Álvaro Obregón

Biography

Álvaro Obregón Salido was born on February 19, 1880, in Siquisiva, Sonora, the youngest of eighteen children in a farming family. He had no military training before the Revolution — he was a chickpea farmer and inventor of a machine to harvest garbanzo beans when Madero's uprising began. Yet he proved to be perhaps the most talented military commander Mexico has ever produced, teaching himself tactics from books while simultaneously applying innovative thinking on the battlefield. Obregón was the pivotal military figure of the Revolution. He played little role in the early phase against Díaz, but when Huerta's coup murdered Madero, he raised an army of Yaqui warriors and Mayo farmers in Sonora and joined Carranza's Constitutionalist cause. His campaign down the Pacific coast was a masterpiece of logistical and tactical improvisation. But his greatest achievement was the Battle of Celaya in April 1915, where he decisively defeated Pancho Villa's previously invincible División del Norte. At Celaya, Obregón — who had been studying reports of the Western Front — deployed barbed wire, machine guns in fortified positions, and coordinated cavalry counterattacks with a precision that Villa's mass charges could not overcome. Villa attacked in waves; Obregón's machine guns cut them down. The battle cost Villa 4,000 dead and 5,000 prisoners and effectively ended his military power. Obregón lost his right arm at the Battle of Trincheras in June 1915 when a grenade detonated nearby. There is a famous story that he fell down, thinking he was dying, but realized he was alive when his arm caught on something — the severed limb had been attracted by a religious medal. True or not, Obregón's one-armed image became iconic. He continued fighting, and when Carranza was overthrown in 1920, Obregón became President of Mexico from 1920 to 1924. He was reelected in 1928, but was assassinated by a Catholic militant on July 17, 1928, just weeks after the election — one final act of violence in a revolutionary generation that had known little else.

Key Battles