Pancho Villa

Biography

Francisco 'Pancho' Villa was born Doroteo Arango on June 5, 1878, in San Juan del Río, Durango, into a family of sharecroppers who worked land they would never own. The hardship of peasant life under the Díaz regime — in which hacienda owners held near-feudal power over rural workers — shaped Villa's worldview from childhood. According to legend, the event that set him on the outlaw path was his shooting of a hacienda owner who had assaulted his sister, though the details of his early life are shrouded in myth. What is certain is that he spent years as a bandit in the mountains of Chihuahua before the Revolution gave his violence a political purpose. When Francisco Madero issued his Plan de San Luis Potosí in 1910 calling for an uprising against Díaz, Villa was among the first to respond. He proved an extraordinarily gifted irregular cavalry commander, combining intimate knowledge of Chihuahua's terrain with personal charisma and a ferocious energy that inspired absolute loyalty in his men. By 1913, he commanded the División del Norte — the Army of the North — a force that at its peak numbered some 40,000 men. Villa's great achievement was the capture of Ciudad Juárez in 1911 and, at the height of his power, the capture of Zacatecas in June 1914, the most spectacular military victory of the entire Revolution. Villa's relationship with the United States was complex and ultimately fatal to his cause. American President Woodrow Wilson initially recognized Carranza's Constitutionalists over Villa, a betrayal Villa never forgave. On March 9, 1916, Villa led some 500 Villistas across the border and attacked Columbus, New Mexico, killing 18 Americans — the only foreign military attack on American soil between the War of 1812 and Pearl Harbor. The raid provoked the Punitive Expedition under General John 'Black Jack' Pershing, who entered Mexico with 10,000 troops and spent eleven months failing to catch Villa. By 1920, Villa had been reduced from a revolutionary titan to a guerrilla nuisance. He accepted amnesty from the Obregón government in 1920 and retired to a hacienda in Canutillo, Durango, where he established a small colony for his veterans. On July 20, 1923, he was ambushed and killed in the town of Parral by gunmen widely believed to have been sent by political enemies in Mexico City. He was 45 years old. In death, Villa became an icon of Mexican revolutionary nationalism and of global peasant resistance, his portrait appearing on murals, currency, and the walls of revolutionary movements worldwide.

Key Battles