The Guadalajara Reporter

Zapata wanted to retire, marry, and settle into a quiet countryside life, but no warring faction wanted that

‘As of marriages, so of revolutions,’ writes a historian of Mexico. ‘The best take years to turn out well. (Francisco) Madero accomplished the overthrow of (Porfirio) Diaz in ten months of planning and action. A victory won too soon.’

On June 22, 1911, the Mexican newspaper El Pais carried a story that surprised many.  General (Emiliano) Zapata had just arrived in Cuernavaca, the capital of his home state of Morelos, after speaking to the man who was about to become Mexico’s new president.  The “jefe” of the South had been called by Francisco Madero to answer grave charges (i.e that Zapata was a bandit planning a new uprising) made by Mexico City newspapers “faithful to their program of deceiving an unfortunate public.”  He left no doubt as to the falseness, and danger, of such accusations, especially at this moment of peace, which so many believed would continue.  He sensed something unsettling about the inexperienced man who had just turned Mexico’s history upside down.

Yet Zapata wanted to trust Madero.  But in this, their third meeting, he could not understand Madero’s patience with those who hated so much of the Revolution.

Actually, all Zapata wanted to do was to go home, retire and get married.

He and those associates who accompanied him to the capital traveled in “magnificent automobiles,” reported El Pais. They paused at the Cuernavaca railroad station. General Zapata spoke with those who had gathered to wish him well.  He declared that if he were affiliated with a revolutionary party, he was not guided by the idea of gain, but of patriotism.

Elected president in October, Madero immediately created freedom of the press, gave workers the freedom to organize unions, but hesitated to take on the “land problem.”   He was the product of a rich hacendado family.  He had no practical concept of what the peones and campesinos who worked Mexico’s millions of hectares of fertile (and not so fertile) soil endured at the hands of large landowners.

Zapata sensed this and it tempered his trust.  Madero, fatally, appointed Brigadier General Victoriano Huerta to put down some landowner-fomented uprisings in the north, even though Huerta was not his first choice.  Unfortunately, Madero believed that all men harbor good in their hearts.  Just as he did not understand Zapata’s simple, campo friends, he did not understand sadistic monsters such as Huerta.

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