When Pancho Villa Invaded New Mexico

In 1916, the Mexican guerrilla leader Pancho Villa launched a cross-border raid into New Mexico.

Pancho Villa                photo from WikiCommons

In 1862, Emperor Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte III of France sent military forces to occupy Mexico.  After suffering a defeat at the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862 (celebrated today in Mexico as the holiday of Cinco de Mayo), the French armies crushed the Mexicans and sent the elected President Benito Juarez into exile.  In April 1864, an Austrian aristocrat was installed, with French backing, as Emperor Maximilian I of Mexico.

Most nations refused to recognize the new government, and the United States in particular continued to view the government-in-exile of Benito Juarez, who had fled to the north near the US border, as the legitimate government of Mexico.  With American diplomatic backing, Juarez formed an army and captured Mexico City in 1867.  Emperor Maximilian was executed, and Juarez assumed office as President of Mexico.

In 1871, Juarez was re-elected to another term, an event which brought political opposition from those who argued that Presidents should be limited to just one term, and that re-election to consecutive terms was undemocratic.  When Juarez died in 1872, his Vice President Sebastian Lerdo de Tejada assumed office and was himself re-elected in 1876, defeating General Porfirio Diaz, the hero who had beaten the French at the Battle of Puebla.  In response to his loss in the election, Diaz organized an armed rebellion, issuing a manifesto known as the Plan of Tuxtepec, which opposed the principle of consecutive terms, repudiated the presidency of Lerdo, and declared Diaz as the legitimate President of Mexico.  After a short civil war, Lerdo fled the country, and Porfirio Diaz assumed the Presidency in 1877.

Despite his campaign against the “undemocratic” principle of re-election, Diaz promptly took steps to consolidate power in his own hands, and crippled his political opponents through repression and outright assassination.  Using fraudulent elections and arrests, Porfirio Diaz ruled Mexico from 1877 to 1910 as a virtual dictator, either directly or through handpicked successors from his inner circle. His time in power became known as the “Porfiriato”.

In the 1910 elections, Diaz was opposed by a wealthy banker named Francisco Madero. Madero was a rather unlikely revolutionary–he came from a wealthy family, he claimed to be able to speak to ghosts and the spirits of the dead, and he had no real program for social reform, other than removing Diaz from power. But Madero quickly became wildly popular and had thousands of supporters. Shortly before election day, however, Diaz had Madero and several thousand Maderistas arrested, then declared himself the winner of the election by a landslide.  A few weeks later, Madero escaped from prison and was smuggled across the border into the United States, where he called upon his followers to launch a rebellion to overthrow Diaz.  This was the beginning of the Mexican Revolution.

The Madero rebellion quickly spread throughout Mexico.  Maderista armies were formed under the command of Francisco “Pancho” Villa, Emiliano Zapata, Pascual Orozco, and Venustiano Carranza.  In 1911, Diaz fled to France, and Madero entered Mexico City, becoming President of Mexico in November.

The Maderistas were a loose collection of groups with widely diverging goals, however, ranging from the conservative Orozco to the radicals Villa and Zapata, who quickly became the central figures in the Revolution. Zapata was mayor of a small town; Villa was leader of a bandit group in northern Mexico. Villa and Zapata openly called for land reform, in which the large haciendaranches of the wealthy would be broken up and given to the poor rural peons who worked them for the absentee landowners. Zapata’a army in particular won the support of the Mexican peasants (and the enmity of the landowners) by attacking the large haciendas, seizing them, and giving their land to the local poor. Within a short time, Villa’s army controlled much of northern Mexico, and Zapata controlled a part of the south. Zapata issued a manifesto called the “Plan of Ayala”, which called for social and economic reform, coupled with land reform which would redistribute wealth and land to the peasantry. Zapata’s army was also unique in allowing women to serve as soldiers and as officers.

In 1912, former Maderista General Orozco, by contrast, launched a rebellion in Chihuahua (with the financial backing of the richest landowning family in Mexico) to prevent the process of land reform.  General Victoriano Huerta, a former follower of Porfirio Diaz who had become a Maderista, was sent to put down the Orozco rebellion. Although Huerta forced Orozco to flee Mexico in 1912, friction with Pancho Villa over land reform caused Huerta to order Villa’s execution—an action which was stopped by President Madero.  By 1913, Huerta, along with Felix Diaz, the nephew of the deposed dictator Porfirio Diaz, American Ambassador Henry Lane Wilson, and former opponent Pascual Orozco, was planning a military overthrow of President Madero.  In February 1913, after a ten-day seige, President Madero was captured and General Huerta took power.  Madero was killed four days later, allegedly during a rescue attempt by Maderista forces.

Opposition to the Huerta regime soon centered around Venustiano Carranza, who called his insurrectionaries the “Constitutionalists”.  Pancho Villa threw his support behind Carranza in the north, while Zapata, in the south, fought against Huerta but refused to back Carranza.  In April 1914, the United States, which had been supporting Carranza, sent troops to seize Veracruz, cutting off the supply of European weapons (mostly from Germany) to the Huertista forces.  Huerta fled, and Carranza assumed the Presidency in July.

Within a short time, though, conflict broke out again over the land reform question.  When it became clear that Carranza would not carry out any real land reform, both Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata broke away. In October 1914, 60,000 rebel troops under Villa and Zapata entered Mexico City and forced Carranza to flee. By this time, Villa was a folk hero in the United States, seen as the plucky underdog fighting a brutal and corrupt regime. He signed a contract with Hollywood to star in film reenactments of his battles, and used the money to arm and equip his troops.

In April 1915, though, General Alvaro Obregon defeated Pancho Villa in the Battle of Celayas, and Carranza returned to Mexico City with the backing of the United States. Villa, now desperate, retreated into the deserts of northern Mexico.

On March 8, 1916, Villa gathered his forces at Palomas on the American border, across from the town of Columbus NM. The US Army had a small outpost there of 400 troops at Camp Furlong. It’s not entirely clear why Villa had decided to attack the US. Most historians have concluded that he hoped to provoke the Americans into sending troops into Mexico that would provoke a widespread nationalist uprising against Carranza. Others have noted that Villa blamed the US and its support of the Mexican President for his defeat at Celayas, and simply wanted revenge. One story has it that he picked Columbus as his target because an American gun-runner there had taken Villa’s money but never delivered the promised weapons.

In any case, around 500 of Villa’s troops crossed the border and entered Columbus at 4:15am on March 9. (It’s not clear whether Villa was actually with them.) Their target was the military camp, but to get there they had to go through town along the railroad tracks, and things bogged down there as the Americans, though surprised, were able to fight back. In particular, they were able to respond with four Hotchkiss machine guns. Some of the local civilians also grabbed their hunting rifles and joined in. Much of the town was set aflame and 8 US troops and 10 American civilians were killed.

After three hours of fighting, the Mexican rebels retreated back across the border. They left about 100 dead and wounded behind. Major Frank Tompkins led a group of American troops over the border to pursue the fleeing Villistas and engaged them until he ran out of ammunition. He was awarded a Distinguished Service Medal and Distinguished Service Cross. Seven of the Mexicans that had been captured during the raid were subsequently tried for murder, with one receiving a life sentence and the six others being hanged.

In Washington DC, President Woodrow Wilson ordered General John “Black Jack” Pershing to take a force of 10,000 US Army regulars, dubbed the “Punitive Expedition”, into Mexico to find Villa. They were accompanied by a squadron of Curtiss Jenny aeroplanes from the Army Signal Corps—the first use of combat aircraft by the United States. But Villa was an experienced guerrilla fighter and knew the terrain well, and although the Americans fought a few minor skirmishes, they were never able to find the Mexican commander. Meanwhile, popular resentment in Mexico grew as the Americans wandered ineffectually around the country, and in January 1917, under domestic political pressure, Carranzas withdrew his permission for the expedition and asked the US to pull out from Mexico.

Pershing would within a few months be commanding US Army forces in France during the First World War. Pancho Villa was assassinated by a rival political faction in 1923. Today a commemorative parade and re-enactment of the “Battle of Columbus” is held each year at Pancho Villa Historical Park in the tiny town of Columbus NM. A small museum displays some artifacts from the battle.