Mexican Revolution

Madero assumed the presidency in November 1911, but his political inexperience quickly became his undoing. A moderate reformer, Madero sought to preserve the existing state institutions, including the Federal Army, while demobilizing the revolutionary forces. He preached patience to a population that had none left to give. In Morelos, Zapata refused to disarm, accusing Madero of betraying the peasantry, and launched an agrarian rebellion under the banner of land reform. Rebellions flared across the country, and the government grew increasingly unstable. Sensing opportunity, prominent generals from the old Porfirian establishment staged a bloody coup d'état in Mexico City in February 1913. Madero and his Vice President, Pino Suárez, were forced to resign and were promptly assassinated on the orders of General Victoriano Huerta, who seized the presidency.

Huerta’s counter-revolutionary usurpation plunged Mexico into a far darker, more violent epoch. His regime triggered the formation of a massive northern coalition known as the Constitutionalists, led by Venustiano Carranza, the dignified governor of Coahuila. Carranza rallied regional commanders, including the charismatic and brilliant northern general Francisco "Pancho" Villa, while Zapata’s forces continued their relentless campaign in the south. This combined revolutionary juggernaut systematically dismantled the Federal Army, forcing Huerta from power by July 1914. But with their common enemy vanquished, the victors immediately turned on one another. The revolution degenerated into a brutal, factional civil war. Carranza’s Constitutionalists, representing a more urban, moderate, and state-centric vision, locked horns with the radical agrarian populism of Villa and Zapata. By the summer of 1915, the Constitutionalist forces managed to break Villa’s army in a series of colossal battles, consolidating Carranza’s grip on the national government.

To legitimize his rule and cement the northern victory, Carranza oversaw the drafting of a new constitution, promulgated in February 1917. The document was arguably the most radical of its era, establishing universal male suffrage, promoting strict secularism, enshrining labor rights, and asserting national ownership over Mexico's natural resources. It also laid the legal framework for sweeping land reform, directly addressing the grievances that had animated Zapata's peasants. Yet Carranza’s implementation of these reforms was slow and reluctant. His attempt to hand-pick a civilian successor in 1920 sparked a final mutiny by his own northern revolutionary generals. Carranza was forced to flee Mexico City and was killed in his retreat.

The death of Carranza in 1920 marked the functional end of the violent decade of civil war, a conflict that had claimed the lives of roughly one million people, the vast majority of whom were non-combatants. The decade of fighting completely swept away the old Porfirian elite and destroyed the federal military, replacing it with a new class of revolutionary generals who would occupy the presidency for the next twenty years. These men gradually brought the military under civilian control, centralized state power, and slowly began to implement the promises of the 1917 Constitution. In 1929, they founded the political dynasty that would eventually become the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), an organization that ruled Mexico uninterrupted for the rest of the twentieth century. The legacy of those ten bloody years remains the foundational myth of modern Mexico—a long, agonizing convulsion through which a nation finally succeeded in claiming its own soil.