Pancho Villa means the power of the people who take their destiny in their fingers

One hundred years after his assassination in Parral, Chihuahua, Pancho Villa is not most effective on the legitimate stationery, however additionally on the center of the countrywide debate. The prejudices and demons that, for decades, his parent has invoked inside the most retarded sectors of the u . S ., have pop out for a walk in recent times within the media and at the tables of precise families.

To assemble the North Centaur puzzle, The Conference He spoke with Pedro Salmerón, one of the historians who has delved into the life and exploits of the caudillo in extra depth. Your book The Northern Division aroused, right now, the sympathies of Friedrich Katz and Paco Ignatius Taibo II.

Dr. Salmerón sympathizes with the caudillo and does not cover it. Convinced of the relevance of the individual, he sees in Villismo the strength of folks who say: We want to dream of a free, truthful and identical united states. Here are elements of the communique he had The Conference with the.

–Who is Pancho Villa?

-Story in my e book The Northern Division that after Don Abraham González invites him to join the Revolution, he appoints him as his private escort in Chihuahua. Abraham González is the top of Maderismo in Chihuahua, the man appointed by Francisco I. Madero to guide the armed conflict in the huge nation. Pancho Villa is 32 years vintage and half of his lifestyles he had lived at the run.

“His first 16 years are the ones of the son of media rose of a farm Of those people who rent the land from the landowner to sow half of with him. He became orphaned of a completely younger father. He never had formal training. He lived as a small-time social bandit for 8 or 10 years, thrown into the mountains via persecution and oppression.”

–Was it due to the fact they abused his sister and he took revenge?

–We aren't positive, however he told that tale. It is a conventional tale of social bandits seeking out a personal justification for their bandit existence. Since 1901 or 1902 he sought to get out of that life and is a bricklayer, a muleteer, and a breeder of great roosters. He created a community of pals in southwestern Chihuahua, with people who stay a little outside the regulation, hating the oppression and the landowners. As he has led organizations of human beings both as a petty bandit, as a muleteer, as an escort of silver from the mines to the railway stations, he has the capacity to command small companies.

He is an indefatigable rider. Splendid pistol and carbine shooter. He could be very charismatic. He wins over people very without difficulty. Villa’s qualities as a innovative chief and as a caudillo might seem within the war.

–One of the maximum large versions of Pancho Villa is that he turned into a partying, under the influence of alcohol, capricious person. A demon that assaulted and raped ladies. What is true on this imaginative and prescient?

The hates of the innovative

-He turned into flawlessly abstemious. He didn’t take a drink. He no longer best didn’t drink, but he tried to hold his men from consuming. We can inform anecdotes that Pancho Villa, twisting his mustache, would come to the bar of an ice cream parlor and ask: provide me a strawberry milkshake, due to the fact I changed into keen on strawberries in all its forms: milkshakes, ice cream, strawberries and cream. Regarding this remember of the rape of girls, the founder of the chronicle as a genre, John Reed, confused by way of his editors, asks Villa approximately the rapes. And then, the North Centaur stares at him and solutions: You had been with us for a long term, my buddy. Do you recognize a father, a brother or a pal of any girl that I actually have raped? And then he thinks and says: Or a witness or someone?

▲ Portrait of Francisco Villa, 1920 / Casasola Archive Collection.Photo courtesy INAH National Photo Library

“Pancho Villa, as modern leader of the Northern Division (from 1913 to 1915), prohibits looting and condemns rape with the death penalty. A soldier in the Northern Division accused with evidence of rape is shot, duration.

What comes next is the black legend. Regarding Villa as a modern chief, I can say that the accusations of rape are slander; additionally this idea of ​​looting Villa and inebriated Villa are also slanderous.

–How does Villa grow to be a innovative? What interests does he express?

–Pancho Villa bitterly hated authoritarianism and the landowners. The two curse words against which heaps and hundreds of Mexican women and men rose up in palms in 1910 and, peculiarly, in 1913, can be reduced to dictatorship and latifundia. That is, to political abuse and lack of freedom. On the only hand, to political persecution, and on the opposite, to the dispossession of the wealth of the peoples and the awareness of wealth in very few arms at the rate of the poverty of the general public.

“Villa hates the representatives of the dictatorship and the landowners. Like every progressive, he could be very clear about what he does no longer need. Between November 1910 and December 1913, he matured very quickly politically.

“Pancho comes into contact with political and social leaders with a preceding political profession. And, in touch with these people, he shapes what his hatreds imply. Hate for the landowner, hate for the dictator. This leads him to discover with Madero after which to welcome the Madero members into the ranks of the Northern Division, when Carranza does not need them. And to offer meaning to a vision of democracy that is very certainly municipal popular democracy, and that later, in convention with Zapatismo, is translated into the concept of ​​quasi-direct democracy and parliamentary democracy. In this way, he's connected with the best a part of Maderismo, represented by way of Felipe Ángeles, by Federico González Garza, by using Roque González Garza, who Villa leads to the interim presidency.

And, on the other hand, it seeks the destruction of the latifundio and the agrarian distribution. The first element he does as governor of Chihuahua is to confiscate the assets of the oligarchy. A excellent little-recognised decree of December 12, 1913.

Why vindicate Pancho Villa now? What is his current popularity?

–Pancho Villa way the electricity of the humans in hands, of folks who take their personal destiny into their hands. He represents the energy of individuals who say: We want to dream of a unfastened, truthful and identical u . S . A ..

–What does the North Centaur say to Latin America?

–Villa’s invasion of Columbus, New Mexico, represents claiming the sovereignty of our international locations. Pancho Villa enters there with a very clean political cause, expressed in preceding manifestos that say: The United States wants to bend the Mexican authorities and publish it to its designs. That technology is over. Mexico is a sovereign us of a. That message resonates for the duration of Latin America.. It is a symbol. Eduardo Galeano stated it: The geese are taking pictures shotguns, rain from bottom to top, “We Latin Americans invaded the United States.” So that? To mark the bounds before the empire.

– What remains socially of Villismo in Mexico?

–In any town you visit in Mexico, you locate photographs of Villa anywhere: in canteens, cafeterias, restaurants, vehicle repair stores. The photos maximum reproduced by means of people of their homes, in their jobs, are the ones of Villa and Zapata and, to a lesser volume, of Lázaro Cárdenas. There are streets named Álvaro Obregón anywhere, however no pictures of him.