The generals in their labyrinths:
The violent trajectories of Emiliano Zapata and Jesus Guajardo

By Robert Mendoza

Las iras de Dios desata
Quien a traición a otro hiere
Y siempre el que a hierro mata
Ya saben que a hierro muere.

He who slays by treason
The wrath of God unleashes
And, eternally, he who lives by the sword
Surely will perish in his season.
--anonymous corrido

It must have been a little before 5 a.m. when the bear came through our camp. High anxiety followed the rude awakening, but we suffered no material or physical damage. It was obvious no one was likely to be going back to sleep, so we built up the fire and began to tell ghost stories. Our guide Meme contributed a haunting tale that featured his fellow Candela native, Jesus Guajardo.
Indisputably the most infamous citizen ever produced by that tiny Sierra municipality, Guajardo was to the Emiliano Zapata legend what "the dirty little coward that shot Mr. Howard" was to Jesse James. "People say," whispered Meme, "that on moonless June nights Guajardo walks the streets of Candela. The braying donkeys are silenced by a chorus of owls hunched in the cottonwoods along the Candela riverbed. It is then that he walks, resplendent in his uniform of a brigadier general, but his bloated visage bears the stigmata of the firing squad's coup de grace."
After breakfast, we climbed 500 meters uphill to a crest of the Sierra de los Pajaros Azules. From this vantage, incongruously surrounded by palm trees, we could look down on the entire magnificent expanse of the Mesa de Catujanos, once the domain of another arch-villain of Mexican history -- the Maximilian diehard, Santiago Vidaurri.
Upon descending to our base camp, we ran into the landowner, Don Atanasio, who could not repress his laughter as he informed us that we'd pitched our tents in El Rincon del Oso -- Lair of the Bear -- (clearly marked in the geodesic survey maps we'd left behind in our vehicle).
Don Atanasio consoled us with an informative tour of his sierra spring-fed orchards of pecan, fig, and pomegranate. Our bear had been reeling home after gorging on pomegranates; telltale massive purple signatures proved that members of the genus Ursus relieve themselves not only in the woods.
That afternoon, arrowing north along NL1 towards the Colombia checkpoint and home, I promised Raul C. Santos, Jr. (head bwana of our Coahuilan expeditions), Ray Herrera, and Bob Garza that I would look into the life and times of Jesus Guajardo. Two Octobers later, the pomegranates are ripe again, and here it is.

Coahuila 1913: "Death to Huerta"
Jesus María Guajardo was born in Candela, Coahuila on August 29, 1896. He matured into a tall, ruddy, norteño with piercing green eyes. Like his older contemporary and fellow Coahuilan, Lucio Blanco (Nadadores, July 1879), Guajardo complemented his physical allure with the reckless bravado and horse mastery of a born cavalryman.
In February 1913, Guajardo was barely 17 when Coahuila governor Venustiano Carranza repudiated General Victoriano Huerta's usurpation of Francisco Madero's presidency. The Candela teenager eagerly became one of the Coahuilan irregulars and members of the state militia that the wily Carranza had prevented from assimilation into the federal army.
The young trooper's courage and charisma rapidly earned him promotion. General Francisco Coss' forces routed huertista formations and overran their garrisons in Coahuila and Nuevo Leon with a zeal that was surpassed only by Pancho Villa's Chihuahuans. Villa's capture of Torreon in October 1913 marked the beginning of the end for Huerta.
1914-19: Clan of Cain,
or "The War of the Winners"
Long before Huerta was disarmed and shipped off to exile in Barcelona in July 1914, Carranza's constitutionalist coalition was precipitously fraying. Although Carranza assumed that he would be unanimously selected to replace Huerta, a convention of revolutionaries convened in Aguascalientes in October 1914 to decide Huerta's succession. The haughty carranzistas boycotted the session soon dominated by villistas and zapatistas. This motley coalition selected Eulalio Gutierrez as provisional President of Mexico and figurehead of what became known as the convencionistas.
Early in 1915, both Villa and Zapata declared war on their erstwhile First Chief; this was the shooting phase of what became known as the War of the Winners. Fortunately for Carranza, he was able to retain the loyalty of the Sonorans and the northeastern and Gulf army corps. Guajardo and his fellow Coahuilans also remained unconditional stalwarts of their governor.
Guajardo, serving under General Coss and Ignacio Flores, distinguished himself in several battles with the convencionistas in the fall of 1914. On December 13, during the Puebla-Cholula campaign, he was promoted to the rank of major.
In spring and early summer of 1915, Carranzas's most able lieutenant, Divisional General Alvaro Obregon, inflicted a stunning series of defeats on Pancho Villa in Guanajuato: the battles of Celaya I, Celaya II, and Leon. Driven out of the strategic Bajio Basin north of Mexico City, Villa staggered northward to Chihuahua to lick his wounds. The Centaur of the North was finished as a player on the national stage. Meanwhile, Guajardo, now a lieutenant colonel, was part of the Army of the East's triumphant advance on Mexico City during June 1915.
1919: Killing Zapata,
or The Jackal's Salute
With Villa neutralized, Carranza turned his attention southward to the state of Morelos and Zapata. Divisional General Pablo Gonzalez was Carranza's choice of the proconsul, charged with the responsibility of subduing the Attila of Anenquilco.
Gonzalez, a short, pudgy Carranza sycophant, was notoriously the only General of Division who had never won a battle. Gonzalez's ascendancy was due to Carranza's profound mistrust of his most efficient generals (a cageyness he shared with his unacknowledged mentor, Porfirio Diaz). While gormless on a battlefield, Gonzalez was staunchly loyal, a true adicto.
Fatefully, Jesus Guajardo was deployed south as one of Gonzalez' subalterns. His longtime mentor, General Coss, had been forced by failing health to retire from the army and return to this home in Coahuila. Guajardo became a full colonel and took charge of the 50th Cavalry regiment.
Gonzalez's Morelos offensive in the spring of 1916 opened a three-year exercise in frustration for the carranzistas. Unlike Villa, who conducted impetuous full-frontal assaults, Zapata was an elusive and furtive practitioner of guerilla warfare. He was skilled at blowing up trains, overrunning small garrisons, and ambushing supply convoys, vanishing into the landscape. Gonzalez, on the other hand, failed to adjust his tactics or attempt to win the hearts and minds of the population. His troops massed together in fortified strong points and focused on terrorizing villagers and stripping the countryside of valuables.
Always notorious as the most venal of Carranza's generals, Gonzalez outdid himself in Morelos. His men stuffed long lines of boxcars with automobiles, pianos, sugarcane production machinery, and even bathtubs. The goods were converted to cash in Mexico City markets or delivered to his homes in the capitol and Monterrey. Zapatista villages were forced to pay graft to Gonzalez' lieutenants and contribute forced loans.
On September 30, 1916, Colonel Jesus Guajardo ordered the execution of 180 men, women, and children in Tlaltizapan, in reprisal for the village's failure to pay a forced loan he had levied upon it.
Zapata became more popular that ever. Windows rattled in Mexico City when Zapata blew up a train on the slopes of Mount Ajusco. Gonzalez continued to load hacienda furnishings into boxcars, all the while complaining to Carranza of the universal treachery of the population of Morelos. Meanwhile, Zapata proceeded to extend the range of his insurgency into the state of Puebla.
In July 1917, a disheartened and mentally exhausted Gonzalez began a two-month leave of absence in the United States. Fortunately for the carranzista cause, Zapata and his subordinates were unable to consolidate any long-term tactical advantage from their many isolated successful actions. The ever-wary Zapata apparently never slept more than a single night in a village. Soon after his departure, the village would fall again to the carranzistas and the cycle of their tender mercies commenced anew.
Nearly two years later, Gonzalez entered a cantina and was astonished to discover Jesus Guajardo, very much at his ease at the bar. Neither man was a teetotaler; Gonzalez's surprise was due to the fact that Guajardo had been ordered to scour the Cuatla countryside for zapatistas. Guajardo was arrested and received a humiliating dressing-down from his commander. The news soon reached Zapata's ears.
On March 21, 1919, Zapata wrote Guajardo a letter in which he consoled him and suggested that he defect to the zapatista side, along with his 50th Cavalry regiment. The letter was intercepted and Carranza notified of its contents. The First Chief and General Gonzalez agreed to set a trap for Zapata. They ordered Guajardo to begin corresponding with Zapata and gain his trust.
On April 1, Zapata contacted Guajardo, who agreed to stage a mutiny at Cuatla within the week and then proceed to Jonacatepec and seize its carranzista garrison. This occurred as planned on April 8 and 9, and Guajardo further reassured Zapata by executing 59 former zapatista prisoners who had helped the carranzistas defend Jonacatepec. Guajardo then convinced the perennially suspicious Zapata of a meeting between their two forces. Guajardo's task of setting a deadly trap was complicated by his desire for minimum risk to himself.
On April 9, Zapata agreed to meet Guajardo at tiny Pastor station on the Interoceanic Line south of Jonacatepec, with each party accompanied by a 30-man escort. Guajardo arrived with 600 men and a machine gun. Zapata did not comment on the disparity, and invited Guajardo to dine with him at his nearby camp. Complaining of a stomach condition, the colonel demurred and presented Zapata with a prize horse seized at Jonacatepec. The two parted company after agreeing to meet the next day at the Chinameca hacienda on the Cuatla River.
On the afternoon of April 10, Zapata and an escort of 10 men rode into the gates of Chinameca. At a signal from Guajardo, the honor guard emptied their salute rifles into Zapata's twitching body. The corpse was tied on a mule and rushed to Cuatla where it was identified and repeatedly photographed by still and motion-picture cameras. An elated Carranza congratulated Gonzalez and authorized Guajardo's promotion to Brigadier General. In addition, Guajardo received a reward of 10,000 gold pesos.

1920: The Demise
of Carranza

Carranza had eliminated the last of his major enemies but had forgotten to keep an eye on his friends. The following spring, he attempted to install a surrogate, Ignacio Bonillas, as his successor President of Mexico, disregarding a disgruntled and heavily armed consensus that it was Alvaro Obregon's turn to warm the big chair in Mexico City.
Sonoran Governor Adolfo de la Huerta repudiated Carranza in the Plan de Agua Prieta and, within days, armies were marching on Mexico City from the north and northwest. Carranza's support among revolutionaries had been precipitously eroding since he had assumed the presidency in 1917. He had failed to enforce many key provisions of his own constitution; land distribution was limited to acreage seized from his political enemies, and his authoritarian governance was all too reminiscent of Diaz and Huerta.
When even the doughty Pablo Gonzalez declared for Obregon, Carranza saw the writing on the wall and (as before in the bleakest days of 1915) fled to Vera Cruz, where General Guadalupe Sanchez offered sanctuary and support. Sanchez promptly betrayed him and Carranza's train (freighted with the contents of the national treasury) was repeatedly attacked.
Brigadier General Guajardo commanded one of the cavalry squadrons in pursuit of the presidential convoy carrying his former boss. He had just been released from military prison where he'd been held on charges that he had trapped and murdered two rival officers, in a manner similar to that which led to Zapata's demise.
Carranza abandoned the besieged train at Tlaxcalantongo deep within the Puebla sierra, and on the night of May 20, 1920, was murdered as he slept. Adolfo de la Huerta assumed the duties of interim president, pending the elections scheduled for September. But Mexico abhors a vacuum, and Carranza was scarcely in the grave before ominous rumblings were audible from Villa's redoubt in Chihuahua.
1920: Guajardo Goes
Down in Monterrey

Pablo Gonzalez retired from the military and announced on May 15 that he was throwing his sombrero into the presidential ring. He returned to his sumptuously furnished Monterrey house where he played host to a series of generals hostile to the Sonoran ascendancy.
In July of 1920, de la Huerta's War Ministry ordered General Guajardo to assist General Joaquin Amaro in neutralizing Villa. Guajardo led some 1,600 troops of artillery, infantry, and cavalry north into the Comarca Lagunera. Less than a week later at San Pedro de las Colonias, Coahuila, Guajardo declared himself in rebellion against de la Huerta.
However, at the first skirmish with troops loyal to de la Huerta's government (at the village aptly named La Hediondilla -- Little Stinker), Guajardo's men abandoned him in droves. He and a handful of followers fled towards Monterrey (where his concubine was staying). Unfortunately, the family of Lt. Colonel Antonio Cano, one of his disaffected subordinates from La Hediondilla, was domiciled at the same address.
On July 17, Cano's sister warned him that a furious Guajardo had arrived two days earlier. Cano arrived to confront Guajardo and then immediately disclosed his whereabouts to the authorities. Guajardo was summarily tried by a court-martial, during which he adamantly refused to testify in his own defense or to implicate others.
At 6:30 a.m. on July 18, some 12 hours after his sentencing, Guajardo was executed by a firing squad at Monterrey's Terminal Barracks. Although no civilian witnesses were present, reporters from El Porvenir assured readers that the Brigadier General met his fate with dignified courage. Not quite 13 months had elapsed since Zapata's bloody reception at Chinameca.
Simultaneously with Guajardo's arrival in Monterrey on July 17, Pablo Gonzalez was arrested (found hiding in the basement of his house under one of his fleet of ill-gotten automobiles). Gonzalez was charged on several counts of rebellion stemming from General Irineo Villarreal's unsuccessful July 14 attack on the Monterrey railroad station.
He was also accused of conspiring against de la Huerta's government with General Pablo Gonzalez (Chico) and several other prominent norteño military figures.
In a sensational trial at Monterrey's Progreso Theater attended by a crowd of 3,000, Gonzalez was confronted by Lt. Colonel Antonio Cano, who testified that Jesus Guajardo had rebelled in support of Gonzalez's political ambitions.
Gonzalez was duly convicted of conspiracy and rebellion, but was almost immediately released from the penitentiary. A rumor circulated in El Porvenir that US and British diplomats had intervened with the Ministry of War on Gonzalez's behalf. Gonzalez's failure to carry out Carranza's anti-US and pro-Central Powers policies during WWI had not been forgotten.

Posthumous Reputations:
Zapata, Gonzalez, and Guajardo

The 1971 publication of Pablo Gonzalez, Jr.'s El Centinela Fiel del Constitutionalismo is the best known of the Gonzalez family's efforts to rehabilitate General Pablo Gonzalez's reputation by denigrating his contemporaries, most notably Zapata. This book, along with Zapata: Reaccionario y Traidor and a host of scurrilous paperback books and magazine articles, is part of a crude campaign to demonize Zapata.
The text of El Centinela Fiel is a rag-tag collection of photostat copies of yellow-press accounts of barbarities alleged to have been committed by "The Modern Attila." As putative editor, Gonzalez, Jr.'s contribution is to interrupt the flood of clippings every few pages to inveigh against his father's adversaries as "Liars!", "Thieves!", "Cowards!", and "Murderers!"
American journalist H. H. Dunn published The Crimson Jester in 1934, portraying Zapata as a perfect devil who, when not in chapel marrying 20 different women, is amusing himself impaling prisoners on maguey plants. Dunn's book, which he claimed was based on atrocities he witnessed (despite his being expelled from Mexico in 1912), belongs on the same shelf with contemporary accounts of Mexican "bolshevist outrages," a literature provoked by President Lazaro Cardenas' expropriation of US and British petroleum interests.
In reality, Zapata was neither chaste apostol nor plaster icon, but the most complex, if not conflicted, of the revolutionary leaders. His long (1908-19) and obstinate advocacy for the landless and downtrodden of Morelos contrasts favorably with Carranza's reactionary opportunism. However, Zapata ultimately failed to implement his idealistic program (El Plan de Ayala) because he lacked the focused audacity of Villa and the military efficiency of Obregon.
Unlike the cold Carranza, Zapata was indeed the homme moyen sensuel -- overly fond of brandy, women, and spirited horses. He certainly rewarded himself, his brother, and his lieutenants with haciendas that rightfully should have been apportioned to peasants and laborers. And undisciplined Zapatista troops were often guilty of outrages, especially when confronting their former masters or overseers. All this notwithstanding, the great majority of historians agree that the abuses of zapatismo pale in comparison to those wreaked by Pancho Villa's troops and the carranzista regime's rapacity.
John Womack's Zapata and the Mexican Revolution remains the most thorough assessment of the Morelos leader's life and times. However, when it was published in 1968, I recall howls of outrage from Chicano reviewers who yearned for a simplistic hagiography they could display beneath their Che poster. To paraphrase an old gringa, a revolutionary's life is nasty, brutish, and short.
I understand that many of Jesus Guajardo's descendants are quite proud of him and his military career -- which culminated in his elimination of Zapata. I imagine they agree with Pablo Gonzalez, Jr.'s characterization of Zapata, as well as his assertion that Guajardo's trap was a police action: Zapata was not asesinado (murdered), but ajusticiado (a criminal punished) under the auspices of the authorities.
It may be unfair that history has smiled upon Zapata and banished Guajardo to the jackal pack with his predecessors Lopez de Santa Anna and Huerta. But with all respect to his blameless descendants, I must conclude that history is right in its assessment. Eric Hobsbawm (in Bandits, 1969) noted that men like Zapata can only "perish by treason." Zapata was "invisible and invulnerable" in Morelos, where the overwhelming majority of the populace supported and identified with him.
Considering Zapata's elusiveness, Guajardo's reliance on trickery to locate his quarry is understandable, although it violated the best traditions of military honor. However, once contact was established, Guajardo, despite his reputation as a fearless cavalier and crack shot, failed on three occasions to engage Zapata and his forces man to man. The shameful event of April 10, 1919 at Chinameca hacienda was neither a military nor police action, but a gangland-style assassination, reminiscent of the 1913 murders of Madero and Pino Suarez and a harbinger of the 1923 murder of Pancho Villa.

Les ruego que me perdonen
Si al narrar meti la pata
Pero asi cuentan murio
Don Emiliano Zapata.

I pray that you grant me pardon
If my tale stepped on your toes
But this is how they relate
Zapata was done in by his foes.
--anonymous corrido