Mexican Revolution · War Crimes & Atrocities

The Darkest Hours

The Mexican Revolution was characterized by widespread atrocities committed by every major faction. The Federal Army under both Díaz and Huerta used torture, extrajudicial execution (the ley fuga — shooting prisoners 'while escaping'), and massacres of indigenous communities who resisted hacienda expansion. Villista forces massacred prisoners, Chinese immigrants, and suspected collaborators. Carrancista and Zapatista forces burned villages. The 1918 influenza pandemic, which struck a country already devastated by displacement and food disruption, killed hundreds of thousands more. None of the factions can claim a clean record. The violence of the Mexican Revolution was not an aberration — it was the product of a political culture in which the Mexican state, from the Díaz regime onward, had normalized extrajudicial killing as a tool of political control. The ley fuga was not invented by the Revolution; it was inherited from the Porfiriato and used by everyone who came after.