The General and the Jaguar by Eileen Welsome Read Free Book Online Page A

the
     coastlines—purportedly to help citizens who were fleeing the country, but clearly meant to intimidate the Huerta regime. And
     to further weaken the government, Wilson decided to lift the embargo on munitions that had been put in place by President
     Taft’s administration. Soon guns and weapons began flowing to rebel troops across the border. Wrote Secretary of State Bryan,
     “Settlement by civil war carried to its bitter conclusion is a terrible thing, but it must come now whether we wish it or
     not.”
    The move dismayed the foreign diplomats in Mexico City. But Pancho Villa was thrilled: “I think President Wilson is the most
     just man in the world. All Mexicans will love him now, and we will look on the United States as our greatest friend, because
     it has done us justice.”
    V ILLA HAD RETURNED to private life after Madero had been sworn into office, opening four prosperous butcher shops in Chihuahua City. At one
     point, President Madero had called upon him to help the then loyal Victoriano Huerta in stamping out local revolts and Villa
     had responded with alacrity, rounding up his old troops and placing himself under Huerta’s command. But Huerta had treated
     Villa with contempt, referring to him sarcastically as
el general honorario.
Villa, in turn, began referring to Huerta as
el borrachito
—the little drunkard. “Not once in all the times I spoke with him was he altogether sober,” Villa said in his memoirs, “for
     he drank morning, afternoon, and night.”
    One morning, raging with fever, Villa had been summoned to Huerta’s headquarters, placed under arrest for taking a horse,
     and escorted to an adobe wall where a firing squad awaited him. At the last minute he received a reprieve from Madero and
     was sent to prison instead. There he languished for months, improving his reading skills and writing long beseeching letters
     to Madero in which he begged him for help. Finally, six weeks before Madero was assassinated, Villa disguised himself as a
     lawyer and escaped from prison. He walked out the front gate, wearing a black overcoat and dark glasses and carrying a handkerchief
     in front of his face.
    He made his way to El Paso, where he took up residence at the Hotel Roma, checking in under the name Doroteo Arango. He kept
     a box of homing pigeons in his room, telling people that he had a very delicate stomach and had to live on squab, but in reality
     used the birds to send messages to friends in Chihuahua. He rode around town on a motorcycle and went to the Emporium, a Greek-owned
     bar and club where Mexican expatriates congregated, and to the Elite Confectionery, where he bought ice cream and peanut brittle
     and strawberry pop. “He had fallen back into obscurity, wore a bowler hat—no better sign there is of abdication from romantic
     dreams—and his career seemed over. But the fates were to give him another chance, and he was the man to take that chance,”
     observed James Hopper, a correspondent for
Collier’s,
who wrote many insightful pieces about the Mexican Revolution and the border.
    When Villa learned that Huerta had assassinated his beloved “Maderito,” he vowed to topple him. On March 6, 1913, two weeks
     after the assassinations, Villa and eight companions splashed across the Rio Grande on horseback, carrying rifles and ammunition,
     two pounds of sugar, coffee, and a pound of salt. As Villa made his way south, he recruited men and collected horses and arms
     to rebuild his army. Within eight months, the entire state of Chihuahua would be under his control and the uneducated Villa—who
     had learned how to sign his name from a store clerk and copied it over and over in the sand until he got the elaborate curves
     and flourishes just right—would find himself building schools, printing money, enacting price controls on bread, meat, and
     milk, and putting his peon army to work cleaning the streets and operating the local power plant.
    In the early months of his