((POD: Felipe Ángeles (Pancho Villa's right-hand man, who IRL was executed one day before newly-installed Madero's Presidential Pardon arrived at his prison), fresh out of prison, sets about, strangely enough, building a network of support for his close friend, the bandit-turned-peasant-insurrection-leader Pancho Villa, among Ángeles's natural environment: the elegant dinner parties and lofty corridors of powers of Mexican, specifically Northern, high society. The powerful Terrazas family, already torn by the rivalry between the immensely wealthy patriach, Luis Terrazas, and his ardent Maderista younger brother, the journalist Silvestre, start developing links with Villa, a development of which Silvestre takes advantage, quickly positioning himself as the strongest link between any of his estranged family and the victorious rebel general who is loved by the people. Villa, eager to hold any sort of leverage over the powerful clan, goes along with this, and together they build up a powerful standing army, bolstered also by Felipe Ángeles, a brilliant career officer of sterling reputation, and his successful efforts to build a network of support for Villa among the professional army.))
The success of Villa in becoming the uncontested epicenter of power in the Mexican north gives pause to the American Ambassador, Henry Lane Wilson, who calls off a planned military coup with Chief of Staff Victoriano Huerta, to wait until better times. This in turn leads to a prolonging of Huerta's unsuccessful campaign against the adamant rebel Emiliano Zapata, who took up arms shortly after Madero took power, condemning the new government as a continuation of the previous "capitalist order." Zapata, who grew close to Villa during the revolt against Porfirio Díaz, is now wary of his closeness to Madero and to the ruling classes through the work of Ángeles, although he's careful not to attack the charismatic leader and his beloved populist policies as Governor of Chihuahua State, including his oddball vision of land reform, facilitated in large part thanks to Ángeles's links among the educated and landowning elites.
Zapata's Liberation Army of the South strikes a series of important victories against Huerta during the summer and autumn of 1913, which allows him to expand his area of activity and replenish his besieged forces. Humilliated, Huerta returns to Mexico City and is informed by American sources of Madero's plan to dismiss him as Chief of Staff. Upon hearing these news, the bad-tempered and alcoholic Huerta storms out of the Embassy, and hastily carries out the original plan for a coup. However, the hastiness of it all throws his collaborators off, many of whom have been getting signals of worry among the previously-enthusiastic private sector, which even in the capital is warming up to the idea of capitalizing on Villa's popularity to achieve stability with minimal concessions to the lower classes. Nevertheless, the coup is carried out and it proves divisive among the ruling classes. General Venustiano Carranza of Zacatecas moves quickly to lead a rebellion against the new regime, in a clear attempt to outmaneuver Pancho Villa, who is forever afterwards derided for not moving as quickly as Carranza, and is then put in the position of subscribing to Carranza's insurrection instead of leading his own, although his popularity remains strong and there are now many voices (amplified by a sympathetic press) calling on him to lead the country after the "usurper" is deposed.
The war quickly turns against Huerta, who (in spite of un-enthusiastic American support efforts) is unable to put down all the fires surrounding him, losing severe losses at the hands of a quickly-advancing and reinvigorated Zapatista movement from the south until his decisive defeat the hands of Villa and Carranza in Zacatecas. Despite the calls for him to rule, Villa agrees to recognize Carranza as President for the sake of stability on the condition that he remain on as Governor of Chihuahua, where his peasant base has begun calling for the expansion of his militaristic mode of land reform, and, controversially, also securing for himself the position of Chief of Staff, raising alarms among urban elites about the future stability of the country, but, given his immense popularity as something akin to a folk hero, this is mostly approved of by the majority peasantry.
After this success, Carranza moves to confront Zapata, who has begun to implement his own vision of anarchist-inspired restoration of indigenous communal land ownership and government systems in the Morelia region, close to the capital, apparently confident enough in his own legitimacy and the revolutionary environment of the country. After the Carranza offensive and Villa's refusal to disown the President, Zapata openly disavows the northern leader and denounces him as a traitor. This animosity only grows stronger after Carranza, bolstered by a support from a victorious Germany, begins carrying out mass executions of civilians suspected of sympathizing with Zapata's forces. The draconian tactic backfires as Zapata's support only grows stronger among the central and southern Mexican countryside, with rural uprisings in his name spreading like wildfire along the Tehuantepec Isthmus and onto the tropical south-east.
Meanwhile, Villa returns to Chihuahua eager to please his rebel peasant soldiers by expanding his model for land reform, but is surprised to meet opposition by a clique within his movement, led by old friend Felipe Ángeles, who, as ever, recommend caution to maintain the populist order and cite Madero's loss of support among the Mexico City elite as a cautionary example. Finding himself outmaneuvered in the urban centers of power, Villa, bandit at heart, grows restless both in his office as Governor and tending to national matters as Chief of Staff, which frequently requires him to travel to the capital, and begins to spend more time among his base, personally supervising the running of the militaristic communes (now called Villa Forts) and riding horseback in grand military exercises along the Chihuahua and Durange countrysides, causing even more wariness among the ruling classes, who had been behind Ángeles's move to form a rightist clique in the first place.
The constant travel and rapprochement with the poor peasantry led Villa to enthusiastically get involved in a local land dispute, seeing this as an opportunity to reassert his authority in face of the rightist clique. After a few major rallies, Villa publicly announces that the only viable solution to this particular problem is to found a Villa Fort with land taken from major landholders in the area. Despite panicked maneuvering by Ángeles and his clique, the situation only escalates as Villa declares that a traitor clique has taken control of the state government and, to the despair of peace-architect Ángeles, rallies a new rebellion against the traitorous clique and, for good measure, also against the increasingly-unpopular Carranza regime, whose bloody war against Zapata and unwillingness to cede on demands from peasants and workers nationwide have left him increasingly isolated.
Military and peasant leaders across Mexico answer Villa's call and the northern half of the country is quickly aflame in fighting. Carranza, however, has since only increased the flow of German weaponry and advisers (many of which are denounced as being simple foreign forces invading national soil), and so is able to hold the city and, for the most part, keep the originally-disorganized Villista forces at bay through superior equipment and tactics. He, however, knows he cannot defeat two Revolutions at once, and begins to sabotage the Villista movement by co-opting or buying out many different leaders and players, thereby giving him time to clear out Zapatista fighters from the mountains surrounding Mexico's central high valley, the region on which the Capital rests. With German help, the natural fortress that peasant rebels had previously employed to great advantage is quickly fortified by federal forces and turned against them, all the while Zapata seems content to lay down the pressure on the central region and concentrate on defeating pro-government forces in the south of the country, solidifying his gains and unifying the uprisings into a fearsome army.
Zapata's success, hampered somewhat by the difficulty of moving and communicating through the dense post-isthmus jungle, leads to the formation of a National Congress of the Indigenous Peoples of Mexico, which in its founding Congress adopts a program largely along Zapata's own line and incorporates nominal autonomy for the many varied forms of indigenous governance, though critics are quick to point out a pick-and-choose attitude by the CNPIM towards which indigenous communities and organizations it chooses to take in, preferring those that align with Zapata's popular communalist programme over those that reject it or outright align with "legitimate" government, army and business factions, thereby complicating even more a southern conflict already rife with questions over racism, government legitimacy and the very nature of a nation founded on colonial pillage.
Despite Carranza's original position of weakness, the success of him and his German backers in securing breathing room for his regime, thanks in large part to their successful co-opting of factions within the northern revolutionary movement and Zapata being bogged down in the bloody and complex conflict in the south.
However, the situation would quickly change as Washington became wary of a German satellite on its border, and instead chooses to funnel arms to Villa's forces. With this aid, Villa unifies a critical mass of fighters necessary to wage a war into the central region, managing to unify most of the revolutionary movement in a congress in Zacatecas that proclaimed him as president. From that moment on he would try to broker a peace between his forces and Zapata's, but it would be to no avail. Zapata, calculating that he had no reason to weaken his position after victory in the south, rejected Villa's advances and instead suggested that the peasantry should now rebel against Villa, for he had always taken the side of those in power when push had come to shove.
While it is true that Villa, controversially, never ordered the execution of Felipe Ángeles after he was captured (in fact, Felipe Ángeles would be pardoned and serve as his link with Washington during this phase of the war), he was known to regret the course of his relationship with Zapata, lamenting that, in his attempt to achieve peace, he had ensured an even longer conflict would embroil his nation for decades to come. The fight against the powerfully fortified Carranza would continue well into the 1920's, as the northern rebellion continued to fend off loyalist factions in the north (many of which had come around to once again fearing the bandit Villa) as well as constantly breaking its neck against the surprisingly powerful German-backed federal government. Villa died in 1922 during a campaign to try and encircle the capital from the East, cutting off its supply line to Veracruz. With the beloved leader fallen, the northern insurgency collapsed into infighting, and Carranza rang in 1923 confident in his ability to eventually pacify the entire country and live out his days as an autocratic proxy for Germany.
His fortunes would be short-lived, however, as a brilliant series of pincer maneuvers saw the remaining pro-government and anti-Zapatista militias quickly destroyed in short order. Shocked by this defeat, Carranza moved to quickly reinforce his southern borders but was sabotaged in this by the eruption of a series of insurrections in the far north-west and north-east, led by socialist and communist workers that were inspired by the success of leftist ideologies in Europe. These insurrections established a series of small "communes", mostly in the countryside (sometimes seeking justification in the late Villa's land reform decrees published during his short-lived "presidency), as well as barricades and factory occupations in the industrial quarters, fed also by the backlash against the end of populist welfare policies carried out by Villa, as well as the resurgence of Magonismo and the IWW in the face of the sympathetic Zapata's continued success.
Publicly committed to restoring the Mexican economy and cutting dependence on German imports to supply the capital, Carranza was pressed by Northern business and landowners to send reinforcements across the largely lawless countryside nominally held by the competing war bands of fractured Villismo. These disastrous campaigns (that, whenever they actually managed to reach the insurrections they were mean to suppress, only sank Carranza's popularity further by carrying out a series of atrocities and massacres, aided, controversially, by German officers) would prove to be a decisive factor in the relative weakness of Carranza at the time of Zapata's Great Adance, which saw a 800,000 strong force of indigenous peasants (most equipped with vastly inferior weaponry than the federal forces, as well as sometimes only minor combat experience) storm the networks of fortresses built by Carranza and his German advisors along the central mountain range. The advance was bloody, as not even Zapata's brilliant tactics could lessen the cost of storming fortified mountain defenses.
Seeing this, the US panicked. It quickly reached out to Felipe Ángeles (now back as Mayor and Commander of the Regional Militia for Chihuahua City, the state capital, a position from which he tried to mediate between the many factions and maintain peace in the city and surrounding areas) and asked him to form some sort of alliance that could claim legitimacy over the North during a post-Carranza era. Ángeles did them one better, and seized this opportunity to, as he said in his memoirs, "redeem himself in the eyes of Villa who watched from Heaven". He summoned a Congress in Chihuahua and not only managed to place himself as vice-president of a "government" led by charismatic rebel general and politician Adolfo De La Huerta, but he also convinced the different factions to actively overthrow the Carranza government, stressing the importance of seizing the seat of power before "those barbarians in the south." Fed by significant defections from the Carranza military, political and business establishment, the new rebel army roared southwards, and in a controversial decision, Ángeles (a known spiritist) insisted on taking the eastern route where Villa had died. This led to discussions among the army and it eventually split, with most commanders continuing the advance from the east and north, while Ángeles led a group of hardcore Villistas in a semi-religious "armed pilgrimage" to the site of Villa's death. With the defeat of Carranza's forces by Zapata and the Chihuahuista forces, the outer mountain ranges of Puebla proved little match for Ángeles's forces (he was, after all, a brilliant career army officer), and they even gained the honor of harassing and thus delaying the flight of Carranza and his High Command to the gulf coast, thus allowing Zapata to personally lead an all-cavalry pursuit force that forced the last guardian forces to surrender, leading to Carranza's capture and world-famous judgement at the hands of an All-Peoples Indigenous Tribunal.
With delegates from indigenous peoples in the United States (thus raising many concerns about the possiblity of insurgent indigenous ideology spreading to the States), the TITP was formed of representatives from indigenous communities, organizations and militias from all over the revolutionary Mexican south, and was quick to turn Carranza into an avatar of all the powerful White men who had wronged them over the centuries. Fragments from Friar Bartolomé de las Casas harrowing Account of the Destruction of the Indies were read aloud in many languages, including European tongues for the benefit of anarchist guests and journalists, as well as náwatl poetry recorded in Friar Bernardino de Sahagún's General Description of the Affairs of the Indies, which were composed shortly after the Spanish Conquest and speak of the plight of a people turned into "foreigners" and "trespassers" in their ancestral lands practically overnight. "The entire world," wrote US journalist John Reed, "was rudely awakened to the plight of the indigenous peoples of Mexico and, thanks to the presence and speeches by international guests, that this same history had repeated all over the American continent, downwards *and* upwards from Mexico. It was a provocation, a defiant stance, and many newspapers in "the West" were quick to dismiss them with all sorts of racist language and argumentation. They centered on General Zapata's continued unwillingness to hand the prisoner over to "legitimate justice" (whatever /that/ meant in the complicated scenario left in the wake of Carranza's defeat and Germany's practicaly withdrawal) and denounced him as a thug for threatening to go to war with the north should their forces dare confiscate Carranza by force. But the truth is that the indigenous peoples had no fear of war, they had already long experience waging it, not only since the days of Zapata's first skirmishes against landowners in the times of Díaz, but also because their whole existence had, for many generations, been marked by the experience of a constant state of pillage and war against the colonial system of capitalism and the State. This is the message that they now were loudly proclaiming for the world to listen, but much of it was, ironically, much more behind the times that the people they dismissed as "savages." "
1926 began with the Mexican revolutionary movement deeply divided. On one side, Carranza’s “Trial of the Centuries” as the sympathetic press called it, continued to wrack the nerves of the Northern and central business class, who were not amused to see a respectable military general lectured for hours on end by that same indigenous rabble that had just spent nigh on 15 years “pillaging and destroying” what had been, in their view, the legitimate social, political and economic order in the southern half of the country. Many of these businessmen had close contact with groups of wealthy emigrés who had fled the revolutionary south, and used their press outlets to spread fear and tall tales of southern indigenous barbarity.
Even so, a growing number of the business class came around to the idea that some degree of reform was necessary, especially if their own workers were to remain content in the face of the increasing popularity of victorious syndicalist ideals. Thus they reached out to many peasant and working class leaders to create a series of nationalist-populist organizations and fronts, the largest of which was the National Revolutionary Party, which received heavy funding to organize and shower the lower classes with direct aid, thus ensuring the loyalty of large sectors of the Villista working class.
Zapata held strong in a standoffish attitude during the long series of unsuccessful talks between his high command and representatives from the Chihuahua delegation, sometimes open about how his only real intention was to buy time for the Tribunal’s work to run its course. By this time, the proceedings had successfully managed to find an audience around the world. Controversially, Felipe Ángeles himself spent little time trying to broker cooperation between Zapata and De La Huerta, knowing the two to be too headstrong to come to an agreement, and chose instead to attend the proceedings of the Tribunal and develop strong links with indigenous delegates, which would prove crucial for his later political career, much to the personal chagrin of Emiliano Zapata.
It was around this time that enough stability finally set in for the many factions of the revolutionary movement to develop meaningful links with the outside world. Radical Socialist factions enthusiastically declared their support for the Indigenous communalist movement, while Totalists sided with the National Revolutionaries and their less imaginative ideas for land reform among individual orders. These promises were quickly derided both by hardcore Zapatista intellectuals as well their Radical supporters as nothing more than a hasty move by the Mexican business class to prevent further erosion of the institution of private property by creating a new class of minor landowners in the North. Totalists responded by arguing that Mexico was still a semi-feudal country, and thus needed more time to develop along welfare capitalist lines before it could realistically work towards socialism. It didn’t hurt that groups among the Chihuahua Congress had begun emulating the Totalist line, especially since it afforded them a “revolutionary” position against the ever-stronger syndicalist and IWW organizing. International syndicalism itself toed a careful line, expressing support for Zapata but also eager to seek and develop ties among the Chihuahuista factions. Thanks in part to some deft scheming on the part of Ángeles, who sought to secure leadership of the Northern left wing for himself, these efforts bore no fruit.
The Tribunal itself served as an organizing centerpole for the Indigenous Congress, who defiantly hosted massive tent cities in the outskirts of Mexico City to host the many guests that had flocked there from around the country and the world. By the end of its proceedings Zapata’s position was more secure than ever, and he even managed to grow a following among the Capital’s destitute poor, who were organized into Radical Socialist organizations thanks, in large part, to the efforts of Felipe Ángeles and his successful mobilization of “True Villista” prestige in coordination with efforts by City radicals and the Congress, always seeking to side-step and out-maneuver the disorganized Syndicalist factions.
By the time the Tribunal handed down its sentence, death by public execution, the environment was ripe for it to explode into an international incident, in which even the White House got involved and declared it an “uncivilized treatment for any formed head of state”. Zapata held fast, and insisted that he would protect and ensure the sentence be carried out. Before that could happen, however, a series of brutal hate crimes by northern soldiers against indigenous women sparked a series of riots that soon turned into running street battles in the capital. De La Huerta had no need to stick around in what seemed increasingly like hostile ground, and so he withdrew to Zacatecas to hold yet another Congress, declare himself the legitimate president of Mexico, denounce Zapata as a would-be dictator and prepare for war.
Felipe Ángeles answered his summons to withdraw, as his True Villista forces were still nominally loyal to De La Huerta, but he was sure to hold a quick series of meetings in which he managed to secure a safe landing for himself should Zapata win the war, a development of which he was oddly prescient. Back in Zacatecas, he once again managed to parlay himself into a mid-level position as Chief of the Third Army, and even got to place close collaborators in important positions, all the while patiently undermining the war effort as Zapata prepared a Second Great Advance.
Zapata’s advance was preceded by a series of famous ceremonial rituals which bestowed him with many leadership and guardianship titles along the lines of various indigenous Mexican traditions. These elaborate propagandistic ceremonies solidified his status as the leader of a new vision for the Mexican nation, one that fully embraced its indigenous traditions and placed anarchistic communal organization at the center of its project. Boasting a force now 1.2 million strong, fed by international volunteers and shipments of aid from Radical Socialist factions around the world, the force slowly began to march out of the central valley region and into the northern plains, where it would begin to wage a war of maneuvers against the highly mobile and experienced cavalry of the north.
This phase of the war, however, would be complicated by the reappearance on stage of a player that had remained mostly quiet since the earliest campaign against Villa: the conservative Church hierarchy, which lend its moral and financial support to many varied right-wing groups and militias to seize the opportunity opened by the failure of the “two revolutions” to come together under a single banner. The largest of these groups, the National Sinarquista Union, carried out bloody retribution against real and perceived syndicalist and Zapatista sympathizers. This only further complicated De La Huerta’s position, as he had previously tried to earn the trust of the right wing of the business establishment by promoting moderate populism as an alternative to radical Zapatismo, and was now being sidelined by hardline reactionaries who once again offered business backers the opportunity to assert their interests with open disdain for the social, political and economic goals of the working class, an offer the traditionally reactionary Mexican elite was only too eager to begin embracing.
The civil war dragged on for two years, as Zapata’s forces struggled to assert dominance over a large territory and establish communalist rule over an unenthusiastic and skeptic population, all the while De La Huerta kept retreating and harassing his outsider force. De La Huerta’s position, however, was severely damaged by both reactionary and syndicalist uprisings, as the IWW seized the opportunity to organize against and sabotage the northern right-wing war efforts, thus ensuring a stronger negotiating position once Zapata held uncontested power.
Felipe Ángeles, meanwhile, had focused on fighting Sinarquista rebels and building ties among factions within De La Huerta’s forces, paving the way for the moment in 1927 when he finally figured that his position was secure enough to betray De La Huerta and declare his fealty to Zapata. Quickly convincing his USA contacts of the wisdom of an arranged peace with Zapata rather than a prolonged conflict backing De La Huerta, his switching sides and the action of the “True Villistas” and associated forces proved decisive to De La Huerta’s defeat and his eventual flight to the United States, where he was welcomed by certain factions of Mexican emigrés who hadn’t already given up hope in his project and switched over to funneling arms to staunchly counter-revolutionary factions.
After De La Huerta’s flight, Zapata was forced to accept the necessity of keeping Ángeles on as the chief pacifier of the Mexican north, as many rebel factions made it clear that it was the only way he could ensure some kind of peace. Ángeles’s maneuvering once again proved chameleonic and decisive in establishing “Villista” left-populism as the solution for peace in the North, as he successfully united peasant organizations under the banner of Villa’s own militaristic land reform, a unique program that ensured that National Revolutionary and even Totalist players could find suitable accommodation in a new social order built, of course, under the prudent eye of Ángeles.
Less than thrilled by Ángeles’s continued role, but also wary of the potential consequences of ordering an indigenous army to pacify the racist and conservative Mexican north, Zapata took on this deal and in 1928 summoned a Constitutional Convention which, right from the get-go, was marked once again by the division between north and south. In exchange for the recognition of workers’ rights and the implementation of Villista land reform, the northern rebel factions and National Revolutionary groups, now unfied under Ángeles, managed to secure a limited restoration of “republican institutions” in certain southern urban centers, particularly those where port and industrial interests had already forced a tense peace with Indigenous rebels in the interest of stability and enduring operations.
Ángeles also managed to deftly negotiate a system whereby the north would participate in the anarchist-inspired National Council through a system of authorized political parties and social organizations which gave cover for the National Revolutionaries to keep organizing and making inroads among the people. It was not all victories for Ángeles, however, as he was ultimately unable to block the presence and even participation of IWW and other Syndicalist factions, who had also grown in the interim among the dissatisfied workers
of the north-east and far north-west, weary after years of being led to and fro by successive groups of nationalist revolutionaries, even as a much more radical (but still Indigenous and somewhat alien) programme took hold of the lower half of the country and
Syndicalism continued to accumulate victories throughout the world.
Unions, cooperatives and self-defense units of many varieties within the red-and-black tradition sprung up and were, for the most part, unified under the leadership of the IWW, which appealed to Zapata’s Magonista and anarchistic roots by rejecting Nationalist discourse in favor of that of international solidarity and “one big union.” As the Constitution was approved in early 1929 and work began to establish the series of local councils which would send representatives to the lower chamber (a process for which the southern indigenous communities were much more prepared) as well as the Western-style elections for the higher chamber (a process openly embraced by northern political parties as the one “legitimate” instance of national power), the Indigenous Congress faced increasing pressure from Totalist factions within it to “evolve” into more of a formal party, an initiative that was resoundingly rejected by Zapata, who publicly derided bolshevism as “a failed ideology of the Enlightenment plot.”
For three years, Ángeles held a series of positions within the federal government, all of them merely facades for his well-known campaign of pacification of the north. By all accounts, he did in fact try to combat the rising power of far-right organizations, many of which had by then begun embracing the fascist ideologies now growing elsewhere in the world. He did, however, work constantly to position himself as the undisputed leader of nationalist populism and, much to Zapata’s displeasure, coordinated persecution and repression of IWW strikes and rallies. Things came to a head when a Syndicalist newspaper published an extensive exposé of nationalist revolutionary efforts to establish a network of sympathetic army officers and militias, complete with arms caches and safehouses, as well as written assurances of support signed by Ángeles himself.
Disgraced, the northern pacifier fled up to the States, from where he coordinated an unsuccessful nationalist (populist and right-wing) uprising of the north against Zapata. The President, however, had by then worked with Syndicalists to establish his own network of IWW militias to rise up just for such an occasion, as well as a mixed force of highly-mobile strike groups that coordinated to jointly wear down northern armed militias and army factions, which had grown slow and ineffective after years of corruption and sometimes-murderous infighting, as well as overly confident of their ability to crush any Syndicalist uprising. Their surprise at the effectiveness of IWW militias led immediately to heavy-handed crackdown which earned the animosity of the civilian population.
The new civil war was marked by the inability of anti-Zapata forces to present a coherent strategy to fight back the growing revolutionary tide, as reactionary forces and even many National Revolutionary elements rejected Ángeles’s purported leadership of the movement, as his chameleonic career and reputation as a turncoat finally began to act as a political liability rather than an asset.
Zapata’s campaign reaped victories against the fractured opposition as the IWW continued to organize ever-larger sections of the working class and, decisively, began to make inroads into the countryside by co-opting some of the very “True Villista” peasant organizations once set up and managed by Ángeles.
De La Huerta, desperate to get back in the action and feeling sidelined by the “dishonorable” Ángeles, managed to stage a return to
Mexican soil just in time to unify National Revolutionary factions into a coherent fighting force that could be defeated by a joint IWW and Zapatista offensive during the famous Laguna campaign of 1930. In the aftermath of this final civil war, Zapata promoted the idea of a new Constitutional Congress to better ward against any such betrayals in the future. The IWW embraced the idea, positioning itself as the only faction in which Zapata could trust to carry on the Revolution in the north. One year later, a new Constitution would eliminate the higher chamber and bestow full authority on IWW chapters to organize territorially and send an allotted number of delegates for what was from now on the country’s only legislative assembly.
Zapata was installed as President, a position similar to head of state for which he would be reelected indefinitely. The head of government position would be rotated among the delegates of the Higher Council, an elected body of delegates from the ruling Congress. The arrangement, that legally and eventually factually led to IWW militants holding federal-level positions, ensured Mexico’s positions as a strange hybrid and conciliatory player between the Radical Socialist and Syndicalist factions within the international left.
Mexican Totalists would be reduced to marginal groups within the northern and southern revolutionary orders, and, most shamefully in the world stage, fighting in the ranks of remaining National Revolutionary armed rebel groups.
For the next few years, the mixed revolutionary processes would deepen in Mexico, leading to profound changes in gender, religious and racial relations along the land. Of special note for this period is the situation of the Enclaves, especially-protected territories established in the 1928 Constitution and that had managed to negotiate or fight themselves into a situation where they could preserve their political autonomy and ensure the continued existence of limited forms of capitalist economics, particularly through the association of Mexican businesses with as-of-yet untouched foreign interests (excepting of course those of declared enemy Germany).
A particular case is that of Monterrey City in the north-east. A traditional bastion of right-wing thought, it had weathered the Revolution without facing the might of larger peasant armies (save for an uncomfortable visit by radical populist Villa during the height of his power), but instead facing sometimes bloody battles with the IWW, which successfully organized in the regions and towns around the city, but that never managed to wrest away control of the city, strategically nestled among large mountains so that any reinforcements could be easily fought away.
According to the most recalcitrant elements of Monterrey society, the City has never given over control to the Zapata government, and so is still part of the “official” Mexican State. Much to the disappointment of the IWW, who favored a full military advance to definitively take the city, Zapata obeyed the Indigenous Congress’s direction to maintain the city as a necessary literal middle ground with the US, and in 1931 agreed to recognize it as a Special Federal Administrative Zone, with a government designated through consensus by the Higher Council and a council of the remaining Monterrey business elite, many of which were mere figureheads for very wealthy emigrés. The political and intelligence intrigue within the city is, to say the least, incredibly complicated.
The revolutionary government never reached a definitive friendly arrangement with the Church, and tensions remained high, with constant scandals of bishops being arrested over counter-revolutionary activities and even of parish priests leading right-wing rebellions. Faced with this adversity, Zapata and his government would embrace the aid offered by progressive and socialist elements within the Church, rapprochement that was met with heavy skepticism by Zapatismo’s extensive anarchist and anti-Catholic factions.
In the eight years of effective Zapatista government, the international leftist press has been rife with stories about increased standards of living, medical and educational initiatives for the benefit of the rural poor, as well as an academic and cultural revival of Indigenous traditions and language. As for the north, Syndicalist social and economic organization took hold even as trust towards the Zapata government was rocked by successive scandals surrounding exposed government efforts to co-opt or facilitate a break-away of Mexican Syndicalists from the worldwide IWW.
The traditional army has, for the most part, been suppressed, with only a few remaining battalions and regiments guarding the “free cities”, and most of the country in the hands of local indigenous or IWW militias. This model is enthusiastically supported both by Syndicalists and Radical Socialists, but Zapata is adamant about the necessity of a permanent standing army, as an evolution of his earlier anti-permanent-army line. This new position has only deepened in him as the experience of fending off reactionary rebels and plots, as well as continually tense relations with its powerful neighbor up north.
Freedom of the press has been preserved for a series of authorized outlets, with lesser organizational media being tolerated as long as it follows a vague Zapatista line. Recently, however, reactionary forces have turned to underground terrorism as a tactic for organization against the State. Meanwhile, racist militias still frequently come down or out of their fortified hideouts to carry out indiscriminate massacres against government health or education facilitators, along with any civilians they manage to torture and kill before the rural guard forces can arrive.
Zapata grows restless with his cavalry’s continued failure to combat this new form of terrorism, the IWW continually lobbies for greater direct handling of government resources in the regions they rule and organize, and racist-reactionary terrorism seems bolstered by intermittent religious uprisings among the faithful northern peasantry. Mexico enters 1936 full of possibility and intrigue, and the ruling factions look warily towards the figure of Lázaro Cárdenas, a former military colonel who has taken over the regiment guarding a string of “free cities” in the gulf coast of Veracruz, and is gaining traction among the “free” urban masses with his revival of populism and National Revolutionary platforms.
