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Hell on Earth:

The 1893 Mexico City Earthquake

 

By Chris Oakley

Part 9

 

 

 

 

Summary:

In the previous eight chapters of this series we    recalled the 1893 Mexico City earthquake and its aftermath;    the United States government’s post-quake efforts to help    the Mexicans rebuild their capital; the ruthless war waged    by General Patrick Shafter against the bandit gangs plaguing    Mexico in the early days of the post-quake era; the beginning    of Guatemala’s efforts to seize control of the Mexican border    province of Campeche; General Patrick Shafter’s victory in his    long campaign to crush Mexico’s post-quake bandit gangs;  the    transfer of Sonora and Chihuahua from Mexican to United States    jurisdiction; the political gridlock afflicting Mexico’s federal    government at the start of the 20th century; the Guatemalan army’s    occupation of Campeche in 1901; the occupation’s consequences for    Mexican society; the eventual collapse of the Mexican federal    government in 1903; the heightening of political tensions in    Mexico over the summer of 1904; the return of martial law to    Mexico City in March of 1905 and the notorious Zaragoza mutiny    three months later; the eventual revocation of martial law in    the fall of 1905; and the circumstances that would plunge the    Mexican government back into economic and political crisis in    1914. In this final chapter of the series, we’ll remember the    exploits of revolutionary leader Pancho Villa and examine the state of Mexico today.

 

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******

To his admirers he was a 20th-century Robin Hood, a peasant Spartacus seeking to right nearly a decade of wrongs perpetrated by the upper class on Mexico’s masses. To his adversaries he was a thug whose criminal actions were being whitewashed by left-wing newspapermen and liberal activists. To the United States he was a human dagger aimed squarely at the throats of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Sonora, and Chihuahua. But whatever one thought about him, Pancho Villa was undeniably a game-changer as far as the history of Mexico was concerned. The four-year campaign by the Mexican federal government to bring him down consumed time, manpower, and resources which might otherwise have been employed to improve Mexico’s weakened economy.

That diversion in turn would have a long-term ripple effect on Mexico’s political and social fortunes, sowing the seeds for many of the troubles which still plague the country today. By the time Villa was finally run to ground in 1918 Mexico was poised on the brink of total collapse-- and in the decades since his death, Mexican society has more than once returned to that brink and at times even threatened to cross over it.

Villa was first motivated to oppose the Mexican government by the tragic outcome of the Zaragoza mutiny; one of his closest friends had been among the casualties of that mutiny, and he held the powers that be in Mexico City directly responsible for their demise. He was further driven to insurrection by the economic and personal hardships he believed the Mexican elite had subjected his family to while he was growing up. But the straw that broke the camel’s back as far as Villa was concerned was the shooting death of his fiancée during a political rally in Guadalajara in early August of 1914. Villa regarded it as an act of assassination, and he promised himself he would avenge that act no matter what the cost. Thus resolved, he then set to work recruiting a band of like-minded people to form the nucleus of the revolutionary arm with which he hoped to topple the existing Mexican government.

The newly minted guerrilla leader would stage his first attack in his war against the federal administration on August 25th, when he and his followers raided a Mexican army munitions depot southeast of Cancun. Physically the raid didn’t do as much damage as Villa had been hoping it would, but the psychological effects of the raid on his foes in the federal government in Mexico City was everything he could have hoped for-- it made the ruling party uneasy about what this new rebel chief might to do them next and fostered support for Villa’s cause in the minds and hearts of Mexicans who shared his belief that the power structure as it existed then needed to be radically changed.

Just four days after the Cancun attack Villa led another raid, this one on a federal police barracks southeast of Mexico City. Vast quantities of weapons and ammunition were seized in the assault and dozens of police officers killed; Villa’s own forces didn’t get off that much easier, losing fifteen of their number in the attack. But the propaganda boost his cause achieved from the raid was well worth the casualties he sustained. That boost came partly from his adroit use of the new medium of motion pictures to cement his public image as a fighter for the downtrodden masses against the ruling class of Mexico. Had Villa lived in the 21st century, it’s not entirely out of the question to imagine he might have employed social media such as Facebook to spread his radical message.

******

For most of the first year and a half of Villa’s insurgency, the Mexican federal government was largely on the defensive. There seemed to be nothing the Mexican army could do to throw the guerrilla leader off his game; he was often one step, and sometimes two steps, ahead of the government forces deployed to crush his rebellion. But in February of 1916 his fortunes began to permanently change for the worse. That month he lost two of his most trusted lieutenants in the same week-- one killed in a skirmish with government troops along the U.S.-Mexico border, the other a victim of malaria. They were experienced fighters, and their loss irreparably damaged Villa’s ability to make strategy or execute said strategy.       Things would get even worse for him a year later when regular Mexican army units successfully ambushed his guerrilla army near the city of Mazatlan; three more of Villa’s deputies fell to government bullets and Villa himself was seriously wounded. That ambush would in effect spell the beginning of the end for Villa’s rebellion as many of his most experienced front-line fighters would also die at the federal army’s hands. By autumn Villa’s uprising was a shadow of its former self; by July of 1916 his headquarters was under siege by regular army troops. Villa would spend the final two years of the revolt-- and of his life --on the run from his own country’s soldiers, not to mention the rather sizable American expeditionary brigade President Woodrow Wilson dispatched to assist the Mexican government in subduing Villa after he attacked several border towns in Sonora and Chihuahua. Many of those who had previously supported the rebellion began to withdraw that support, and Villa’s critics felt themselves vindicated in their refusal to back his revolt.

On August 3rd, 1918 Villa’s four-year battle to bring down the Mexican government came to a violent end as he was shot through the head by a Mexican federal army sniper. Two days later, what was left of his guerrilla force surrendered to American troops; by January of 1919 the last remnants of Villa’s former stronghold had been cleared away by Mexican army engineers. With his insurgency crushed, Mexico embarked on a run of economic prosperity and relative political and social stability which lasted well into the late 1920s-- in a speech made during ceremonies commemorating the Mexico City quake’s thirty- fifth anniversary in 1928, the Mexican finance minister confidently predicted that by 1930 Mexico would have the second-most prosperous economy in the Americas.

But the onset of the Great Depression in 1929 put an end to that hope-- and thrust Mexico right back into chaos. By 1933, when Franklin Roosevelt was sworn in for his first term as President of the United States, Mexico was teetering on the brink of civil war and there were fears among some diplomats at the League of Nations that Mexico might soon become the flashpoint for a regional war in Central America. Only when the Depression started to subside did tensions among the Mexican people ease somewhat, and even then there were still frequent clashes between government troops and anti-government protestors. It took the outbreak of the Second World War to bring back a semblance of national unity.

******

The anti-corruption crusades of early post-World War II Mexican governments engendered a glimmer of hope among Mexico’s people, and its allies abroad, that a new era of prosperity might be coming into bloom for that economically and socially buffeted country. But in the mid-1950s a new wave of graft at the federal and state levels plunged Mexico into hardship again, and by 1963 the country was in the midst of a health crisis that recalled the worst moments of the epidemics which had struck Mexico City following the earthquake seventy years earlier. One British physician who’d spent time in Africa and seen first-hand the health care problems confronting that continent was stunned when he visited Guadalajara in August of 1963 and found it gripped by twin epidemics of cholera and yellow fever; two months later President John F. Kennedy, in one of his last official acts before his assassination, signed an executive order clearing the way for millions of dollars in American medical aid to be dispatched to Mexico.       In the ‘70s the country was faced with yet another large-scale crisis, this time involving the Mexican banking system. During 1973 along four of Mexico’s largest banks crashed within weeks of each other; only a massive multi-national bailout effort spearheaded by the United States and administered by the International Monetary Fund kept Mexico from suffering full-blown economic collapse-- and even with the bailout the Mexican people still had to endure years of hardship. By 1981 the Mexican peso was barely worth the paper it was printed on; much of the rest of the 1980s was marked by chronic inflation in Mexico, a problem compounded by renewed tensions between Mexico and Guatemala over the disputed Campeche territory. Adding to the country’s internal woes was an escalation in drug-related crime as three of the most powerful cartels in the Mexican underworld went to war with one another for control of Mexico’s lucrative illegal drug trade.

In 1993 ethnic unrest in the state of Chiapas exploded into full- fledged civil war. Within six months the fighting had spread to three other Mexican states, and after that the Mexican federal army would be locked in a bitter fifteen-year-long conflict with the Zapatista Front of National Liberation; the radical leftist group was not only deemed to be a threat by the Mexican government, but was also classified as a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department, who in the spring of 2002 launched an investigation into claims that members of the ZFNL might have given logistical support to al-Qaeda in its attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon the previous year. And even after the Chiapas rebellion was put down large parts of Mexico would remain unsafe for foreign tourists-- it wasn’t until August of 2011 that the State Department would finally cancel its travel advisory warning U.S. citizens against venturing into certain areas of western Mexico.

More than a century after the earthquake that devastated its capital city, Mexico is still suffering many of the aftereffects of that disaster and the ancillary misfortunes it spawned in its wake. It may take generations more for the country to recover from those events-- if recovery is even still possible.

 


 

 

The End

 

 

 

 

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