Thread by @arctotherium42

Excerpts from TR Fehrenbach's "Fire and Blood: A History of Mexico" (1973). The Porfiriato gave Mexico a generation of stability and development for the first time since independence. This left Mexico overdue for another civil war: the Mexican Revolution.

One problem was that the Porfirian school system had created a large, literate middle structure (not class). These educated mestizos became dissatisfied due to lack of opportunity; growth was rapid but not rapid enough to absorb them all.

The Revolution kicked off in 1910, when Diaz announced he'd won reelection with 99% of the vote. This kicked off an insurgency in Chihuahua, in the mestizo, frontier north.

In the South, in Chiapas, a mestizo named Emiliano Zapato organized indio peasants into an agrarian revolt, killing landlords and seizing the land. Zapata himself was incorruptible and had no desire for power.

The Mexican army couldn't suppress either revolt because Porfirio had deliberately filled its ranks with old corrupt time-servers so as to prevent ambitious colonels or generals from coup'ing him.

Diaz left in 1911, abdicating in favor of his 1910 election opponent Madero, and most Mexicans believed the revolution had succeeded and been mostly bloodless.

But Madero was a constitutional liberal, like Diaz (only he believed in democracy and wanted no re-election); the Zapatistas, who wanted mass expropriation and redistribution of land, not democracy, did not lay down their arms.

American sympathy might have saved Madero, but Madero was extremely nationalistic and rhetorically hostile to the US, which, tragically, led the US to fail to support his government.

As is traditional, General Huerta coup'd Madero, possibly with the assent of the US ambassador Wilson, and had him shot. The Taft admin refused to recognize the Huerta govt as legitimate thanks to this assassination.

This coup shattered the legitimacy of the central government, and the northern frontier rose against Huerta, buoyed by a massive young population (infant mortality plummeted during the Porfiriato).

The revolutionaries were officially led by Don Venustiano Carranza, a constitutionalist, but many others sprang up, among them Alvaro Obregon, the most effective military man of the Mexican Revolution.

The leaders were men of the northern frontier, Mexican mestizos rather than Europeans or Amerindians.

The most famous, due to his charisma, was Pancho Villa, who was basically a bandit operating independently from Carranza. The Villistas robbed, raped, and tortured more or less randomly, except for foreign women (always raped) and Chinese (always killed).

However, Huerta still had the army, the major cities, and the ports through which he could import modern weapons. He might've won, but Woodrow Wilson hated him as an assassin, prioritizing morality over stability or US investments, and embargo'd his govt.

Huerta was OK with the US, and the Constitutionalists very anti-American, but Wilson authorized sales to the latter on moral grounds. He also managed to blunder into occupying Veracruz; war was only averted by South American arbitration.

Cut off from arms, the Huerta regimes lost several key battles to the Constituionalists, Zapata, and Villa, and Obregon took Mexico City.

The Northerners held the people of the capital in contempt for their passivity. They'd played no role in the revolution, and all three revolutionary forces were rural and agrarian, with little in common with organized labor.

When the Villistas arrived in the capital, they looted it and dominated it, but, as bandits, couldn't really rule. Still, they and the Zapatistas made the masses an ever-present threat, and forced a social revolution on Carranza's constitutionalists.

After the Zapatistas and Villistas ate the capital bare and were forced to withdraw, Obregon moved in, organized a new army with 'red battalions' from the urban proletariat, and took the fight to Villa, defeating him in a bloody battle of 50,000.

Demographically and economically, the Mexican Revolution/Civil War was a calamity. Perhaps 2M Mexicans, out of a population of 12M, died or fled.

The defeated Villa tried one last role of the dice: raiding the United States to draw an intervention which might smash the Carranza government. But Carranza handled it skillfully, permitting an intervention but so regulated it didn't anger nationalist Mexicans.

Attacking Americans destroyed Villa; he could no longer buy arms, sell loot, or seek refuge over the border. He remained a minor bandit until the Carranza bought him off with an hacienda (and he was later murdered by relatives of some of the women he'd raped).

The Constitutionalists/Carranza had won, but they had to write a new Constitution. Previous Mexican constitutions copied the US, but this did not work in Mexico, as Mexicans tended not to unity but anarchy in the absence of an all-powerful government.

Fragmenting power between federal and state and between three branches failed in Mexico; it did not prevent tyranny and simply paralyzed national governments unless subverted (eg Diaz). So the new constitution created an all-powerful President as effectively elected monarch.

Rather than try to limit the executive and center to prevent tyranny, he was given near-absolute power, with the only condition being "no reelection."

The Mexican mind could not cope with true separation of powers, but it did understand hierarchy.