Mexican Revolution

The Mexican Revolution was a decade of uprisings and civil wars that began in November 1910 against the long rule of Porfirio Díaz and is usually considered to have ended around 1920. Shifting alliances of reformers, peasant armies and generals fought one another for control of the country. The conflict cost perhaps one to two million lives and produced the Constitution of 1917, which shaped modern Mexico.

Díaz had governed Mexico, with one short interval, since 1876. His regime brought railways, foreign investment and order, but power and land were concentrated in very few hands. Large estates, the haciendas, absorbed village lands, and most rural Mexicans were landless labourers. Elections were managed, and opposition was suppressed.

In 1910 Díaz claimed victory in another election after jailing his main rival, Francisco Madero, a wealthy landowner who campaigned for honest elections. Madero escaped to the United States and called for a revolt to begin on 20 November 1910. Risings spread, especially in the north under leaders such as Pancho Villa and Pascual Orozco, and in the southern state of Morelos under Emiliano Zapata. After rebels captured Ciudad Juárez, Díaz resigned in May 1911 and went into exile in France.

Madero became president but moved slowly on land reform, and Zapata soon rose against him. In February 1913, during ten days of fighting in Mexico City known as the Decena Trágica, General Victoriano Huerta seized power. Madero and his vice-president were killed shortly afterwards, by most accounts on Huerta's orders. Venustiano Carranza, governor of Coahuila, led a coalition called the Constitutionalists against Huerta, with Villa and Álvaro Obregón as his main commanders, while Zapata fought on in the south. The United States, opposed to Huerta, occupied the port of Veracruz in 1914. Huerta resigned in July 1914.

The victors soon divided. A convention of revolutionary factions at Aguascalientes in late 1914 failed to reconcile them, and Villa and Zapata broke with Carranza. In 1915 Obregón defeated Villa's army in a series of battles around Celaya, using trenches and machine guns. Villa retreated to the north, and in 1916 his raid on Columbus, New Mexico, brought an American punitive expedition into Mexico that failed to catch him.

Carranza's government called a constitutional congress, which produced the Constitution of 1917, promulgated in February that year. It gave the nation ownership of land and subsoil resources, providing the basis for land redistribution and, later, the nationalisation of oil, and it protected workers' rights and restricted the role of the Church. Fighting continued. Zapata was killed in an ambush in 1919, and Carranza was killed in 1920 while fleeing a rebellion led by Obregón, who was elected president later that year. Villa was assassinated in 1923. The revolution overlapped with World War I, during which Germany tried, through the Zimmermann Telegram of 1917, to draw Mexico into war with the United States.

Estimates of the dead vary widely, from about one million to more than two million, most of them civilians who died from violence, hunger and disease. Nearly 200,000 refugees fled abroad, mostly to the United States. The revolution gave rise to a political system that, under the party later called the PRI, governed Mexico for most of the twentieth century, and to large-scale land reform, especially in the 1930s. It also inspired an artistic movement, including the murals of Diego Rivera.

Our 1900 map shows Mexico under Díaz, and our 1914 and 1920 maps show the country during and just after the revolution, with its borders unchanged.