Reflections on Pancho Villa and the Fall of Dictators

Dictators – whether in Spain, South Africa, Romania or Syria —retain power for decades. They can seem impregnable and invulnerable. But they always fall, and when they do fall the world acts surprised. It ought not to be. The demise of dictators is woven into the fabric of history. In his massive, exhaustive, definitive new biography of Pancho Villa, famed Mexican author, Paco Ignacio Taibo II, calls Porfirio Diaz—who ruled Mexico for 30 years, from 1876 to 1911— the “nearly eternal dictator.” Bashar al-Assad with his prisons and his police and the backing of Putin also seemed to be a nearly eternal dictator. When his time came, he ran to Russia. Dictators have escape routes.

No one played a more decisive role in the overthrow of Porfirio Diaz than the charismatic, photogenic Villa, the only 20th century revolutionary to be the subject of a Hollywood movie while real bullets were flying, and also the only 20^th century revolutionary to invade the United States. Villa had all the qualifications to spearhead the demise of Diaz and end his oppressive regime. An excellent marksman usually armed to the teeth, and a veteran horseman, he was unafraid to take up arms against powerful armies. He made efficient use of railroads, airplanes, modern technology such as telegrams and telegraphs, printed banknotes and used them to purchase everything his armies needed to survive. He knew how to isolate, neutralize and ally – crucial for any guerrilla war.

Villa also manufactured and disseminated fake news, and befriended reporters. John Reed wrote about him in Insurgent Mexico before traveling to Russia and writing about Lenin and the Bolshevik revolution in Ten Days that Shook the World.

Villa was one of those natural born insurgents and instinctive rebels like Che Guevara who are more effective as destroyers of old orders not as builders of a new order; more adept and savvy on the run then lodged in an office and behind a desk. His life as a bandit prepared him to wage guerrilla warfare, confiscate property and weapons, execute disloyal troops and take on the Catholic Church and its conservative priests.

His detachment from ideologies—he was no Marxist or Communist, though he was an anti-imperialist — plus his liberation from established political organizations, except those he created to support his own military campaigns—made him elusive, slippery, furtive and seemingly an eternal outlaw. With no fixed headquarters, but rather a mobile tent and a fast horse to ride into the mountains for safety and to regroup, he evaded capture by American soldiers led by General John J. Pershing and Mexican forces led by his foes. George Patton joined the fray. Whenever Villa seized food, commodities and resources, he shared them with the poor and thereby created a loyal following.

If any single person brought about the fall of the man who toppled Diaz, it was Villa himself. Though he had substantial help from his friend and comrade Emilio Zapata and his troops, Villa overextended himself and lost his devotion to armed struggle. He made his own separate peace with the victorious conservative leaders of the Mexican Revolution, accepted land, a hacienda, money, and immunity from prosecution. You might say he was co-opted.

More or less settled, he was assassinated (in a car in which he was riding), and, while he became a legendary folk hero and the subject of many corridos, he was not formally recognized by the Mexican government for his strategic role in the revolution of 1910-1920 until decades after his murder.

He was too unorthodox and too much of a maverick to be packaged, labeled and sold as an iconic hero until his followers, the Villiasts, were mostly dead and buried. Finally, the Mexican government declared 2023, “the year of Francisco Villa.”  Taibo’s biography of Villa was translated into English and published in the US by Seven Stories in 2024. Subtitled “a revolutionary life,” it aims to separate the man from the myth, an impossible task given Villa’s legendary status, the proliferation of tangled stories about him and his own self-generated mythology. In the end, Taibo amplifies the myth and the man and places him in the pantheon of revolutionaries along with Che and Castro.

The many photos of Villa on horseback wearing a sombrero help Taibo mythologize. So do the posters from that era, including one that invites US citizens to cross the border and join Villa and the insurgents. A few apparently did that. While battling American troops led by General Pershing, Villa proposed the idea of digging a trench between Mexico and the U.S. “so wide and deep that no American could ever come to rob Mexican land, gold, or oil.” He was a nationalist, a dreamer and a utopian as well as a brilliant military tactician and strategist. Pancho Villa might inspire foes of dictators and dictatorships around the world today. “!Viva Villa!.”

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