The Plan de San Diego: the border raids of 1915-1916;
storms brewed in other men's worlds, or a very local story:
the Laredo connection

By Robert Mendoza

Prologue
Exactly 88 years ago this June, the United States and Mexico careened onto the brink of war. Laredo (population 16,000) was inundated by more than 20,000 US Army and National Guard troops deployed to protect the border and to invade Mexico. Sinister agents of the German and Japanese empires plotted in downtown Laredo hotel rooms while fiery saboteurs terrorized the local population. A few miles south of the Río Grande, a Laredo-born Carranzista general prepared to invade the US, beginning with the city of Laredo. Laredo and the Río Grande Valley were forever transformed by the tumultuous events of 1915-1916, inspired by the notorious Plan de San Diego.

El respeto a lo ajeno es la paz.
--Benito Juarez

In ceremonies of the horseman
Even the pawn must hold a grudge.
--Bob Dylan

I don't recall exactly when I was first aware of the series of border raids associated with the Plan de San Diego. The 1915 Plan de San Diego was a modest proposal that Mexicanos, Negroes, American Indians, and Japanese take up arms to seize the territory stolen by the United States from Mexico. To secure this goal, all North American males over the age of 16 were to be exterminated.
More than likely, I learned about the Plan de San Diego in the pages of Aztlan during 1970 or 1971. Juan Gomez-Quiñones' article was more intent upon political rather than historical correctness, and it was fraught with the chicanismo vehemence so endemic to the times. Gomez' recommendation that community organizers had much to learn from the Plan (a racist screed that called for genocide) indicated that he was more focused on Texas Ranger harassment of farmworkers' unions in the late 1960s than on the appalling events of 1915-1916.
It was also during this period of the early 70s that I read Barbara Tuchman's The Zimmerman Telegram and related articles that detailed the role of Japanese and German secret agents in the Plan de San Diego activities along the border. However, at the time I was a graduate student in English, and I put off pursuing these tantalizing historical details.
Two decades later, I was simultaneously pursuing a graduate degree in Mexican history and sleuthing into the circumstances that had forced my father's family to precipitously flee Yucatan during the Revolution. The Plan de San Diego was drafted on January 6, 1915 by alleged Huertista sympathizers. Two days before that, on January 4, my grandfather, who held a colonel's commission signed by Victoriano Huerta, led a full-scale assault on the revolutionary government forces in Merida, Yucatan. Later that spring, after a Carranzista army forced him to abandon hope of separating Yucatan from Mexico, he was an exile improbably ensconced in the luxurious St. Charles Hotel in New Orleans. The summer of 1915 found him residing in Laredo's Grant Street, within sight of the Río Grande, just in time for the worst of the Plan de San Diego's raids.
Intrigued by these parallels, I began to tear into the many studies about the Plan de San Diego. This wasn't the last time that I suspected my grandfather of involvement in nefarious counter-revolutionary activities centered in Laredo. Later, after diligent procedurals, I could be only somewhat relieved that his "alibis" cleared him of involvement in the Felix Diaz and Lucio Blanco capers. I was in search of facts, even at the risk of airing defamatory dossiers, to fill the mysterious and tantalizing voids in the life of my grandfather, this enigmatic exile who died almost a decade before I was born. Above all, I had to know why this international man of mystery had settled in such a godforsaken hellhole as Laredo. Surely there must have been a desperate mission he had been compelled to accept.
My present compulsion to add to the voluminous and ever-growing scholarship dedicated to the Plan de San Diego can largely be explained by its kinship with the Catarino Garza War of 1891-94. My service in that conflict (see LareDOS, Nov. 2002 and Dec. 2002) brought me in contact with sources and references that I squirreled away for future use. Both cooks and writers relish the challenge to improvise with what's on the table, rather than replenish the larder. However, I managed to get out of the kitchen long enough to also read the dozen essential articles on the Plan de San Diego published since 1954, revise the larger revolutionary era in Knight, Meyer, and Katz, and squint at a kilometer of microfilmed primary sources. I noted (but studiously avoided) the deconstructionist obfuscations of "Border Studies" by good tenure hunters. My agenda was to find out what happened in 1915-16, and what I discovered led me to believe that the Plan de San Diego could have easily been designated the Plan de Laredo.

So Far from God, So Close
to the United States:
Seven Decades of Rage

While San Diego was (and remains) a bump on the road halfway between Corpus Christi and Laredo, Laredo was second only to San Antonio as a hotbed of conspiratorial activity during the 20 long years of the Mexican Revolution. The streets of Laredo pullulated with disgruntled refugees; most notably vengeful exiled generals and their staffs busy soliciting funds and recruiting counter-revolutionary troops. The counter-revolutionaries were in turn shadowed by US Bureau of Investigation (later, the FBI) agents intent on enforcing US neutrality laws. The (Revolutionary) Gobernacion ministry in Mexico City also hired private detectives to monitor conspiratorial activity in Laredo, often dispatching hit men to assassinate those who emerged as leaders. Opportunistic individuals of all stripes came to Laredo to sell arms, peddle influence, and promote investment schemes in the next regime's Mexico. Local merchants and forwarding agents made fortunes overnight by supplying foodstuffs, livestock, and military goods to all revolutionary factions. Laredo hardware stores advertised case lots of machine guns and they boasted of being able to fill ammunition orders by the wagonload.
In order to understand the appeal of the Plan de San Diego in the South Texas and Laredo of 88 years ago, it is necessary to go back even further to the middle of the 19th century. General Zachary Taylor's 1848 invasion of Mexico (which began at the Nueces River) resulted in the loss of one half of Mexico's territory to the United States. Henceforth, irredentist embers were never far from the surface in US-Mexican and Anglo-Mexicano relations.
The situation was exacerbated at century's end when a worldwide economic crisis, serial drought years, and falling livestock prices in Texas forced many Mexicano ranchers to sell their ancestral land holdings and leave South Texas. The new "Anglo" landowners (who were frequently French, Italian, Spanish, and Lebanese) were acrimoniously viewed as interlopers and economic imperialists. Their successes -- often due to farsighted capital investment, technological improvements in irrigation, pumping stations, and crop innovation -- were resented by their Mexican-American neighbors. Working-class Mexicanos complained (often justifiably) of racial discriminations; some of the new landowning class were bigoted, while others merely failed to appreciate the subtleties of the traditional patron system (employed by Mexicano ranchers to thoroughly exploit their workers).
In 1891, Catarino Garza successfully recruited from Mexicanos who considered themselves victims of a transformed South Texas economy. It was perhaps inevitable that, as Anglo influence in the Valley increased, the next generation of aggrieved Mexicanos would be drawn to the promises of the Plan de San Diego.
The dramatic upheavals of the Mexican Revolution could not help but buoy the hopes of Mexican Americans who felt oppressed in a South Texas that many felt had been "stolen" from Mexico. Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa promised land and liberty to the landless and exploited. Their all-out assault upon the old order in Mexico resonated across the Río Grande, throughout South Texas, and into the barrios of San Antonio, Houston, and Dallas. Mexicanos who seethed with resentment and hatred of their gringo bosses and landlords reasoned that if the once-invincible Porfirio Diaz had been sent packing, there might be something to this Plan de San Diego.
However, the defeat of Porfirio Diaz did not lead to a distribution of the spoils to the disinherited, but to what became known as the War of the Winners. The year the Plan was drafted (1915) found the victorious revolutionaries at each other's throats. Zapata and Villa both declared war on Carranza after he failed to call for elections or distribute land. Villa controlled northwest Mexico and Zapata the south, while Carranza maintained a precarious hold on Mexico City and the east, including the South Texas border.
Counter-revolutionaries included the recently deposed President Victoriano Huerta and Generals Pasqual Orozco and Felix Diaz (Porfirio's nephew), who raised funds in Europe and New York City. Their associates cached arms and recruited men along the Mexican border with Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.
Both Carranza and Villa actively sought US recognition for their regimes. Conceding no legal or moral authority to the US, their desire for diplomatic recognition was purely pragmatic: diplomatic recognition would allow the favored belligerent access to a vital flood of US and European armaments. Both Carranza and Villa remained unified in hatred of the United States (which had invaded and seized the port of Vera Cruz in April 1914). Most Mexicans understood that the Wilson Administration was determined to manipulate the Revolution to favor US capitalist interests and it was all too willing to intervene militarily on the slightest pretext.

1915: A Race War in the
Lower Valley; The Pinzano
and de la Rosa Raids

This unsettled, muddled state of affairs in Mexico was propitious for the advent of the Plan de San Diego. Ever since the July 1914 defeat of President Victoriano Huerta, wild rumors and absurd conjecture had arrived with refugees into the borderlands. In the fall of that year, an inflammatory pamphlet was circulated in the Laredo area, addressed to the "Sons of Cuauhtemoc, Hidalgo, and Juarez in Texas." It demanded that Mexicans in the United States be freed from Anglo exploitation, the government and officials of Texas should be overcome by armed action, and steps should be taken to re-unite the state with Greater Mexico. Laredo officials confiscated several copies, but dismissed it as yet another crackpot scheme.
In the summer of 1914, four Mexican nationals (two formerly resident in Nuevo Laredo) arrived in San Diego, Texas to open a tavern, which soon became a forum for anti-gringo rhetorical contests. The dusty hamlet revealed itself to be a short-fused powder keg of malcontents (many of whom subscribed to Ricardo Flores Magon's anarchist journal, Regeneracion). However, when it was revealed that the barkeeps had falsified their loan and liquor applications, the quartet suddenly vanished into Mexico.
The four, with two new associates, surfaced in a Monterrey prison during the first week of January 1915, after being arrested for conspiracy on behalf of Huerta. The men would later claim that the Plan de San Diego was smuggled into the prison for their signatures. Within days, they were released, and they headed back into the US.
One of the new associates, Basilio Ramos, Jr., a former secretary in the Nuevo Laredo customs house, decided he was too well known in the two Laredos, so he crossed the river at Brownsville. Ramos soon reconnoitered with A. A. Saenz, a former Nuevo Laredo saloonkeeper, and with recent recruit Luis De la Rosa, a former Laredo butcher. The men had much to discuss -- their Plan de San Diego specified that an armed uprising against the US would occur at 2 a.m., February 20, 1915.
However, no gringos were murdered in their beds on that night; Basilio Ramos made the mistake of recruiting in pro-Villa McAllen, and he was arrested there on January 24. He had in his possession a copy of the Plan de San Diego, some blank military commissions, and a safe-conduct pass signed by Carranza's General Nafarrate. Ramos was transferred to Federal custody in Brownsville and charged with conspiracy to overthrow the US government.
While Ramos languished in jail, Agustin J. Garza, commander of the Liberating Army for Races and Peoples, traveled from San Diego to Laredo to set up a junta. Garza (aka Leon Caballo), a diminutive, one-eyed Mexican national of mysterious antecedents, was the designated leader of the movement. Two recruits from the San Diego beer-hall phase of the movement, Aniceto Pizaña and Luis De la Rosa, were designated field commanders as the Plan began to prepare raiding operations. Pizaña, owner of a small ranch near Brownsville, became second in command of the general staff. De la Rosa, who had lost three fingers as a maladroit meat-market worker in Laredo, was named Supreme Chief of Operations. Pizaña and de la Rosa distributed copies of the Plan to cowboys, farmworkers, and common laborers employed by Anglos. During this period, the Plan was revised to include anarcho-communist terminology and concepts (presumably to entice a wider spectrum of recruits).
In May 1915, Basilio Ramos appeared in federal court for the Southern District of Texas. After the judge examined the Plan de San Diego documents, he declared the "the defendant should be tried for lunacy, not conspiracy against the United States." Ramos' bond was reduced from $5,000 to $100, and he immediately skipped across the river to Matamoros. The commander welcomed Ramos with a celebratory banquet. Ramos' warm reception puzzled those who recalled his recent imprisonment as a Huertista.
Incidents of lawlessness increased steadily through that spring and into early summer along the Lower Río Grande border. Record numbers of cattle and goats were rustled on both sides of the river. Raiding became so endemic that Texas Governor Ferguson persuaded the US Army to send reinforcements to the Valley. Most scholars do not view these earlier raids as related to the Plan de San Diego, but instead as the work of Mexican bandits taking advantage of the Carranzista army's failure to secure that sector of Tamaulipas.
The first sighting of the Plan de San Diego raiders was on July 2, 1915. Forty heavily armed horsemen were reported maneuvering near Sebastian, Texas north of Harlingen. Two days later, at an isolated ranchhouse near Lyford, two Anglo men were murdered. The raiders proceeded north through the brushlands to Raymondville, where they killed an 18-year-old Anglo boy. A posse dispatched in their pursuit killed two of the raiders, but the remainder managed to escape.
At the end of July, a railroad trestle near Harlingen was burned, and telegraph and telephone lines were severed. A Plan de San Diego profile of violence was emerging; the raids modi operandi resembled guerilla or terrorist tactics. Government or institutional properties were targeted and only Anglos were wantonly killed.
The events of July were reported in sensational detail in US, regional, and national newspapers. In Mexico, Carranzista-controlled organs heralded the advent of "The Texan Revolution." False reports were published detailing Mexican riots in San Antonio, as well as claims that Brownsville, McAllen, and Laredo were in rebel hands. El Dictamen in Vera Cruz assured its readers that Indian uprisings were breaking out across the US Southwest. US law enforcement officials reacted with rage to these outright lies and gleeful displays of Carranzista schadenfreude. Anglos began to eye Mexicanos warily, and in the week following the raids, two Mexicanos were shot while resisting arrest. On the road near San Benito, a group of masked vigilantes seized a Mexicano prisoner from sheriff's deputies and hanged him from a telephone pole.
Carranza and his man in Tamaulipas, General Nafarrate, denied any involvement with the raiders. However, Carranzista command and control of the region had been re-established well before the raids of July. US Bureau of Investigation agents recalled that, at the time of his arrest, Basilio Ramos, Jr., had in his possession a safe-conduct to cross Carranzista lines.
On August 2, 20 Mexicans crossed the river five miles north of Brownsville, stole horses, fired shots at Anglos in an automobile, and vanished. A posse of Texas Rangers, sheriff's deputies, a cavalry officer, mounted customs inspectors, and private citizens set off in hot pursuit. The next morning, they were informed of suspicious activity at Aniceto Pizaña's Los Tulitos ranch. As the posse approached the ranchhouse, they were met with a volley of rifle fire. A US soldier was killed instantly and several of the posse wounded. Pizaña managed to escape in the melee, but his wife, brother, and son were arrested. A search of the house yielded a hoard of anarchist literature and "an inflammatory handbill."
On August 6, Luis De la Rosa, accompanied by 14 men, rode into Sebastian and robbed Thomas Alexander's small grocery store. They crossed the road and stripped the shelves of Beda Shultz's store. After setting fire to the building, the raiders led away her livestock. De la Rosa directed his men to the Austin Corn Sheller warehouse, where they murdered Alfred Austin (president of the Sebastian Law and Order League) and his son. The following morning, De la Rosa attacked Norias, headquarters of the southern division of the King Ranch. However, Norias was not Sebastian; loyal Mexicano kinenos, backed by a patrol of US soldiers, exchanged fire with the invaders for two hours, killing five of them.
This time, De la Rosa had gone too far -- attacking the grandest and most venerable symbol of Anglo dominance in South Texas. The Adjutant General of Texas, Henry Hutchings, accompanied by his most senior Ranger captains, immediately boarded the train to Brownsville to personally direct the chase. De la Rosa managed to slip away from the posse but many innocent Mexicanos in the vicinity of Norias were shot down or "rangered" in the following days.
After the battle, the Norias Rangers posed for a photograph that featured them dragging the bodies of dead "raiders" with lassoes tied to their saddle horns. The Rangers arranged for the photograph to be widely distributed in Mexico in the form of a cautionary postcard.
In the week following the Norias attack, panicked Valley Anglos stepped up the pressure on the state and federal governments to send additional Rangers and troops. Mexicans of suspicious appearance seemed to be everywhere. Many were shot while "resisting" interrogation by trigger-happy sheriffs. Mexicano horsemen who rode up to Anglo ranches or farms were likely to be shot with deer rifles from surprisingly great distances. Adjutant General Hutchings returned to Austin after instructing the Rangers to "shoot to disable any suspicious character on sight." The Laredo Times editorialized its agreement: "There is a surplus population down there that needs eliminating."

Wrecked Trains, Lives, and Economies: Carranza's Drive
for US Recognition

Aniceto Pizaña waited until September 2 to exact vengeance for the attack on Los Tulitos. He led groups of Mexicanos and Mexican nationals (some in Carranzista uniform) in attacks near Brownsville and Harlingen. The Fresnos pump station was burned to the ground and its Anglo staff was executed.
Witnesses to the Fresnos attack testified that Pizaña offered to spare the lives of any of the men who claimed to be Germans. This was of great concern to Brownsville authorities, for military intelligence agents had reported that Germans in Laredo had been approached and asked to support the "liberation" of Mexicanos and Negroes. This new "national origin" bias of the raiders added to the distress of Anglo Valley residents who now also feared German spies in their midst.
By early autumn, tense Anglos began to sleep fully armed in their fields or on the roofs of their houses. Reprisals against Mexicans continued apace. The bodies of Mexicans who had been featured on Ranger "bad Mexican" blacklists began to be found piled together in groups. Prominent Valley leaders J. T. Canales and Deodoro Guerra led all-Mexicano posses in pursuit of the raiders. However, the well-intentioned missions of the Canales Scouts (who assisted the US Army) failed to stem the tide of racism. In September, 14 Mexicanos were shot down in Donna and their corpses were lined up in row along the road. Faced with a situation that was spiraling into a race war, many Mexicanos and Anglos began to abandon their isolated farms and ranches.
In mid-October, Luis De la Rosa led the most horrific of the 1915 raids. A St. Louis, Brownsville, and Mexico Line train was deliberately derailed at Tandy Station eight miles north of Brownsville. The wreck killed the engineer instantly and injured several passengers, but the worst was still ahead. The force of 60 raiders, mostly Mexican nationals, proceeded to pour rifle fire into the passenger coaches. De la Rosa then boarded the train and began to kill unarmed soldiers and Anglo civilians. The raiders robbed passengers of money, jewelry, and their boots. A man who falsely claimed to be German was spared death, and none of the Mexican passengers were molested.
The following day, a posse led by the Brownsville sheriff and Ranger Captain H. L. Ransom arrived on the scene. Four Mexicano workers found on a nearby ranch were captured and executed by Ransom.
Three days later, an army detachment at Ojo del Agua was attacked by Pizaña leading a force of Mexican nationals that included four Japanese. Three of the US troops were killed and eight were wounded. When Pizaña's men re-crossed the river, about a hundred Carranzista soldiers provided covering fire from the Mexican side. Throughout the autumn, small groups of US troops in isolated trenches were attacked by Mexican national raiders, some of whom wore Carranzista uniform.
Frederick Funston, commanding general of the US Army's Southern Department, continued to call for reinforcements along the border. He became convinced that Carranzistas were probing US defenses in preparation of an all-out invasion. By November 4, fully one half of the mobile forces of the US army were positioned along the border.
By year's end, the rural economy of South Texas was nearly devastated. Anglo families had abandoned farms and ranches and had relocated, some permanently, to the safety of cities such as Dallas and San Antonio. Conversely, terrified Mexicanos began fleeing southward to Brownsville and Mexico. Vigilante committees backed by Rangers had begun to disarm Mexicanos and concentrate them to be "watched." An American official estimated that 300 Mexicano families crossed the Matamoros bridge within a two-day period. During the period of the raids, more than half of the total population of the Valley eventually left the region.
Woodrow Wilson's Administration responded to General Funston's charge (confirmed by private detectives within Mexico) that Carranza was encouraging the Plan de San Diego raiders by applying greater diplomatic pressure on the Constitutionalist leader. Carranza shrewdly protested that, lacking US recognition, his regime was unable to authoritatively pacify the Tamaulipas region. Wilson was also anxious to pacify Mexico so that the US military could be withdrawn from the border to be ready for an increasingly probable deployment to Europe. US operatives had intercepted German intelligence agents' telegrams, and were well aware of Germany's efforts to increase tension between the US and Mexico.
After much wringing of hands, Washington granted Carranza formal diplomatic recognition on October 19. Following Villa's devastating losses at Celaya and Zapata's lapse into defensive passivity, Carranza's was now unavoidably the dominant faction in Mexico. A week after the US diplomatically recognized Carranza, the border raids abruptly ceased.
Formal US recognition opened the floodgates of arms and munitions to the Carranza armies. Despite the desperate efforts of his lobbyists in Washington, Pancho Villa remained subject to an arms embargo. The Wilson administration also made the unprecedented decision to allow Carranza to transport troops through the US in order to reinforce a Villa-beleaguered garrison in Sonora. On the night of November 1, Villa (who believed he was attacking 1,200 Carranzistas) was soundly defeated at Agua Prieta by 3,000 well-entrenched defenders, deploying barbed wire, searchlights, and scores of machine guns. Villa's once-invincible Dorados were decimated.

1916: US-Mexico War Crisis;
Raids in the Laredo Sector

In the spring of 1916, a series of trials, stemming from the Plan de San Diego raids, were held in District Court in Brownsville. Of 34 individuals indicted for murder, 12 were arrested and tried. Despite the racial tension that still resonated in the region, only four were convicted, two of whom were hanged in Brownsville. Aniceto Pizaña and Luis de la Rosa remained at large in Mexico (where agents reported that they had received cash payments and Carranza army commissions). The governor or Texas offered a $1,000 reward for their delivery, dead or alive. For many, the Plan de San Diego seemed a closed chapter.
However, on March 9, 1916, Villa took his revenge for President Wilson's perfidy at Agua Prieta by attacking Columbus, New Mexico. Wilson replied with the Punitive Expedition that, disregarding Mexican territorial sovereignty, pursued Villa into Chihuahua. Carranza was enraged; the gringo enemy of his enemy was not his friend, but the Imperialist that had seized Vera Cruz. Outrage over the nine-month occupation of Mexico's major Gulf port had initially fueled Mexican and specifically Carranzista support for the Plan de San Diego. The US invasion of Chihuahua granted the Plan a new lease on life, but in this new phase, the theatre of operations moved upriver to Laredo.
The ferocity of Villa's attack on Columbus, with its loss of 17 American lives and wanton destruction of property, sent tremors of fear along the border. Rumors from the interior of Mexico, verified by Bureau of Investigation agents, reported that de la Rosa and Pizaña were preparing to attack the United States. Mexican newspapers exulted that fifth columns of Mexican Americans in the US were ready to rise up against "the white-faced hogs."
On May 1, Washington imposed an arms embargo on Carranza and mobilized the National Guard forces of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. After Mexican irregulars raided the Big Bend settlement of Glenn Springs on May 5, 150,000 US militia were called up for service along the border. General Pershing's brigades in Chihuahua were not only unable to locate Pancho Villa, but had begun to suffer casualties at the hands of outraged Mexicans of all factions.
Having successfully manipulated the earlier phase of the Plan de San Diego to obtain diplomatic recognition, Carranza authorized General Pablo Gonzalez to fund and marshal a new series of border raids. Gonzalez dispatched General Juan Antonio Acosta to Laredo to spy on the deployment of army troops at Fort McIntosh and to make contact with the Plan de San Diego junta in the city. Acosta was instructed to set up a network of operatives in Cotulla and San Antonio. Curiously, he was also charged with the procurement of luxury automobiles for the Carranzista general. Acosta's coded communications detailing US troop movements are interspersed with his itemized receipts for Packards and their railroad transport fees to Mexico City.
Gonzalez selected Colonel Esteban Fierros to command the newly minted Brigada Fierros that was charged to establish a railroad infrastructure to support Luis de la Rosa's and Maurillo Rodriguez' raiders. Since de la Rosa and Rodriguez held the rank of general in the Carranzista army, Gonzalez was obligated to promote Fierros to Brigadier General. Fierros simultaneously received a general's commission from the Liberating Army of Races and Peoples in America, issued at San Diego, Texas and signed by General-in-Chief "Leon Caballo."
Esteban Fierros, the son of respected customs broker Don Andres Fierros, grew up at 311 Matamoros Street in Laredo. Esteban and his brothers Leocadio and Carlos all took up their father's first career choice, railroad work. Just prior to his military promotion, Esteban Fierros had been superintendent of the Tampico rail terminal, but he and his brothers had all learned their trade working on the Texas-Mexican railroad that connected Corpus Christi with Laredo via the Río Grande Valley.
The staging area for the Fierros Brigade was La Jarita near Nuevo Laredo. The brigade's strength of 450 men (led by four generals and many officers) included Plan de San Diego refugees from Texas, Carranzista regulars, railroad corps laborers, and raw recruits. The plan for the invasion called for the Brigade to cross into Laredo on June 10 via the international rail line. Columns of troops under General Fortunato Zuazua were to cross the river above and below Laredo, isolate it, and attack from the north. Simultaneously, the Nuevo Laredo garrison would stream across the bridge into Laredo. A fifth column of Plan de San Diego Laredo-junta guerillas would secure the neighborhoods and commercial center. On June 9, Fierros advised Gonzalez that, preparatory to the invasion, he had infiltrated groups of 20 to 25 cavalrymen disguised as cowboys into the US, and had identified Kenedy, Texas as their assembly point.
Fortunately for non-irredentist Laredoans, the invasion was aborted at the eleventh hour. Gonzalez, Carranza's most inept and venal general, lost his nerve and dispatched General Alfredo Ricaut to reassure US authorities that the Brigada Fierros forces at La Jarita were a harmless rabble of bandits who would be dealt with severely.
US Consular and Bureau of Investigations records show that the Americans were fully informed of plans for an invasion and of the identity of Fierros and other participants. It is also clear that the Mexicans were serious about invading. The Carranzistas' outrage at a second US invasion of Mexico in two years spurred them to attempt the preposterous to save face. Fortunately, sober heads prevailed, yet Carranza had not completely ruled out the limited use of raiders to influence American diplomacy.
On the morning of June 13, a group of 15 men led by Carranzista Lt. Colonel Juan Villarreal raided the American-owned San Samuel ranch near Nuevo Laredo. They stole several horses and forced cowboy Cenobio Mendez to guide them across the Río Grande into Webb County. The raiders then attacked a group of stockmen leading a herd of 80 horses to pasture. While the raiders returned to the river with the herd, the cowboys raced to Minerva to rouse the cavalry troop stationed there. Captain Bell and Troop K of the 18th Cavalry caught up with the bandits and retrieved the horses.
The next day, the abducted cowboy Mendez was able to slip away from the raiders and warn US authorities of a plan to burn the railroad bridge at Webb Station 21 miles north of Laredo. A posse of 15 heavily armed stockmen led by Ranger Captain Tom Ross converged there early Monday morning. Simultaneously, a La Salle County posse arrived in automobiles from the north. They found some 20 men in Carranzista uniforms busy dousing the bridge timbers with kerosene. The posse shot three of the arsonists dead and captured three others. Their leader, Lt. Colonel Villarreal, resisted bravely until succumbing to 15 gunshot wounds. Laredo District Attorney John Valls ordered the three prisoners jailed on charges of robbery by firearms, horse theft, and conspiracy.
On the following Thursday, a grand jury heard the testimony of Mendez, revealing that four Japanese had been among his captors. The defendants protested at being tried as being common criminals. Captain Norberto Pezzot admitted carrying a red and white Plan de San Diego banner, but asserted that Carrranzista General Maurilio Rodriguez had ordered the raid. That day's Laredo Daily Times noted that several days before the Webb incident, District Attorney Valls had received a mysterious envelope, postmarked Monterrey, warning of an imminent Carranzista raid on Laredo.
At 2 a.m. on June 15, Colonel Isabel de los Santos, a longtime cohort of de la Rosa and a member of the Fierros Brigade, led 100 raiders across the river at San Ygnacio (40 miles south of Laredo) and attacked a group of sleeping 14th Cavalry troopers. The raiders were unaware that Troop I had been reinforced shortly before midnight by Troop M, normally positioned along Dolores Creek. Four troopers were killed and six wounded. Their losses would have been considerably greater if they had not been prepared for contingency. Six raiders were killed and eight captured in what a Times reporter styled a "moonlight battle."
A shockwave of indignation swept Laredo. The editor of the Laredo Carranzista paper, El Progreso, already on peace bond for writing inflammatory articles against the US, was escorted to the banks of the river at Indian Crossing, relieved of his shoes, and sent wading to Mexico. The Times reported the arrival of a chartered Texas-Mexican railroad train transporting Mexicanos fleeing the Valley to Mexico. Laredoans were receiving letters from relatives in Mexico warning them to repatriate before their city was bombarded. A week later, after Corporal Oberlies died at Fort McIntosh of wounds received at San Ygnacio, District Attorney Valls re-convened the Grand Jury in order to charge the raider prisoners with murder. Groups of Laredoans took it upon themselves to patrol the city, rounding up vagrant Mexican nationals and "escorting" them to the center of the International Bridge. The Times' headlines exulted,"100,000 [US] Militia Concentrating on Border."
The US-Mexico War crisis reached its grim crescendo with news of the Carrizal debacle. On June 21, Captain Boyd of the 10th Cavalry (aka Buffalo Soldiers) disobeyed General Pershing's order to avoid towns, and tried to force his way through the military defenses of Carrizal, Chihuahua. Boyd and six troopers were killed, while 24 more were taken prisoner. The soldiers who escaped (along with jingoist reporters) concocted a tale of treachery that was bannered across the US. The San Antonio Express screamed, "US Troops Attacked: 40 Killed" and spun a story of troopers lured into ambush by means of a truce flag and then ripped to ribbons by hidden machine guns. The Laredo Daily Times editorialized the "shameless duplicity of Carranza," and demanded the "complete overthrow of Carranza element and its evil domination." In Washington, the War College began to plot invasion routes to the interior of Mexico, and President Wilson, on his personal typewriter, prepared a rough draft of a declaration of war.
Laredo found itself in a debate over the necessity to declare martial law. The majority felt comforted by the proximity of a well-reinforced Fort McIntosh, while the good nuns of the Ursuline convent on the riverbank were still aflutter over an attempted Carranzista break-in on the night of June 20. (Local police and cavalrymen chased off the assailants.) Local merchants were even more distressed by a US embargo slapped on comestibles and other supplies going into Mexico. The trains were not even running on time -- an International and Great Northern passenger train was delayed by what was discovered to be an innocuous brush fire at Cactus Station, just north of Laredo.
Meanwhile, downstream at Brownsville, it had also been a momentous June. Abel Sandoval led a group of 20 raiders across the river on June 16, intent on wrecking trains and assassinating Mexicanos who had informed on Plan de San Diego raiders. General James Parker prevented any wrecking of trains or traitors by chasing them back across the river. When Parker's troops were attacked by Carranzistas, he called for the 26th Infantry to reinforce him on the Mexican side.
Carranzista General Alfredo Ricaut responded to the American challenge by ordering the evacuation of Matamoros. The incident caused grave consternation in Mexico City where it was feared that the Americans would occupy Matamoros. However, when Ricaut promised to suppress border raiders, General Parker and his forces returned to Texas.
The Mexican-US War crisis kept the border in a state of anxiety until the end of June. A bilateral commission was formed to investigate both the conspiracy behind the border raids and Captain Boyd's blundering in Carrizal. Despite the two nations finally arriving at a diplomatic solution to the crisis, one last Plan de San Diego raid occurred on June 20.
Some 16 miles west of San Antonio, 10 raiders abducted two Mexicanos from their ranch. A posse composed of San Antonio deputies, city detectives, Bureau of Investigation agents, and ordinary citizens engaged in a shootout with the raiders, which forced them to release their captives. The two men testified that they had been forced to serve as guides in "a campaign to restore Texas to Mexico."
Despite the progress of negotiations between the two countries, Laredo continued to be garrisoned for all-out war with Mexico. At the beginning of July, there were 10,000 soldiers in Laredo, with an additional 10,000 expected within the month. Fort McIntosh was supplemented with National Guard outliers such as Camp Missouri, Camp Maine, Camp New Hampshire, and the 9th Infantry barracks. Laredo was host to specialist units of field and coast artillery, signal corps, engineers, searchlight companies, motor truck pools, hospital corps, and a quartermaster's depot. Horses were frightened and children scattered by an experimental motorcycle machine gun company that conducted high-speed maneuvers into the Heights neighborhood. On Sundays, Holy Redeemer Church was packed beyond capacity with soldiers.
Laredoans still approached the riverbanks warily. It was rumored that the Japanese raiders at San Ignacio had crossed the river underwater, breathing through lengths of carrizo. Anxiety spiked on June 30, when Captain Tom Ross arrested a Carranzista agent in a local brothel. Jesse Moseley, a black physician who held the rank of major in the Carranzista army, was arrested for attempting to recruit Laredo African-Americans for the Plan de San Diego. On July 12, Moseley's decomposed body (with a crushed skull) was found in a field east of Laredo. Upon completion of the coroner's inquest, Captain Tom Ross and one of his ranch employees were arrested for murder. Ross was quickly exonerated on the testimony of Deputy US Marshal Allen Walker that provided an alibi for the Rangers.
After 15 hours of deliberation, the four San Ignacio raiders (José Antonio Arce, Vicente Lara, Jesus Cerda, and Paulino Sanchez) were sentenced to death on July 16. Exactly one month had elapsed between commission of the crime and sentencing.
On June 12, 1916, the Laredo Daily Times reported that General Alfredo Ricaut had arrested border raider (and former Laredo butcher) Luis De la Rosa in Monterrey. The story managed to be both premature and prescient. Two weeks later, De la Rosa was in custody. General Pablo Gonzalez tried to intercede with Carranza to obtain De la Rosa's release "to perform valuable services with the Fierros Brigade." But Carranza had lost faith in the efficacy of the Plan de San Diego's ideology and tactics. As relations with the US improved, the Fierros Brigade's infrastructure was dismantled.
De la Rosa (released from confinement in Monterrey's Hotel Continental), Basilio Ramos, Jr., Augustin (Leon Caballo) Garza, and Aniceto Pizaña were paid off, and they vanished forever into obscurity in Mexico.
Esteban Fierros was appointed superintendent of the Carranzista railways in Chihuahua. On February 4, 1917, the last US army unit saddled up and rode out of Mexico. Almost exactly three years later, Venustiano Carranza was murdered in his bed by disloyal troops.
The June 17, 1916 edition of the Laredo Daily Times published a photograph of a 10-year-old Plan de San Diego raider holding a gun and posed in front of the Hamilton Hotel. In the accompanying story, the boy (captured at San Ygnacio) tells of his recruitment by Luis de la Rosa and of his profound hatred of gringos.
The Plan de San Diego's genocidal agenda was a greater failure than its political program. During 1915-16, a total of 17 US soldiers were killed and 22 were wounded. Anglo civilian casualties totaled six murdered and eight wounded. However, Mexicanos, the purported benefactors of the Plan, reaped the whirlwind of a devastating Anglo backlash. The most judicious estimates are that some 500 innocent Mexicanos perished at the hands of Texas Rangers, local law officers, vigilantes, and terror-crazed property owners. Thousands of ordinary hardworking rural folk and smallholders were forced into exile in Mexico.
The economic consequences to the South Texas economy were equally grim; millions of 1916 dollars of property and resources were laid to waste. In economic terms, the region did not begin to recover until well after World War II. The racial tensions engendered by the conflagration are still present in the lower Valley, and resonate in the Borderland studies written by Mexican American academics two generations later.
Some 88 years after January 6, 1915, I'm in Jarvis Plaza, standing in front of a diminutive red-brick bandstand erected by the New Hampshire militia "in gratitude for the kindness shown them by the people of Laredo in 1916."
Why, I wondered, were those northernmost gringos torn from their families and thrust into the inferno of a Laredo July? Surely, there must have been some vital ethos, some "ghost in the machine" of the Plan de San Diego's Texas Revolution. Or was the motivation for so much carnage and mayhem as shallow as the blank, sullen stare of the 10-year-old racist who had his photo taken less than 75 feet from where I stood? Did Carranza cynically manipulate useful idiots, venal opportunists, and homicidal malcontents to serve his international policy? Was the Plan de San Diego merely a sordid sideshow to the 15-year-long Mexican Revolution?
In 1992, James A. Sandos published the first book-length study of the Plan de San Diego, Rebellion in the Borderlands: Anarchism and the Plan de San Diego, 1904-1923. Briefly stated, Sandos viewed the Plan as a failed but noble attempt to implement the anarchist principles of Ricardo Flores Magon. (Flores Magon and his brother Enrique are considered the preeminent intellectual precursors of the Mexican Revolution.)
Sandos regrets that the Plan, "a potentially international revolution," was "strangled by the military and political authorities of the [capitalist] US and Mexican governments." In order to portray the Plan de San Diego as a harbinger of contemporary Liberation Theology, he disregards Flores Magon's disavowal of the raids, wanton murders, and venal opportunism of its protagonists. Sandos does not provide any plausible documentary evidence for his assertions, and Rebellion in the Borderlands must be read with extreme skepticism.
In spite of the veritable flood of new archival sources made available since 1979, Charles H. Harris' and Louis R. Sadler's The Plan de San Diego and the Mexican-US War Crisis of 1916: A Re-examination. Published in 1978, it remains the most credible account of the events. Harris and Sadler's monograph is a clear and fastidiously researched indictment of Venustiano Carranza's 1915-16 brinkmanship, and his cynical manipulation of the legitimate grievances and aspirations of South Texas Mexicanos.
As we approach the second post-9/11 summer, the distant events of 1916 acquire an uncanny resonance. We experience intense homeland insecurity and anxiety over alien agents slipping across porous borders. We too have witnessed horrific carnage wreaked by homicidal zealots programmed from abroad by cynical ideologues. And much like the Laredoans of 1916, we dread a future that seems to be spiraling into racial persecution and global war. The cycle continues.