The General and the Jaguar Read Online Free PDF Page B

the invaders and fired at them, the battle
     began. To shield themselves from bullets, the
insurrectos
hacked their way house to house toward the center of the city, blowing out the adobe walls with bombs made from tin cans
     and gunpowder. Carrying rifles, pistols, machetes, and dull swords, they moved silently down the narrow alleys and unguarded
     side streets. Crouching behind the cover of buildings and doorways, they would spend a few hours firing at the federal troops
     and then drift back to the rear for food and a few hours of rest before returning once more to the fighting. Across the river
     in El Paso, hundreds of spectators flocked to rooftops and the tops of boxcars to observe the battle. The exploding shrapnel
     was a “beautiful sight,” remembered one local judge. Five observers were killed by stray bullets and another twelve wounded,
     but the casualties did not dampen the crowd’s enthusiasm. In the battles to come, enterprising capitalists sold reserved seats
     on the top of buildings for a dollar a chair and views for twenty-five cents. (If the fight did not materialize, refunds were
     promised.)
    Madero did try to stop the fighting, sending out a white flag and even going so far as to ask the federal commander to order
     his own men to stop shooting, but when the federal troops obliged, the
insurrectos
kept firing and the opposition had no choice but to pick up their guns again. After several days of heavy casualties on both
     sides, the federal army surrendered on May 10, 1911.
    Afterward Villa went to a local bakery and instructed the baker to begin making bread. At four o’clock in the morning, he
     returned and gathered up the loaves and first distributed them to the federal prisoners and then took what was left to his
     own men.
    While the victors broke bread with their enemies, an unruly mob in Mexico City halted under the windows of an apartment in
     the National Palace where Porfirio Díaz lay suffering from a badly ulcerated tooth. “Death to Díaz!” they screamed. The aging
     dictator, who had created modern Mexico, knew his time had come. With the help of a loyal general named Victoriano Huerta,
     he was smuggled out of the city with his family and taken to Veracruz, from where he left for Europe.
    M ADERO WAS SWORN IN as the new president in the fall of 1911. On the day that he made his triumphant entry into Mexico City, Ambassador Wilson
     sent a telegram to the State Department in which he predicted continued uprisings and the eventual overthrow of the newly
     elected leader. “The revolution never ceased,” he would say later. “The revolution begun against Díaz continued without any
     interruption whatever through the time of Madero.” Indeed, the flames of rebellion Madero had helped stoke were nearly impossible
     to quench and fighting broke out again throughout the country. One of the gravest threats came from Emiliano Zapata, a committed
     revolutionary in Morelos, a small state south of Mexico City. In other parts of the country, frustrated peasants also took
     land, looted homes, and murdered the wealthy hacendados who had so oppressed them.
    In Mexico City, the wives and daughters of those hacendados sipped tea and ate jelly sandwiches and spoke in nervous whispers
     of the unrest. One lovely woman was forced to flee her plantation when the peons revolted: “They were all right until they
     suddenly threatened to kill all of us and set fire to the house. My husband frightened them thoroughly with his Mauser pistol.
     I think he killed one or two. But of course I couldn’t stay there.”
    Madero made many tactical errors as he attempted to restore order. He demobilized the revolutionary troops that had brought
     him to power, including Villa and his men, yet left the federal army in place. Similarly, he did not purge his administration
     of the Díaz loyalists. By the end of 1912, writes Hart,
    the Madero government had entered a state of deep crisis. The president could