Emiliano Zapata

Emiliano Zapata was a peasant leader from the state of Morelos, south of Mexico City, and one of the principal figures of the Mexican Revolution of 1910 to 1920. Under the slogan "Land and Liberty", he led an army of villagers demanding the return of land taken by sugar plantations, and he kept fighting successive governments until he was killed in an ambush in 1919. Denounced in his lifetime by the press of the capital as a bandit, he became after his death the revolution's most enduring symbol of rural justice.

Zapata was born on 8 August 1879 in Anenecuilco, a small village of mestizo and Indigenous families, some of whom still spoke Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, in Morelos. His parents, Gabriel Zapata and Cleofas Salazar, were not poor by local standards: they owned a little land and livestock, and Emiliano, the ninth of ten children, became known as a skilled horseman, horse trader and small farmer. Both parents died when he was in his teens.

Morelos was then being transformed by sugar. Under the long dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, which lasted with one interruption from 1876 to 1911, a few dozen great haciendas expanded their cane fields with new railways and mills, absorbing the fields, woods and water of neighbouring villages, often by dubious legal means. Many communities lost almost everything and their people became day labourers on the estates. This process had roots in the liberal Reform of the 1850s, when laws promoted by Benito Juárez and his allies broke up communal landholdings. Anenecuilco had been fighting in the courts for its lands for generations, armed with colonial-era titles.

In September 1909 the village elders of Anenecuilco chose Zapata, then thirty, to head the council defending their land claims. In 1910 he was briefly drafted into the army, apparently as punishment for his political activity, and was soon released through the influence of Ignacio de la Torre, a wealthy son-in-law of Díaz, for whom he then worked as a groom in Mexico City. Back home, when legal petitions failed, he began leading villagers to reoccupy and fence disputed fields.

In November 1910 the wealthy reformer Francisco Madero called for a rising against Díaz, whose regime had rigged yet another election. Madero's plan vaguely promised to restore lands unjustly taken from villages, and in March 1911 Zapata and his neighbours rose in arms. In May his forces took the town of Cuautla after six days of hard fighting, one of the blows that persuaded Díaz to resign and go into exile.

The alliance quickly soured. The interim government, with Madero's backing, insisted that Zapata's men disband before any land question was settled, and sent federal troops under General Victoriano Huerta into Morelos. Madero, elected president in late 1911, treated the land issue as a matter for the courts. Zapata concluded that the new government had betrayed the revolution. On 25 November 1911 he and the schoolteacher Otilio Montaño issued the Plan of Ayala, which disowned Madero, demanded the immediate return of stolen village lands, and called for the expropriation of a third of the great estates, with compensation, and the full confiscation of the property of landowners who resisted.

The federal army responded with scorched-earth campaigns, burning villages, deporting inhabitants and forcing men into the army. These methods drove more people into Zapata's Liberation Army of the South, a loose force of village bands that fought as guerrillas, returning to their fields between campaigns.

In February 1913 Huerta overthrew Madero in a coup, and Madero was murdered. Zapata fought the new dictatorship while the northern Constitutionalist armies of Venustiano Carranza, Álvaro Obregón and Francisco "Pancho" Villa advanced on the capital, and Huerta fell in July 1914. The victors then split. Zapata refused to recognise Carranza, whom he saw as another landowner with no interest in reform, and at the Convention of Aguascalientes in late 1914 the Zapatista delegates won acceptance of the Plan of Ayala in principle. Villa and Zapata sided with the Convention against Carranza, and in December 1914 their armies occupied Mexico City; the two men met at Xochimilco and were photographed at the National Palace, Villa seated in the presidential chair.

The alliance had little substance. Zapata soon returned to Morelos, and Obregón defeated Villa in a series of battles in 1915. In Morelos, meanwhile, the Zapatistas carried out a genuine agrarian revolution: haciendas were confiscated, land was returned to villages under agrarian commissions staffed partly by young agronomy students, and some sugar mills were run for the benefit of the movement. Zapatista intellectuals, including Antonio Díaz Soto y Gama, wrote manifestos, and some were issued in Nahuatl as well as Spanish.

From 1916 Carranza's general Pablo González invaded Morelos with great brutality, burning villages, executing suspected supporters and deporting civilians, while disease and hunger killed many more. The Zapatistas recovered much of the state in 1917 but were increasingly isolated and short of arms.

In 1919 González and one of his officers, Colonel Jesús Guajardo, set a trap. Guajardo pretended to want to defect with his troops and, to prove his sincerity, attacked and executed some federal soldiers. On 10 April 1919 Zapata rode into the hacienda of Chinameca to meet him and was shot down by soldiers presenting arms in salute. His body was displayed in Cuautla to prove that he was dead. Many of his followers refused to believe it, and stories spread that he had escaped and was still riding in the mountains.

The movement survived its leader. In 1920 Zapatista generals backed Obregón's revolt that drove Carranza from power, and they gained office in Morelos, where land was returned to many villages. The agrarian reform clause, Article 27 of the 1917 constitution, owed much to Zapatista pressure, though large-scale redistribution came only under President Lázaro Cárdenas in the 1930s.

The ruling party that governed Mexico for most of the twentieth century made Zapata an official hero, while its land policies often fell short of what he had demanded. Historians have debated whether he was a local leader defending the traditions of his village or a national social revolutionary; John Womack's classic study argued that his movement was rooted in the effort of country people to stay in their villages and not be forced to change. In 1994 the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, an Indigenous rebel movement in Chiapas, took his name in its uprising against the government and the North American Free Trade Agreement with the United States and Canada, showing how alive the symbol remained. His image, with broad sombrero, moustache and cartridge belts, is among the most familiar in Mexican history, and murals by Diego Rivera and others have made it known across the world.