Pancho Villa

Once a fugitive cattle thief in the mountains of northern Mexico, Pancho Villa became the most famous commander of the Mexican Revolution. His Division of the North helped topple two regimes between 1911 and 1914, and his later raid on a New Mexico town drew an American army across the border. Celebrated by many Mexicans as a champion of the poor and condemned by others for his brutality, he was killed in an ambush in 1923.

Most accounts give his birth as 5 June 1878 and his birth name as José Doroteo Arango Arámbula; the son of a sharecropper, he grew up on a large hacienda in Durango, though he himself told several conflicting versions of his early life. After his father's death he worked at a series of jobs, then drifted into banditry. Arrested by the rural police in 1902, he was forced into the federal army, deserted, and settled in Chihuahua, where by 1903 he was using the name Francisco "Pancho" Villa. Abraham González, the local organiser for the opposition candidate Francisco Madero, persuaded him that his raids on the estates could serve a political cause.

When Madero called for revolt against Porfirio Díaz in 1910, Villa joined at once. In 1911 he and Pascual Orozco took Ciudad Juárez, against Madero's orders, and Díaz resigned soon afterwards. In 1912 Villa fought for Madero against Orozco's rebellion, but General Victoriano Huerta accused him of theft and ordered him shot; the president intervened, and Villa was jailed in Mexico City, where he improved his reading and writing. He escaped on Christmas Day 1912. After Huerta seized power and Madero was killed in February 1913, Villa returned to Mexico with a handful of men and joined the Constitutionalist movement led by Venustiano Carranza.

Villa now built one of the strongest armies in Mexico, the Division of the North, financed by printing money, forced loans and confiscations from wealthy landowners. Briefly governor of Chihuahua in 1913, he moved his troops south by rail, winning at Tierra Blanca, Torreón and, in June 1914, at Zacatecas, the bloodiest battle of the revolution, in defiance of Carranza's orders. Huerta left the country in July. American reporters such as John Reed spread Villa's fame, and Villa even appeared as himself in Hollywood films.

Villa and Carranza split in September 1914. Villa allied with Emiliano Zapata and their forces occupied Mexico City, but Carranza's general Álvaro Obregón defeated Villa heavily at Celaya in April 1915 and again over the following months. After a failed offensive into Sonora, where the United States let Carranza move troops across its railways, much of Villa's army surrendered. Washington recognised Carranza later that year.

Reduced to guerrilla warfare in Chihuahua, Villa turned against the Americans. His men killed American mining employees on a train in January 1916, and on 9 March they raided Columbus, New Mexico, where eighteen Americans and about 80 of the raiders died. President Woodrow Wilson sent troops under John Pershing into Mexico, but they failed to catch Villa and withdrew in February 1917. In these years Villa's forces also committed atrocities against Mexican civilians, including mass rapes at Namiquipa, though some historians argue that other crimes were wrongly blamed on him.

After Carranza was killed in May 1920, Villa made peace with the interim president, Adolfo de la Huerta, in exchange for a large estate at Canutillo and pensions for his remaining men. On 20 July 1923 gunmen ambushed his car in Parral and killed him. A Durango politician, Jesús Salas Barraza, claimed responsibility, but historians think the killing was most likely ordered by Obregón and Plutarco Elías Calles. Long left out of the official story of the revolution, Villa was reburied in the Monument to the Revolution in Mexico City in 1976.

Our 1914 map shows Mexico at the height of Villa's power, and the 1920 map shows the country as his rebellion came to an end.