McLynn's book is focused on the actions and ideologies of Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata during the Mexican Revolution, but it's not exclusively about that. It can't be, since what they did was shaped by and in response to the actions of others.
So McLynn starts with the reign of Porfirio Diaz, how he changed the rules to remain in power, how his aid to the owners of the giant haciendas and to foreign land investors increased dissent among the peasantry. Their land kept being stolen, and there was no legal recourse. Even when they had title deeds, they weren't honored. That in particular raised Zapata's ire, and was agrarian land reform was a consistent part of his movement throughout.
McLynn discusses the rise of Madero as a political opponent to Diaz, his flight to the U.S., the rise of various armed revolutionaries like Zapata, Orozco and eventually Villa. Madero's return and ascendance to the presidency is ultimately a disappointment to those who helped get him there. At least in this portrayal, Madero reminds me more than a little of the folks who run the Democratic party here in the U.S. More than willing to use the more radical elements to gain power, but always determined to cozy up to the people who were there enemies. That's Madero. He refrains from any land reform, preferring to try and make friends with the Army and the major landowners at the expense of the working classes who got him the job. So he ends up with no friends.
From there, you have the rise of Huerta and the revolution against him. Then the battles against the Carranza/Obregon front. The shifts in fortune for each major player, their shifting alliances, the escalations in violence. Huerta especially brings things to a level of brutality that leads to atrocities on both sides. Things don't remain at that fever pitch, but it seems easy for all the men in charge to fall back on that when things turn against them. Villa starts taking the old men in villages hostage so the people won't report him to the Army, or Pablo Gonzalez hauls all the people in the villages of Morelos off to concentration camps to take away Zapata's support.
The book does its best to parse fact from fiction on everyone's actions. This is difficult with Villa, where there are often many conflicting accounts. His, his admirers, and his enemies and detractors. So McLynn often will discuss each motive or theory in terms of which seems most likely. How accurate the conclusions he draws are, I don't know. Villa comes off as mercurial, self-aggrandizing in a way that works as both a great weapon and great weakness. His charisma is what helps him gather such a disparate group of people to his banner, and the loyalty he inspires wins him more than a few battles. It hampers him when he starts to believe his own hype too much, especially when he decides his failures are the result of turncoats.
This happens with Zapata as well, during the struggle against Carranza in the latter stages of the 1910s. There are defections and betrayals, but both men grow overly paranoid, and seem to fail to realize that while there are those who will cheerfully go on fighting and killing indefinitely, most people are going to get tired after a certain point. Especially if there's an option to request amnesty or possibly even get a reward for laying down arms.
McLynn's theory seems to be that what ultimately doomed both men was a lack of ambition. Once Huerta was defeated and the time to choose a new national leader arrived, neither Villa or Zapata stepped up. Zapata because he had no interest - McLynn presents him as a man really only concerned with things in his home state of Morelos - and Villa because he felt himself unsuited for the position. Villa apparently is very impressed by intellectuals and liked to learn, big on encouraging education for children, but didn't feel he had the level of knowledge to be a leader. And, like Zapata, he was mostly concerned with his home state of Chihuahua, with his idea of military colonies. So each stayed out of the way at the national convention until it was too late, allowing Carranza and Obregon to gain popular support.
I don't think that turned out well for Mexico, but it's hard for me to fault either man for not reaching for a job they either didn't want or felt unqualified for. Also, it's hard for me to picture what Mexico might have looked like with either man in charge. I feel as though if Zapata tried to implement his version of agrarian reform over the entire country, he'd find himself fighting another revolution. One probably backed by a lot of foreign investors and possibly foreign governments. McLynn does a good job of keeping this book about Mexico, but pointing out that all the players were aware of their neighbor to the north. Everyone is cautious about when they want the U.S. to either be involved or to stay out of it.
The book needed a better editor, as there as definitely passages where the wording is confused, or a word might even be missing. In a couple of cases, I think McLynn puts the wrong name in, such as a sentence where he's meant to be talking about Villa in relation to Madero, but the way it's written, it's somehow Madero reacting to himself.
Also, McLynn is fond of drawing comparison to other historical figures without explaining the reference. At one point, he states that Madero doesn't realize he's the Mirabeau in this process, and that he will have to give way to the Robespierres, the men of Thermidor and the Bonapartes. I have a vague enough knowledge of the French Revolution to grasp at the general meaning, but I have no clue who Mirabeau is. In another passage, he compares Villa, Zapata, Carranza and Obregon to Achillies, Hector, Aeneas and someone else, and I'm unclear at which was which and why. That tended to break my stride in reading, so I'd just as soon he left those analogies out.
'The Zapata movement was coherent, focused on a strong core, dedicated to a relatively straightforward form of class warfare; the Villa movement was a trans-class coalition, embracing military colonists, agricultural workers, miners, railwaymen, industrial workers, the middle class and even some reformed hacendados. Villismo was heterogeneous, eclectic and fissiparous: it did not have one single goal, but several, often mutually contradictory.'
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