Emiliano Zapata

Emiliano Zapata Salazar was born on 8 August 1879 in Anenecuilco, a village with a centuries-old community in the fertile valley of Morelos, south of Mexico City. His family owned a piece of land and some livestock and was not poor by village standards; relatives had fought in the wars against the French. He spoke Spanish and later also addressed the villages of the region in Nahuatl in his manifestos.

Under the rule of Porfirio Díaz the sugar plantations of Morelos expanded at the expense of village lands, water and woods; anyone who protested could be conscripted into the army or deported. Zapata himself was briefly forced into military service in 1910. When he was elected head of the village council in 1909 he was entrusted with the colonial title deeds of Anenecuilco, which he had guarded and hidden for the rest of his life.

Zapata's aim was limited and concrete: the villages had to get their land back. The Plan of Ayala, drawn up with the schoolteacher Otilio Montaño, declared Madero a traitor to the revolution, demanded the return of stolen lands and the expropriation of a third of the great estates, and threatened those who resisted with total expropriation. He repeatedly refused offers of land and office for himself.

His army consisted of peasants who worked their fields between campaigns, and it fought as a guerrilla force: small groups of horsemen who raided trains, garrisons and plantations and then dispersed. In the short period when the Zapatistas governed Morelos themselves, surveyors recorded the boundaries of about a hundred villages and sugar mills were kept running under their own management. Outside his own region Zapata had little interest in national power.

Under Porfirio Díaz (1876–1911) Mexico had railways, foreign investment and stability, but also an enormous concentration of land: most of the rural population owned none. The revolution that began in 1910 as a protest against a rigged re-election grew into a civil war between armies with very different aims, from liberal constitutional reformers to peasants and workers.

Zapatismo was the most agrarian and the most local of those movements. The northern armies of Villa, Obregón and Carranza consisted of cowhands, miners and professional soldiers and fought for the state; the men of Morelos fought for their village. Urban intellectuals, anarchists among them, joined Zapata and gave the movement its language, including Ricardo Flores Magón's slogan 'Tierra y Libertad'.

The Convention of Aguascalientes adopted the principles of the Plan of Ayala in October 1914, and in January 1915 Carranza issued an agrarian law of his own to win over the peasants. Article 27 of the Constitution of 1917 gave the state the right to divide great estates and to return to villages their common land (ejido): the most important lasting result of the peasant rising.

The price was high. Federal and later Carrancista troops burned villages, deported thousands of inhabitants and plundered the sugar industry; Zapatistas, too, executed prisoners and attacked trains in which civilians died. Between 1910 and 1921 Morelos lost more than a third of its inhabitants to violence, hunger, disease and flight. The Mexican Revolution as a whole cost an estimated one to two million lives.

In 1919 Zapata was isolated and looking for allies. Colonel Jesús Guajardo pretended that he wanted to defect with his regiment and proved his good faith by attacking a garrison and having prisoners shot. On 10 April Zapata rode with a small escort into the hacienda of Chinameca, where a guard of honour opened fire at close range. His body was put on display in Cuautla; many peasants refused to believe that he was dead.

After Carranza's death the remaining Zapatistas made peace with President Obregón, and Morelos was one of the first states to receive an extensive distribution of land. The state took Zapata into the official pantheon of the revolution, while peasant movements went on invoking him against that same state, down to the neo-Zapatistas of 1994. The historian John Womack described his followers as country people who did not want to move and therefore got into a revolution.