Emiliano Zapata

Emiliano Zapata: The Revolutionary Who Never Traded

On 10 April 1919 he rode into the Hacienda de San Juan at Chinameca to accept the defection of a federal general. The general's men riddled him with bullets. The government photographed the corpse, displayed it for twenty-four hours, and hung his clothes outside a newspaper office in Mexico City opposite Alameda Park — so that the peasants of Morelos would understand he was dead. Within a few years, in the words of a contemporary observer, he had "taken on the proportions of a myth."

Anenecuilco: Not the Peasant of the Poster

Zapata was born on 8 August 1879 in Anenecuilco, in the state of Morelos, to Gabriel Zapata, a farmer and horse trainer, and Cleofas Jertrudiz Salazar. He was of mestizo descent, Spanish and Nahua, and one of ten children — three brothers, including Eufemio, and six sisters. The familiar image of the barefoot peon is wrong: the Zapatas were a well-known local family and reasonably well-off, and his godfather managed a large hacienda. His education was slight, a little schooling from a teacher named Emilio Vara that included the rudiments of bookkeeping. He was an outstanding horseman who competed in rodeos, races and bullfighting; he hauled maize and bricks for money and grew watermelons as a cash crop; and he dressed with conspicuous care, in tight black cashmere trousers with silver buttons, a broad charro hat and fine linen.

The Village Council

In 1892 he joined a delegation from his village seeking redress for stolen land from the government of Porfirio Díaz. He was arrested and conscripted into the Federal Army as punishment. It was an early and precise lesson in how the Mexican state answered petitions. In 1909, at thirty, the village of Anenecuilco elected him president of its council without contest — unusually young for the office, and a measure of how completely his neighbours trusted him with the land question. He had also worked as a horse trainer for Ignacio de la Torre y Mier, Díaz's son-in-law, a friendship that has attracted persistent and unresolved speculation from historians about his private life.

Madero, and the First Betrayal

In 1910 Zapata joined Francisco Madero's rising against Díaz, alongside Pascual Orozco and Pancho Villa. Madero's Plan of San Luis Potosí promised land reform in vague terms; the vagueness was the point, and Zapata seems to have understood it. On 19 May 1911, after a six-day battle, he captured Cuautla, and Díaz's fall became inevitable. Then Madero was elected and did nothing radical about land. In November 1911 Zapata answered with the Plan of Ayala, declaring Madero illegitimate.

The Plan of Ayala

The Plan was the most radical reform programme the revolution produced. It demanded the immediate return of all lands stolen under Díaz; the nationalisation of one-third of the great plantations for redistribution to poor farmers, with confiscation of the remaining two-thirds if owners resisted; and rural cooperatives designed to make future dispossession impossible. It invoked the precedent of Benito Juárez's expropriation of Church lands. It is the document on which everything else rests: it defined Zapatismo, and its principles were written into Article 27 of the 1917 Constitution.

Madero sent General Victoriano Huerta to crush the Zapatistas with scorched-earth tactics — villages burned, men conscripted by force. The brutality drove more peasants to Zapata. When Huerta overthrew Madero in February 1913, Zapata revised the Plan of Ayala and named himself leader of the revolution. He had by then been elected Supreme Chief of the Revolutionary Movement of the South, after the death of the commander Pablo Torres Burgos in 1912.

Morelos as a Republic of Villages

When the United States occupied Veracruz in 1914 and Huerta withdrew troops from Morelos, the Zapatistas took Cuautla and Jonacatepec, then Milpa Alta and Xochimilco, and stood at the edge of Mexico City. Huerta fled in July 1914. At the Convention of Aguascalientes that autumn, Zapata and Villa broke with Venustiano Carranza, and the victors turned on each other. Villa promised weapons and coordination and failed to deliver; Villista troops abused Zapatista soldiers; Zapata withdrew and did something more interesting than fighting for the capital. He implemented the Plan of Ayala in Morelos — breaking up the haciendas, restoring land to villages, letting village councils govern themselves. Peasants grew corn, beans and vegetables for themselves. Morelos fed itself while Mexico City went hungry.

He refused to open a second front even as Villa lost at Celaya and Carranza consolidated national power. He raided from Hidalgo to Oaxaca and briefly seized the Necaxa power plant that supplied the capital. He also executed his former adviser Otilio Montaño Sánchez for treason after Montaño urged surrender to the Carrancistas. When Carranza issued the 1917 Constitution incorporating elements of the Plan of Ayala, Zapata stayed in the field. In March 1919 he sent an open letter demanding Carranza resign. Three weeks later he was dead, in an ambush arranged by General Pablo González and executed by Jesús Guajardo on Carranza's priority.

Why Emiliano Is Called a Genius

Zapata was not an intellectual and it would be dishonest to dress him as one. His formal education amounted to basic literacy and bookkeeping; he wrote no theory; the Plan of Ayala was drafted with advisers, one of whom he later had shot. If the word applies, it applies to political judgment: he alone among the revolution's leaders identified a single irreducible demand and refused, across nine years and four national governments, to trade it for office, money or peace.

That sounds like stubbornness. What makes it sharper is that he was consistently right about the men he dealt with. He read Madero's promises as evasion before anyone else did, and his summary of Carranza's constitutionalism — administrative reform, honesty in public monies, "freedom of the press for those who cannot read; free elections for those who do not know the candidates" — is as good a critique of hollow proceduralism as the century produced. In Morelos between 1914 and 1919 he did what no other revolutionary attempted: he built the society he was arguing for, and it fed itself.

The counter-case is real. He was a regional commander with a regional programme and no national politics, and his refusal to relieve Villa helped doom the only force that might have won on his terms. Much of his stature was assembled after 1919 by people who needed a symbol. What is unarguably his is Article 27 — a peasant's demand that became the law of a country.

Votán Zapata

His assassination cost Carranza the countryside and handed Álvaro Obregón the presidency; Zapatista generals helped depose Carranza in 1920 and then took office in Morelos, redistributing land with state backing. Full national implementation of Article 27 waited for Lázaro Cárdenas after 1934. In Chiapas and Tepoztlán he is venerated as a reincarnated Mayan deity, Votán Zapata; the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, formed in Chiapas in 1983, took his name into the 1994 uprising and still carries it. Marlon Brando played him in Elia Kazan's *Viva Zapata!* (1952), written by John Steinbeck. A 2019 painting at the Palacio de Bellas Artes that depicted him nude in high heels drew protests from farmers' unions and legal threats from his grandson — a century on, the country is still arguing over who owns him. The chant at Mexican demonstrations has not changed: *Zapata vive, la lucha sigue.*