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September 05, 2001
Reading Mexican history is always
Reading Mexican history is always disturbing, when one sees the often brutal violence that for many years just seems a natural part of life there. Everywhere in Latin America, as nearly as I can tell, one sees class warfare of the most savage sort. Wealthy landowners, in particular, seem to have a venal hatred of peasants and poor workers in general. Often extreme levels of violence and devastation are employed to bring them under control. When workers' and peasants' movements rise up, their levels of violence are often no less worse - and, more often than not, their victims are not the wealthy but other poor people employed or conscripted by the government or landlords.
Porfirio Díaz, ruler of Mexico from 1867 to 1910, held the country in an iron fist. The landlords slowly swallowed up small farmers and reduced them to a peonage little better than slavery. When armed revolts arose, their savagery knew no limits. Native people suffered the most, as they often tried to resist theft of their lands. In Hidalgo, native rebels were buried up to their necks in sand and trampled to death by horses. Díaz even offered a reward for the ears of any slain warrior of the northern Yaqui people. Bounty hunters slaughtered indiscriminately, going so far as to attack unarmed villagers and claim the bodies were Yaqui. Thousands more were shipped to the slave fields of Yucatán and worked to death in chain gangs.
Francisco Madero started the Revolución. Angered by Díaz's stealing the elections of 1910, as he had so many times before, he distributed pamphlets calling for the régime's overthrow and a return to democracy. Two armed bands rose up to his call. Despite his own rather lacklustre leadership, the risings across the countryside soon made Díaz's position untenable. After the dictator left, Madero became president, but showed none of the radicalism that had animated his followers. Fundamentally a liberal and moderate rather than a revolutionary, he became caught in the trap between peasants hungry for change and landlords and generals vicious in their opposition. In late 1912, he was assassinated.
His killer and successor was Victoriano Huerta. It is difficult to comprehend, fully, the villainy of this man, easily one of the most cruel and sadistic figures in Mexican history. Under Díaz, he had systematically laid waste to the entire Yucatán peninsula, burning food reserves and forcing the Maya rebels into starvation. When Zapata's guerrillas rose up against Madero's vacillations with the landowners, Huerta went on a rampage in Zapata's home state of Morelos. His soldiers burned defenceless villages. They destroyed crops and left peasants to starve in the winter. They stormed into schools and massacred children. Women were brutally raped as their husbands were forced to watch, then shot. Terror and the rule of terror seemed to be his only byword.
Huerta's atrocities, more than any other, make me think of the horrors of the vicious class warfare prevalent in Latin American history. Think of it. What hatred could possess a man to kill, burn, rape, and destroy with such mindless bent? Such is the insanity that wealth brings in Latin America, a continent where the rich bar their doors and fight off with raw, naked human wrath any attempt to escape it. How else to explain the Guatemalan military's relentless 30-year campaign to destroy its indigenous peoples? the brutality of the El Salvadoran death squads? even today, the mendacity with which Colombian paramilitaries pursue peasants and workers?
Yet consider Huerta's main adversaries, Francisco "Pancho" Villa and Emiliano Zapata. Zapata is the closest thing the Revolución has to a hero; but his genuine caring for his people was not matched either by his political judgement or his ability to grasp and adapt to change. He was a radical when it came to class conflict and social reform; but fundamentally he was a conservative, longing only to preserve the simple, pastoral life of the nineteenth century. Despite the fervor of his mass movement (which reverberates still today, in Subcomadante Marcos' zapatista movement) he was never able to translate into a genuinely national political force.
Villa is even more of an enigma. He is the most colorful figure of the Revolución a former bandit who suddenly found himself the commander of Mexico's largest army, making up for his almost total lack of any coherent political ideology with an almost unmatched generalship and military cunning. A reckless womanizer, given to an abusive temper, impulsive behavior, and often senseless pettiness and spite, his list of sins is nearly as long as his accomplishments. He had no mercy on From defending the peasants at the beginning of the war, Villa ended up one of their tormentors, ending up raiding villages to conscript the men, rape the women, and steal the crops to feed his troops. So often in history the oppressed become the oppressor. Lacking the political skill to run the country himself, he was continuously at the mercy of militarily weak but politically shrewd politicians. The one who first used Villa to gain power, then turned against him, was, Venustiano Carranza, who became president in 1916.
Carranza, and the general he later turned to and named his successor, Alvar Obregón, betrayed the original instincts of the Revolución. Instead of pushing the landowners from power and distributing land to peasants, they put in power an industrial, middle-class clique that brutalized workers and punished farmers as harshly as before. For over seventy years after the war, Mexico's democracy was more apparent than real, with the tight rule of a one-party state, the oppression of native peoples, and the hopelessness of the ordinary citizen.
Is it over yet? When the governing PRI was finally toppled, they were replaced by the equally conservative PAN party. Time will tell whether the ordinary Mexican will ever see real social justice.
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Posted by Tyrone at September 5, 2001 06:21 AM