Maderistas

They are also the hardest kind of subject for a map. A state has a border and an army; a movement has a programme and a following. The border data draws the Maderistas at 1911 as a block of western Chihuahua, about 34,700 square kilometres — roughly fourteen per cent of the state, containing Chihuahua City, Cuauhtémoc and the Guerrero district, but not Ciudad Juárez, Casas Grandes or Parral. That is their heartland in the spring of 1911, not the country they were about to govern.

At a glance

What were the Maderistas?

The coalition that answered Madero's call to arms in November 1910 and brought down a dictatorship that had lasted thirty-five years. It included middle-class reformers who wanted honest elections, northern ranchers and businessmen who resented the Díaz regime's favouritism, agrarian radicals who wanted land, and opportunists who wanted office. What held them together was opposition to Díaz; what tore them apart was everything else.

Madero himself was an unlikely revolutionary: a small, vegetarian, spiritualist member of one of Mexico's richest families, who believed that the country's problems could be solved by honest elections and moral regeneration. He was brave, sincere and politically inept, and his revolution succeeded faster than his programme could bear.

Who was Madero?

Francisco Ignacio Madero was born in 1873 into a Coahuila family with land, cotton and a bank. He studied in Paris and California, ran the family estates, and entered politics as a municipal candidate and a critic of the Díaz regime's local bosses. His book La sucesión presidencial en 1910, published in 1908 or early 1909, argued that the country needed effective suffrage and no re-election, and it made him famous.

In 1909 he founded the Anti-Reelectionist Party and toured the country, drawing crowds that alarmed the government. In June 1910 — the date is given variously as 5, 6 or 15 June — he was arrested on the eve of the election, and Díaz was declared re-elected. Madero escaped to San Antonio, Texas, and from there issued the plan that began the revolution.

What was the Anti-Reelectionist campaign?

The first modern political campaign in Mexican history. Madero's party was a coalition of clubs rather than a machine, and its method was the tour: speeches in provincial towns, local committees, a newspaper, and the slogan sufragio efectivo, no reelección. It drew crowds that the regime had not seen before, and it convinced Díaz that Madero was dangerous enough to arrest.

The campaign's demands were procedural — honest elections, an end to presidential re-election, provincial autonomy — and its base was the new middle class of the northern towns: clerks, teachers, small professionals and the sons of ranchers. It was a movement for political reform, not social revolution, and it became a revolution only when the regime refused to be reformed.

What did the Plan of San Luis Potosí say?

Eleven articles, a set of transitorios, and a lie about its origin. The plan is dated 5 October 1910 at San Luis Potosí, but it was drafted in San Antonio — the city from which the Texas republic had governed itself two generations earlier — between 20 and 23 October and printed there on 26–27 October in five thousand hand-signed copies; the city in the title was a fiction to give it a Mexican address. It became public only in mid-November, when the distribution note fixed the rising for 18, 19 or 20 November depending on the copy.

Its content is more moderate than its reputation. It declared the recent election void, called for a provisional government and free elections, and promised to return land taken from smallholders — but through the courts, by restitution, with no agency, no deadline and no mechanism. It said nothing about the ejidos, the communal lands, or the hacienda system. Article 5, which set out the plan's interim arrangements, was bypassed by the treaty that ended the war.

The famous slogan — sufragio efectivo, no reelección — was the whole of its political programme: effective suffrage, no re-election. Everything else was left to a future congress.

When did the revolution begin?

Not on 20 November. The plan fixed 20 November 1910 as the day of the rising, and the day was a fiasco: the expected general insurrection did not happen, the government arrested suspects, and Madero himself crossed the border to find almost nobody waiting. The first shots came earlier — at Cuchillo Parado on 14 November, and at San Isidro and Miñaca on 19 November — and the movement only became a war when it took root in Chihuahua.

That pattern matters. The Maderista revolution was not a national uprising coordinated from Texas but a series of local risings that found leaders and weapons in the north: Pascual Orozco, a muleteer and transport contractor, and Doroteo Arango — Pancho Villa — a bandit turned revolutionary. In Chihuahua, where land hunger, drought and the collapse of the mining economy had made the Porfirian order unbearable, the movement found its army.

Who actually fought?

Not the people who wrote the plan. The Maderista army was made up of vaqueros, muleteers, miners, small farmers and the unemployed of the northern frontier, led by men like Orozco — a transport contractor who knew the country and could raise 300 riders in a week — and Villa, who had been a bandit and a butcher and turned out to be a natural commander of cavalry.

The middle-class reformers who ran the party stayed in the towns, wrote the manifestos and negotiated the treaties. The gap between the two groups is the movement's central social fact: the men who made the revolution were not the men who inherited it, and the land they wanted was not the reform the plan offered.

How was Ciudad Juárez taken?

Against Madero's orders, which is the best evidence that he never controlled his coalition. In April 1911 the Maderista forces under Orozco and Villa attacked Ciudad Juárez, the border city opposite El Paso, and Madero — who wanted a negotiated settlement and feared American intervention — tried to stop them. They attacked anyway, and the battle of 8–10 May 1911 gave the revolution its decisive victory.

Ciudad Juárez mattered because it was on the border: it gave the rebels a port of entry for arms, a customs house for revenue, and a visible symbol of government failure. With the north lost and the treasury empty, Díaz negotiated. The Treaty of Ciudad Juárez was signed on 21 May 1911, and consisted of a single operative article: the president would resign, and an interim government would hold elections.

How did Díaz fall?

Politically, not militarily. The treaty left the army, the Congress, the courts and the state governors in place, and it installed Francisco León de la Barra, the foreign minister, as interim president. Díaz resigned on 25 May and sailed for Europe. The old regime did not collapse: it negotiated a transfer of power to a government that contained many of its own people, which is why the revolution's radical wing felt betrayed almost immediately.

Madero was elected in October 1911 — indirectly, through an electoral college, which gave him 19,997 votes against 87 for his opponent, and a closer vice-presidential contest of 10,245 to 5,564. He was inaugurated on 6 November 1911, and the Maderista movement became a government with a programme it could not implement and a coalition it could not hold.

What was the American role?

Sanctuary, money and arms. Madero planned the revolution from San Antonio, printed the plan there, raised funds from sympathisers in the United States, and operated across a border that the American authorities policed intermittently. The 1911 neutrality proclamation and the deployment of troops to the border constrained the traffic without stopping it.

Washington's attitude was decisive in another way: the United States did not intervene to save Díaz. American business interests in Mexico were substantial, and the Porfirian regime had cultivated them; but by 1911 the American government had concluded that Díaz could not survive and that a Maderista government might be more stable. The ambassador's role in the later coup of 1913 — and the debate about how far he encouraged it — is the darker sequel to that calculation.

Was Madero a revolutionary?

In temperament, no; in effect, yes. He wanted a constitutional republic with honest elections, and he believed that once the dictatorship was removed, the country's problems would solve themselves through law and education. He was horrified by the violence his call to arms unleashed, tried to stop the attack on Ciudad Juárez, and spent his presidency trying to reconcile the men who had made him president.

That is why the movement outgrew him, and why the men who buried him — Carranza, Obregón, Villa, Zapata — fought for seven more years over a revolution he had begun but never commanded. The campesinos of Morelos wanted land, the workers of the north wanted wages and rights, and the old army wanted its privileges — and none of them could be satisfied by electoral reform. Madero's assassination in 1913 settled nothing, but it clarified everything: the revolution was not about a man or a plan, but about who would own Mexico.

Why did the coalition break?

Because it had agreed on what it was against and not on what it was for. Emiliano Zapata, in Morelos, had fought for land and found the plan's court-restitution clause worthless; in November 1911 he issued the Plan de Ayala, disavowed Madero and demanded the return of village lands. In Chihuahua, Orozco revolted in 1912, arguing that Madero had betrayed the revolution's promises to the north. In the cities, conservatives and the old Porfirian army waited.

Madero's government survived Orozco and the Zapatistas but not the coup of February 1913 — the Decena Trágica, ten days of fighting in Mexico City in which the army turned on the president, and Madero was arrested and murdered on 22 February 1913. His movement had begun a revolution it could not control, and the men who followed him — Villa, Zapata, Carranza, Obregón — fought over its meaning for the next seven years.

What did the revolution cost?

In 1911, less than the wars that followed. The fighting of 1910–11 was short, localised and small in scale compared with the civil war of 1913–20, which killed perhaps a million people and drove hundreds of thousands into the United States. The Maderista rising's casualty figures are not reliably recorded, which is itself a sign of how quickly it was over.

The political cost was higher. The treaty left the Porfirian army intact, and that army destroyed Madero eighteen months later. The revolution's failure to dismantle the old regime in 1911 is the reason it had to be fought again — and the reason the 1917 constitution, written after another six years of war, was so much more radical than the Plan of San Luis Potosí.

What does the map show?

The border data draws the Maderistas at 1911 as a polygon of about 34,700 square kilometres in western Chihuahua, running from roughly 27.5 to 29.4 degrees north and 107.9 to 105.3 degrees west. Inside it are Chihuahua City, Cuauhtémoc, Guerrero, Bachíniva, Namiquipa, Temósachic and La Junta; outside it are Ciudad Juárez, Casas Grandes, Madera and Parral — and every other Mexican state.

That is a military heartland rather than a state: the district where the Maderista forces concentrated in the spring of 1911, not the country they claimed. It is the same problem as the California Republic's 15,600 square kilometres or the Rio Grande's 303,000: the map represents control, and control in a revolution is a matter of where the columns are.

Common myths about the Maderistas

Timeline of the Maderistas

What the map shows next

At 1911 on the map the Maderistas hold western Chihuahua, and the Confederacy is half a century in the past.

At 1913 on the map Madero is dead, and the revolution has become a civil war between Mexico's own factions.