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New Year’s Day 1905 was not the most festive of holidays in Mexico City; the climate of fear and hate which had been taking root in the Mexican capital since the summer of 1904 was growing steadily worse, and many foreign diplomats believed it was just a matter of time before the city exploded into riots once again-- or worse, became the battleground for the start of a civil war. And they were not alone in this dire assessment; U.S. Army bases in Texas, Sonora, and Chihuahua had been a beehive of activity as the White House braced itself for the possibility of having to intervene in Mexico once more. Furthermore, foreign tourists-- and most Mexican ones for that matter-- were avoiding the city in droves.

      Theirs was a feeling of dread shared by many of Mexico City’s own citizens, who of late had started taking to the roads leading out of the Mexican capital in search of what they thought or at the very least hoped would be safer ground elsewhere. It was one of the biggest mass exoduses the capital had seen since the first grim weeks after the 1893 earthquake. The crucial difference between that migration and these latter-day migrations was that the disaster provoking them was man-made in origin. Some of the more apocalyptically minded members of the Christian church in Mexico even speculated that these impromptu evacuations from the nation’s capital city might be a harbinger that the end of the world was coming.

      February brought a fresh wave of cause for concern among the capital’s citizens as Mexico City’s mayor was assassinated by a left- wing radical who was himself shot to death by police in the aftermath of the assassination. Although there was no evidence found to suggest anyone other than the shooter himself could have been responsible for the mayor’s death, panic quickly spread in response to rumors that the mayor’s assassination had been the first blow in an alleged socialist plot to overthrow the Mexican federal government and establish a left- wing dictatorship. By the first week of March Mexico City had almost turned into an armed camp as political leaders of all ideologies took to carrying loaded guns with them wherever they went lest they too get shot by a fanatical assailant.

       On March 9th the assassination of a member of Mexico City’s Legislative Assembly of the Federal District sparked the worst riots the capital had seen in nearly a decade. The unrest lasted nearly a week, and before it was all over more than 40 people were dead and scores of buildings had been destroyed. Panicked that this might be only the beginning of a final descent into civil war in Mexico, the Mexican federal government imposed martial law on the city less than twelve hours after the riots ended. This decision was greeted with mixed feelings on the part of the capital’s population: some welcomed the move as a sign that the government was ready to act decisively to restore order in the city, while others feared it signaled a return to the kind of dictatorship Mexico had known during Portofilo Diaz’s second reign as president two-plus decades earlier.

       The Mexican army didn’t take long to assert full control over the beleaguered capital: within just 36 hours after the martial law decree was first issued, the Legislative Assembly had been suspended (“until further notice” as the new commander-in-chief of the martial law administration put it), a cordon of cannon and machine guns ringed the mayor’s office, and soldiers were posted on every street corner checking identity papers and casting suspicious looks at anyone who they thought might be a potential agitator. Sometimes they did more than just look-- in an incident that took place barely ten days after martial took law effect, a sergeant with a notorious reputation for both heavy drinking and violent fits of rage confronted a laborer who had accidentally spilled mud on a portrait of Mexico’s president and shot the poor man three times in the chest at point-blank range.

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        One unfortunate aspect of martial law is that it’s easier to start than to end. Even the most honorable of governments have a difficult time weaning themselves from it once the original need for it has passed; for regimes like the military-dominated junta which was running Mexico in the spring of 1905 the power that comes with martial law is as addicting as the most potent hallucinogenic drug. and breaking that addiction requires almost superhuman effort. It was an effort that, unfortunately for millions of Mexicans both within and outside Mexico City, the junta was either unable or unwilling to make. If anything, most of the junta’s actions pointed in the direction of perpetuating the power they had appropriated for themselves after the martial law decree was first imposed.

    One such action was the suppression of a factory workers’ strike in late April of 1905. The strike had been called in protest of the threatened loss of freedoms guaranteed to every Mexican citizens under that nation’s constitution-- among them the right of workers to rally against unfair labor practices and unsafe working conditions. Their protest lasted nearly three days before army and police units swarmed on them like locusts and assaulted them with everything from fists to cannons; according to modern historical research of the strike, nearly a hundred people were killed or injured before the carnage was over. The surviving leaders of the strike were summarily executed by firing squad. As traumatic as that was, however, it would seem like a lover’s quarrel compared to what would happen two months later on board one of the Mexican navy’s corvettes.

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     While not as famous as the Potemkin insurrection of June 1905, the August mutiny aboard the corvette General Zaragoza that same year had nearly as dramatic an effect on the course of Mexican history as the Potemkin revolt did on Russian history. It blew the lid off a host of resentments many in the lower ranks of the Mexican armed forces had been feeling towards their officers for months-- sometimes years-- and exposed considerable weaknesses at the heart of the federal government in Mexico City. Among Zaragoza’s tasks as part of the Mexican Navy was to serve as a training vessel for young cadets preparing to enter into maritime service; many of the trainees were the sons or grandsons of people who’d been hurt by the political upheavals of the previous ten years, and they were tired of the heavy-handed tactics the national civilian leadership used to keep a lid on dissenters.

     More to the point, they and the junior officers on Zaragoza’s crew heartily detested the harsh treatment they were often subject to at the hands of the ship’s senior officer staff.     It wasn’t unusual for a cadet to be cuffed simply for disagreeing with a superior on a seemingly minor matter; as often as not the ship’s brig was filled to the brim with unlucky seamen jailed for relatively trivial offenses. In emotional and psychological terms, the corvette was a bomb waiting to go off at any second....and on August 17th, 1905, it finally did.

      The precise sequence of events which triggered the Zaragoza mutiny is still a matter of considerable dispute even today, but it is generally agreed that the initial catalyst for the uprising was an argument between a group of cadets and the ship’s first officer over the quality of the vegetables intended to be served with lunch in the mess hall the next day. One harsh word led to another, then to pushing and shoving between the cadets and Zaragoza’s other senior officers, and finally to the crack of rifle fire as the ship’s guard detail shot two of the cadets for what her first officer asserted was a deliberate attempt to incite a riot on board. This action effectively obliterated any hope there may have been for a peaceful resolution to the standoff between the cadets and their superiors. Outraged by what they regarded as the outright murder of their two friends, the remaining cadets went after the guards and the senior officers like rampaging bulls. In turn the senior officers viciously lashed out at the mutineers, ignoring an urgent plea from the ship’s chaplain for both sides to turn aside from violence and peacefully resolve their dispute.

      By the time Mexican marines finally managed to quell the revolt on the evening of August 19th, the Zaragoza looked less like a maritime training vessel than a charnel house. All of the ship’s officers and most of her cadet crew were dead, and those who’d survived the carnage were so badly injured it was questionable whether they would even make it off her decks before succumbing to their wounds. The photographs of the violence-ravaged corvette in the next day’s newspapers shocked the Mexican public beyond words-- and when the handful of sailors who had survived the mutiny began giving their first-hand accounts of what had happened on(and below) her decks as well as the circumstances leading up to the mutiny, the shock turned to full-fledged outrage.

      Throughout the rest of August and well into the first half of September anti-government rallies were held daily in Mexico City’s main square; the demonstrators, calling themselves “Zaragosistas” in tribute to the Zaragoza’s fallen crewmen, demanded the resignation of the entire Mexican cabinet and an end to martial law in Mexico City. They got most of what they wanted in early October, when the martial law decree was finally lifted in Mexico’s capital and the Mexican president, war minister, attorney general, naval minister, chief of the national police, and treasurer all tendered their resignations to the Mexican Senate. A caretaker administration was quickly appointed to keep the machinery of state functioning until elections could be held; one of the new government’s first official acts was to appoint a commission to institute reforms of disciplinary procedures in the Mexican armed forces, with special attention to the navy.

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     During the next decade, Mexico experienced a period of relative political calm as the country finally achieved a measure of economic success at home and began achieving greater standing abroad. However, three events happened that would greatly disrupt the Mexican government’s plans for the nation’s future. The first was the outbreak of a new crisis along the Campeche border with Guatemala. This time it was the Guatemalan government accusing the Mexicans of aggressive intent; a series of cross-border skirmishes between rogue Mexican militia bands and Guatemalan frontier troops had convinced the government in Guatemala City that Mexico was getting ready to mount an invasion of Guatemala to avenge the Guatemalan occupation of Campeche thirteen years earlier.

     No sooner had the border crisis with Guatemala passed than the second event-- the outbreak of World War I --bit deeply into Mexico’s overseas trade with the great capitals of Europe. With German U-boats waging an all-out campaign against Allied shipping and the Royal Navy enforcing a strict blockade of Germany’s major seaports, the Mexican government’s export options were seriously curtailed, and the nation’s private industry suffered accordingly. By late 1915 Mexico’s gross national product had dropped twelve percent and one out of every six Mexican adults was unemployed as the loss of export trade with Europe forced companies to either sharply cut back their operations or even go out of business altogether.

    The third and perhaps most serious event to disrupt the Mexican government’s efforts to make the country more prosperous happened when a peasant farmer’s son whose ancestors had once lived in Chihuahua before that state was transferred to American jurisdiction became the leader of a guerrilla army that was determined to overthrow the establishment in Mexico City. He’d been born as José Doroteo Arango Arámbula, but the world would soon known him better by another name-- Pancho Villa....