or perhaps because of it, there was very little unity amongst its leadership. Supposedly, this rebellion was connected to the Vasquez-Gomez brothers, and officially at least rebel generals like Arosco were ready to recognize Emilio Vasquez Gomez as provisional president of Mexico. But these new rebels had even less of a connection to the Vasquez-Gomez brothers than they had

to Madero, and Arosco, for his part, never seemed to have had any intention whatsoever to ever to ever again, nor, frankly, should he have. Orozco had a name, a resume, and connections that made him the real leader of this rebellion. So, on May 5th, 1912, Emilio Vasquez Gomez reentered Juarez from his headquarters in Texas, and he was ready for everyone to proclaim him provisional president. Orozco told him to go back to Texas, and if he ever set foot in Mexico again, that he would be arrested and thrown in jail. Emilio looked around, sized up his chances, and he fled back to Texas. And that right there is the end of whatever Vasquista branding may have been attached to this rebellion. It is also the end of the Vasquez Gomez phase of our story.

Now, they would keep trying to organize themselves as the legitimate anti-Madero rebels, and Emilio would in fact be arrested in July for violating American neutrality laws, but they never really generated any support, and national events quickly rushed past them and left them in the dust. Both Francisco and Emilio Vasquez Gomez would remain in exile, only returning to Mexico later once the revolution was over. and though they did not fulfill their dreams of becoming presidents of Mexico, they did live long enough to die peacefully instead of violently, which is the fate of practically every other person

we are talking about in this series. The minute he took control of the rebellion, though, Orozco's fortunes changed. He was never going to be able to match what the federal government was now pouring into Chihuahua under General Huerta in terms of men and money and guns. And it did not help that plenty of old Matarista rebels, like Ponzias, Manchovia, we're like, no, man, it's fine. Give Madero a chance. And a lot of common people felt the same way. And they, in fact, signed up for federal service rather than rebel service. And Werta was far more effective up here than he had been in Morelos. At a second battle of Rayano on May

the 23rd, Orozco's forces were routed and scattered. So Werta's reputation is beginning to be rehabilitated. He's able to claim these victories and cover himself in some glory. But one dude who would not share in this glory was Poncho Villa. Everyone knew Poncho Villa was a talented officer, but also a dangerous and unpredictable man. So upon his arrival in the north, Huerta attempted to coax Villa into subservience by making him an honorary brigadier general. But Villa continued to mostly be his own man and just kind of do his own thing. He was a bandit turned officer who might switch sides at any moment. So, in June of 1912, Werta found out that Via had requisitioned a horse for himself from a local farmer,

which Werta seized on as the perfect excuse to get rid of Pancho Villa. Werta accused Via of outright theft, and a heated argument broke out between the two men that may or may not have ended with Via punching Werta. Accused now of theft and insubordination, Via was swiftly railroaded through a court-martial that ended up with a sentence of death. But it just so happened that a couple of Madero's brothers were in camp. They knew via very well from the good old days and were like, oh my God, geez, we can't let Werta kill him. He's good. So they sent frantic telegraphs to their brother to get a stay of execution, which they secured and then raced back to Huerta. This stay of execution literally came at the last minute.

There is in fact a famous photograph of via standing in front of the firing squad about to be shot. The execution was stayed, but Via was not set free. Instead, he was incarcerated, but it was while in prison that he first met one of Zapata's closest allies, learned about the plan of Iola, and got some further tutoring in reading, writing, and revolutionary politics. Back on the battlefields of Chihuahua, the summer of 1912 was just one disaster after another for Orozco. The federal forces advanced up from the south, and Orozco had to do. keep retreating north. Soon he was pinned against the border with the United States. Werta retook Chihuahua City on July the 8th, and then by mid-August, Juarez was captured.

Orozco was left with a very small force and practically no hope of winning. In early September 1912, he lost his last little base, and by now wounded, he fled across the border into the United States. His rebellion had turned out to be a complete failure, and he was now in exile. But unlike the Vasquez Gomez brothers, Orozco would be back. After a brief sojourn in Los Angeles, he will wind up making a very strange political bedfellow and returned to our story later, representing a very different part of the Mexican revolution. Meanwhile, back down in Morelos, General Robles was still pursuing his course of brutality.

But the rebels got a reprieve, because with so many resources now being directed to Chihuahua, Arobelus was forced to work with a limited budget and no real hope of being reinforced, at least not for the time being. The rebels, meanwhile, went into a holding pattern. With Orozco, in revolt, they believed it would only be a matter of time before Madera was overthrown, and then they could exert pressure on the new government, hopefully install a more revolutionary government. So though there's Apatistas attacked and raided around in the spring and summer of 1912, things were relatively quiet. The rebels, frankly, needed to conserve ammunition, and then when the rainy season came along, everyone had to return home to take care of the planting, which proceeded more or less normally,

because everyone in Morelos, whether a conservative or a radical, a peasant, or ascendado, needed the agricultural produce of Morelos to survive. And so as May turned to June 1912, things almost felt normal. Now, this gave the interim governor of Morelos a chance to start lobbying President Madero to ditch General Robles, who was doing far more harm than good. And with the state approaching something resembling peace, martial law was set aside, and the regular functioning of the Constitution was brought back. A bunch of reformist materista types, but not Zapatista types, were then elected into a brief legislative session in the summer of 1912 that got the ball rolling on many of the land

questions that needed to be answered. None of them had any interest in embracing the kind of large-scale redistribution the plan of Iowa called for, but they did introduce a new 10% tax on Asienas to raise the resources necessary to even to begin to start addressing the lines between Asianda and village. Now at the same time, a new governor's race also got going, and Patricio Leba threw his hat back into the ring. Leba, remember, had once enjoyed the support of all the political and social opposition in Morelos, but the family name had taken a major hit when they refused to pick up the revolutionary banner in 1910. But Labo was sympathetic to the plight of the villagers

and had at least two things going for him that most people seem to want. He was not just in the pocket of the assentados, and he was a native son of Morelos. With things continuing to trend towards reform and peace, Madero finally heeded the calls to replace General Robles, and he appointed a new, new general. This would be the fourth new general in less than a year, This guy's name is General Felipe Anjales.

Anjolice was as ambitious as any officer in the army, but he had a diametrically opposed worldview to men like Werta and Robles, who thought that the answer to social unrest was to beat that social unrest into the ground and then shoot it in the back of the head. Anhalis came to Morelos intending to strategically play good cop to Robles and Werta's bad cop. The first thing he did was free the various family members who had been taken hostage. he told them to go home and be at peace. Then he ended the cruel practice of the concentration camps.

He could not undo the damage that had been done, but he could prevent more damage from being done. Then he intentionally restricted the scope and movement of his troops. Where the standing assumption under General Robles was that everyone was a rebel and this was a war practically against the whole population of the state, Anhalis refused to allow firefighters or skirmishes to grow into larger affairs that would make no distinction between rebel and civilian. Basically, he wanted to reduce the violent footprint of the army.

And this seemed to work wonders. Both Zapata and De Laotle later commented that it was at this point, when summer turned to fall in 1912, that the plan of Ayala revolution looked most likely to fail. Men were less willing to return to the rebel camps from their villages. They got less active support from the villages. Then they found out that Orozco's rebellion in the, the North had completely failed. Had not larger national events overtaken them, it is very possible

that the Zapatistas would have dwindled away into nothing and been little more than a historical footnote. Now, speaking of historical footnotes, that's another A plus transition sentence from yours truly, there is one more little rebellion we need to talk about before we move on. A rebellion that will, like all the others, appear to fizzle away for a lack of real sustained support by the end of 1912. And this is the rebellion of General Felix Dias. Felix was the nephew of old Don Perfrio. A general in the Mexican army, Felix Dias had somehow been allowed to stay at his post in Veracruz after the revolution, which is like, I mean, Madero, come on, man, trust me.

It's okay to not have literal family members of your moral enemies running key military garrisons. You can fire some of these guys after you've won a revolution. but there Felix Diaz was still commanding the garrison in Veracruz. Having been in contact off and on with fellow officers like Werta and Bernardo Reyes, Diaz concluded that if he took the lead and led a rebellion, that most of the army would follow him. But he had even less of a platform to run on than Arosco and the Vasquez Gomez brothers did. Diaz was rising up merely in defense of Mexico's honor, which had been besmirched by the usurper Madero.

So Diaz led his men into revolt and took control of Veracruz in the second week of October 1912, and then he waited for the rest of the army to join him. But the rest of the army did not join him. D.S. had not planned this very carefully, and there had never been some organized conspiracy of officers ready to join him. He just sort of went out and did it. So without anyone joining him, Dias and his guy started looking around and saying, geez, this is not working out, especially because the Navy is also refusing to join us, and they have now instituted a blockade of Veracruz, and so we can't even

escape. With absolutely no hope of winning, Dias' isolated garrison put up no resistance when another army, one loyal to the Madero administration, came and retook the city over October the 22nd and October the 23rd. Dias himself was arrested, and in a lightning round of court-martial and sentencing that took just a matter of days, he was slated for execution along with 26th other officers on October the 26th. But in the same, he was slated for execution. But in the Inside society circles in Mexico City, the railroading of Felix to the firing squad was shocking, especially as Bernardo Reyes and a bunch of Orozco's generals just sort of sat in jail. So cooler heads prevailed, and Dias's sentence was reduced to imprisonment.

But as compassionate as all of this was, the stockades were now getting awfully full of men very hostile to Madero who hungered to overthrow the regime. And every once in a while, I think, you know, treason is treason. and you maybe need to kill a couple of these people so they don't come back. But still, we're now approaching the end of 1912, and despite dozens of violent eruptions and a couple of huge sustained revolts, Madero is still president, and none of these insurrections ever gained wider traction. Even the Zapatistas were at this moment struggling to sustain their revolution. So despite what the various rebel leaders wanted to believe, it turns out there was no real popular clamoring to overthrow Madero. The people of Mexico seemed willing to let Madero have his shot.

Certainly it is one thing to rebel against 30 years of authoritarian tyranny, but this was just a couple of months of a new democratic government. I mean, Menero had just been elected in a popular landslide, so you can't now come around and say, hey, let's rise up and rebel against him. Now, Madero is kind of a disaster of a politician, and a lot of the rebellions against him were frankly his own fault. A better leader could have easily kept. Arosco in the fold. A better leader would have had no trouble cutting a deal with Sapata to stand

down and then carry out some agrarian reforms to keep Zapata's finger away from the trigger. But even with Madero being this frustratingly obtuse in his dealings, the rebellions of Arosco and Zapata at that moment at the end of 1912 did not threaten his regime. What did threaten his regime, though, was the perception among a lot of people in the officer Corps and beyond that these revolts were proof Madero could not govern Mexico effectively. Men like Werta and Robles and Felix Dias and Bernardo Reyes fervently believed in the myth-making of the Porfriado that only a strong hand could control Mexico, that only through strong executive force would Mexico ever be stable. The officer corps of the army was staying loyal to

the Matarista government for the moment, but most of them were conservative holdovers from the previous regime. And it did not help matters that the American ambassador in Mexico City, Henry Lane Wilson, absolutely believed these same stories, and he breathlessly reported in dispatches to his bosses in Washington, D.C., and to the press. The President Madero was simply unable to deliver on the promise of stability. And without stability, there could be no progress. So much was order and progress assumed to be two sides of the same coin. So next week, Francisco Madero will finally face the truly fatal challenge to his regime.

It was not a popular uprising. It was a staged coup.