Puerto Vallarta Real Estate Articles

The right of the common man to own private property is a recent event in history. Wars have been waged throughout history over territory or land.

In the 1800’s, Mexico experienced a revolution that opened the ownership of land to the common people. One of the leaders of this revolution was Emiliano Zapata.

Emiliano was born on August 8, 1879, in the village of Anenecuilco, Morelos. Zapata was a mestizo and the son of a peasant medier, ….a sharecropper or owner of a small plot of land. From the age of eighteen, after the death of his father, he supported his mother and three sisters with the family farm. In September of 1909, the residents of Anenecuilco elected Emiliano Zapata president of the village's "defense committee," which was a group charged with defending the community's interests. In this position, it was Zapata's duty to represent his village's rights before the president-dictator of Mexico, Porfirio Díaz, and the governor of Morelos, Pablo Escandón.

During the 1880s, Mexico had experienced a boom in sugar cane production. This led to the acquisition of more and more land by the hacienderos or plantation owners. Their plantations grew while whole villages disappeared and more and more medieros and other peasants lost their livelihoods or were forced to work on the haciendas. It was under these conditions that a plantation called El Hospital, neighboring Zapata's village began encroaching upon the small farmers' lands. This was the first conflict in which Emiliano Zapata established his reputation as a leader. He led various peaceful occupations and re-divisions of land, which increased his status and fame regionally. The stage was set for another strong personality to become part of the revolution of 1910

In 1910, Francisco Madero, a son of wealthy plantation owners, instigated a revolution against the government of president Díaz. Though most of his motives were political, Madero supported a platform for national suffrage and prohibition of presidents succeeding themselves. Madero’s revolutionary plan also included provisions for returning seized lands to peasant farmers. The latter provision became a strong cause for the peasantry. Zapata began organizing local citizens into revolutionary bands, riding from village to village, tearing down hacienda fences and opposing the landed elite's encroachment into their villages. On November 18, the federal government began rounding up Maderist's the followers of Francisco Madero. Forty-eight hours later, the first shots of the Mexican Revolution were fired.

The government was confident that the revolution would be crushed in a matter of days, but the Maderista Movement kept gaining in strength and by the end of November, Emiliano Zapata had fully joined its ranks. Zapata, known as cautious, soft-spoken man, had become a revolutionary.

During the first weeks of 1911, Zapata continued to build his organization in Morelos, training and equipping his men and consolidating his authority as their leader. Soon, Zapata's bands of revolutionaries were poised to change their tactics and take the offensive. They became Zapatistas.

On February 14, Francisco Madero returned to Mexico after escaping from New Orleans. He realized that it was time to restart his revolution with an all-out offensive. Less than a month later, on March 11, 1911, the bloody phase of the Mexican Revolution began at Villa de Ayala.

There was no resistance from the villagers, who were mostly sympathetic to the revolution. They were sharecroppers or hacienda workers themselves, and the local police were disarmed quickly. Not all battles that followed were this quick, however. The revolution took its bloody course with Pancho Villa fighting in the northern part of Mexico, while Zapata remained mainly south of Mexico City. On May 19, after a week of extremely fierce fighting with government troops, the Zapatistas took the town of Cuautla.

Only forty-eight hours later, Francisco Madero and the Mexican government signed the Treaty of Ciudad Juárez, which ended the presidency of Porfirio Díaz and named Francisco León de la Barra, former ambassador to Washington, as interim president.
Under different circumstances, this would have meant the end of the Mexican Revolution. Madero's most important demands had been met, Díaz was out of office, and regular elections were to be held to determine his successor. León de la Barra, however, was not strong president. While Barra had great personal integrity, his political skills were weak. The new president could not assuage the peasants, especially since they knew his allegiance was clearly with the rich planters who were trying to regain control of Mexico by using the conditions of the Treaty of Ciudad Juárez. Zapata had been ordered to cease all hostilities, but he and 5,000 men entered and captured Cuernavaca, the capital of his native state of Morelos.

In 1911, Madero was elected president of Mexico, and Zapata met with him to discuss the demands of the peasantry. The meeting was fruitless and the former allies parted in anger. Officially, the Zapatistas were disbanded and Zapata himself was in retirement. The police forces were in disarray after fighting the revolutionary forces, and they were no match for the new wave of bandits now roaming the land.

The situation in Mexico deteriorated and assassination plots against the new president surfaced, fighting was renewed between government and revolutionary forces, and the threat of revolution was once again hanging over the cities of Mexico.

In the "Plan of Ayala", Zapata declared Madero incapable of fulfilling the goals of the revolution and promised to appoint another provisional president, once his revolution succeeded and until elections could be held. As part of his plan, a third of all land owned by the hacienderos was to be confiscated, with compensation, and redistributed to the peasantry. Any plantation owner who refused to cede his land would have it taken from him without compensation. The revolution was once again in full swing, and it was in these days that Zapata first used his now famous slogan of “Tierra y Libertad” or “Land and Liberty.”

It was in February of 1913, after almost three years of violent struggle, that a former loyal federal General, Victoriano Huerta, murdered Madero. The Zapatistas reached the outskirts of Mexico City. Huerta offered to unite his and Zapata's troops in a combined assault on the city, but Zapata declined. Even though Huerta eventually was declared the new president, after a sham election, he was forced to abandon the country in 1914, after yet another revolutionary faction, under "constitutionalist" Venustiano Carranza.
At this point there were three major revolutionary powers in Mexico: the army of Pancho Villa to the north, the Villistas; the” Constitutionalist Army" of Carranza; and the Zapatistas to the south. In an attempt to consolidate these forces and become their supreme commander, Carranza arranged a meeting at Aguascalientes, in which the Zapatistas and the Villistas -- the majority at the meeting -- agreed to a new provisional president. Carranza rejected the choice. War broke out between Carranza's moderates and the more radical Zapatistas and Villistas.

On November 24, Emiliano Zapata commanded the Liberation Army of the South. This was the new name for his fighting force of over 25,000 men who were to occupy Mexico City. Eventually, Villa and Zapata held a meeting at the national palace and agreed to install a civilian in the presidency. The war had not ceased. The Wilson Administration now officially recognized Carranza’s federal government. The “Constitutionalist Army” and the Zapatistas in Morelos appeared to be at a permanent stalemate. Carranza knew that he could never fully take Mexico while Zapata was still alive and in charge of his army. To rid himself of his enemy, Carranza plotted Zapata’s murder.

A letter had been intercepted where it was learned that Zapata had invited a colonel of the Mexican army, who had shown leanings toward his cause, to meet and join forces. Colonel Jesús Guajardo, under the threat of being executed as a traitor, pretended to agree to meet Zapata and defect to his side. On Thursday, April 10, 1919, Zapata walked into Carranza's trap as he met with Guajardo in the town of Chinameca. Zapata was shot and killed by federal soldiers. The legend of Zapata did not die with the man.
Carranza did not achieve his goal of ruling Mexico by killing Zapata. In May of 1920, Álvaro Obregón, one of Zapata's right-hand men, entered the capital with a large fighting force of Zapatistas. After Carranza fled, Obregon formed the seventy-third government in Mexico's history of independence. In this government, the Zapatistas played an important role, especially in the Department of Agriculture. Mexico was finally at peace.

Zapata's revolution was first and foremost an agrarian one. One of the ideas in Zapata's ideology was the re-establishment of ejidas or communally owned lands with shared use rights -- a system common among the Mexican indios. One of the best documents describing Zapata's position on land reform is the 1917 Manifesto of the People.

“To unite Mexicans by means of a generous and broad political policy which will give guarantees to the peasant and to the worker as well as to the merchant, the industrialist and the businessman; to grant facilities to all who wish to improve their future and open wider horizons for those who today lack it; to promote the establishment of new industries, of great centers of production, of powerful manufacturies [sic] which will emancipate the country from the economic domination of the foreigner...”

Zapata's main goal was the political and economic emancipation of Mexico's peasantry. Land reform was not an end in itself but a means to achieve independence for the common man. Zapata argued against a system that kept the sharecroppers and small-time farmers in perpetual poverty. He was cautious and prudent in not arguing for the dismantling of all haciendas. Zapata supported the coexistence between an empowered peasant population and a number of larger plantation owners.

Emiliano Zapata was an intelligent, rational leader, who tried to lead the people of southern Mexico out of extreme poverty by giving them back some of their land, terra firma.

Harriet Murray

Sources for this article are from Robert Million “Zapata—The Ideology of a Peasant Revoluntionary”; Roger Parkinson, “Zapata”, and John Womack, “Zapata and the Mexican Revolution”