THE INSURGENCE of CHAN SANTA CRUZ

BOOK SEVEN: THE SECOND of the BOOKS of CHANGE

CHAPTER NINE

Against all rational expectation, Victoriano Huerta remained President of Mexico. Over the summer and early autumn, Villa had sent sixteen thousand rebels against Torreon... not ten... and the smashed and demoralized Federals scattered to the four winds. A dozen times since the fall of Torreon the end of Victoriano Huerta had been hailed, a dozen times the Constitutionalist armies had ultimately failed and descended to fighting among themselves, stealing defeat away at the very advent of victory.

Perhaps the darkest hour of the Huertismo had fallen shortly after the elections of October, 1913... a spectacle arranged to legitimize Huerta's presidency. On the sixteenth of September, Huerta... defying his enemies and potential assassins... had delivered, with enthusiasm, the Grito! on the one hundred third anniversary of Mexican independence, three years following the sentimental obsequies of Porfirio Diaz... who, now, celebrated his 83rd birthday quietly in Biarritz with a few close friends and family, including the chastened Felix Diaz. (Huerta, professing nothing but admiration for the diplomatic efforts of the dictator's nephew in Japan, had invited Felix back to be the Catholic Party candidate in the elections.)

Huerta... sometimes hinting at retirement... had baffled not, only the Catholics, but such other political factions as he had allowed to exist. Seven months after the Decena Trageda, Huerta was behaving, more and more, as an interim President; the Chamber of Deputies was growing more confident, enough so to refuse to confirm some of those Huerta named to office.

Those who found advantage to doing so avowed that democracy was returning and the political, if not military, fortunes of Huerta's enemies slid. A further notice on September 22nd that Colonel Francisco Cardenas... accused of masterminding the murders of Madero and Suarez... was, himself, assassinated in Michoacan proved that justice still lived, Huerta's supporters said. Proof that the dictator feared Cardenas would talk, alleged the Constitutionalists.

Felix Diaz finally took leave of his uncle and returned to Vera Cruz by way of Havana despite Huerta's dissolving the Chamber, and jailing one hundred and ten Deputies, an act which... with the delivery of a splenetic "ultimatum" by the sanguinary Minister of the Interior, Dr. Aureliano Urrutia... caused American Secretary of State Bryan to allege the credibility of the upcoming elections "destroyed". But, pacified by Foreign Minister Federico Gamboa and Manuel Calero, a former Mexican Ambassador to Washington, Bryan also approved the request of General Maas to cross U.S. territory to strike at the Carrancistas at Nuevo Laredo. Germany's Baron Manfred von Richtofen lobbied to prevent Woodrow Wilson's recognition of the Constitutionalists, out of anger at Villa's taking of German hostages at Torreon, and Britain's Minister, Sir Lionel Carden, defended Huerta against his enemies, foreign and domestic. "A revolution, in my opinion, is an organized movement with a leader and fixed ideals," Carden admonished the Americans, dismissing the Constitutionalists as "merely a conglomeration of outbreaks here and there; unrelated except as they are all the outgrown of a general social unrest."

Coincidentally, concessions on the crude oil war surtax were shortly thereafter made in favor of Carden's patron, Lord Cowdray, to certain financial institutions not unknown to Griffin Hughes of Belize and to the Waters-Pierce Oil Company. Huerta could claim recognition not only by Britain and by Germany, but France, Norway, Italy, Portugal, the Salvadorans and Guatemalans, China and... through (or, perhaps, despite) the labors of Felix Diaz... the Japanese.

Gratitude, however, had never been much of a virtue of Huerta when not enforced by need. Three Italians among the Felicistas were arrested as anarchists and $45,000 was confiscated by General Blanquet, who insinuated it was to be used for "political crime". With Diaz under house arrest in Vera Cruz, the Catholic Party named Gamboa its candidate, the Liberals chose Calero and Victoriano Huerta, waiting until the last moment, allowed his name to be placed on the ballot.

On the 27th of October headlines screamed "Mexico Votes, Nobody Elected!" Since the Constitution required one third of those eligible cast ballots and since... in the capital, as an example... less than three thousand of eighty thousand eligibles braved or bothered, the elections were nullified and Huerta remained in office until Mexico could vote again.

Woodrow Wilson retaliated almost immediately, delivering an address in Mobile, Alabama, deeming Huerta unworthy of recognition. But despite new Constitutionalist tactics, including the use of an airship in bombing Federal positions on the West Coast, Huerta's armies won military victories in Monterrey and in Chihuahua, and the expected insurrection of Felix Diaz failed to materialize. On his request, Diaz was taken aboard the U.S. gunship Louisiana, leaving the American consul at Veracruz his $1,400 hotel bill. General Maas... a nephew of Huerta, as was the younger Diaz related to don Porfirio, said that he had chosen not to attack the Americans, but Felix should have been more "courteous" in declaring his intent to leave.

The Felicistas were mortified and, although the young Diaz would return many times and under many ideologies, he never would pose a serious threat to any of those holding the Cactus Throne again. Constitutionalists wrote him off with a sigh of relief, and the Huertista press reacted with derision. "The nephew of the great Don Porfirio Diaz showed himself as cowardly as a rabbit," smirked El Imparciál. "The rebel of Veracruz and hero of the Ciudadela declares himself vanquished, under the wing of John Lind and pasted like scum to Consul William Canada..." crowed El Independiente, "... he has shown himself, in moments of imaginary danger a military man full of terror and entirely devoid of honor."

Time and again Woodrow Wilson veered towards intervention, only to pull up at reports of Carrancista corruption, or another of Pancho Villa's bloody executions... despite assertions by the former Minister to Russia Miguel Covarubbias, safe in London, that such massacres were lies fomented by Huerta, who had "out-Heroded Herod". But a Christmas loan of seven million from London's friendly bankers... granted on the existence of unnamed securities which were only reported to Fleet Street as "considerable"... saved Huerta once more, and Carranza's insistence on unconditional surrender to himself... as unopposed First Chief of Mexico... demoralized the other revolutionary bands. Huerta again devalued the peso in March; its value now stood at twenty nine cents to a dollar, as opposed to forty five only a year ago.

Those who kept their money in the Republic's bank... a dwindling, conservative few... lamented while their neighbors who had moved it to French, British or American concerns sighed with relief.

A firm controlled by Lord Cowdray, he whose fingers stirred thick, Tampico oil, received the contract to improve and operate the streetcar lines of Mexico City.

On April 2nd, Villa captured Torreon... again... and set up court at the Hotel Salvador, castigating Velasco (for the old trick of throwing rebel wounded into fires to be burned alive) and Carranza (for prohibiting use of Villa's currency among his troops). Enough good money was confiscated in Torreon, however, for Villa to order a Moissant aeroplane from Long Island, New York... keeping up with Carranza, who was training two of his own nephews as bomber-pilots. Velasco escaped, but with 12,000 casualties against 2,000 for Villa, which action was hailed by Vice President Blanquet as "a strategic retreat". Huerta's nephew Maas still held Saltillo, General Caos, Chihuahua and the forces of Gen. Luis Carton were battling Zapatistas around the Guerreran capital Chilpancingo, from whence came rumors that Zapata would personally crucify the Bishop of Chilapa on Good Friday unless a ransom was paid.

Woodrow Wilson's refusal to recognize Huerta had received strong support from a fellow Ivy Leaguer... "This despot is a vampire who must always have fresh blood," asserted Professor Albert Bushnell Hart of Harvard. Comparing Huerta to a Turkish Pasha, Hart rolled back the carpet of Porfirismo, asking "The success of the Diaz regime? What is the use of a strong man who, with all his armies, finances and prestige, is at last obliged to flee his native country because he taught his countrymen to abominate him?"

But, in this first week of April, 1914, American eyes were on the battles in New York, where police clashed with "IWW anarchists of the Alexander Berkman - Emma Goldman brand" who, along with ten thousand Spanish anarchists, were rumored to be streaming into the armies of the revolution... carrying all of their discontents and godlessness to Mexican shores like so many plague rats. The gente decente, barely over their indignation at the short but painful Maderismo were horrified... his spirits and seances had been alarming enough, but he had been one of them, at heart, while those changes now inundating the Republic seemed cinematic phantoms derived from Feuillade's sinister cliffhangers or, at other times, Max Sennett comedies.

In this first week of April, all Europe mourned the demise of Toutorle, the poet Mistral's black spaniel (who had died a few days following his master's own end), and rejoiced at the smashing of a ring of grave-robbers working at the venerable Pere Lachaise cemetery. The old century and its old ways... smashed and dead, also, these fourteen years... was finally being interred. No less bloody than the machetes of Villa and Carranza waved the pens of Kafka and Proust. Obregon descended from Sonora towards Mazatlan like one of Duchamp's nudes; Zapata ripped apart Morelos like the mobs awakened by Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" where Ravel cried "Genius!" and Saint-Saens, reviled, now, in Paris as "Old Death", walked out. President Huerta... himself subjected to more than a few caricatures as a skull holding up his cognac glass... looked backwards, now, as a defender of tradition, still casting longing glances at his swallow tails, cravat and silk hat gathering dust in the closet of the Palacio. But President Woodrow Wilson and his representatives, Lind and O'Shaughnessy, remained as hostile to Huerta as President Taft and Henry Lane Wilson had been to Madero. Nothing, it seems, could satisfy the capricious, incomprehensible Americans, who divided Mexico's resources with the Europeans, but wept like little girls when necessary force had to be used to defend the privileges of the gente decente, both foreign and Mexican.

"We are lost, all of us, without intervention," Huerta told the tall, slouch-hatted Jackal upon whom he relied for quick, shady resolutions to problems that sometimes required midnight disappearances... a man whose name was not uttered who, to please his President, would sometimes slip a white death's head mask out of the pocket of his raincoat and over his face when they lifted their copitas at El Globo or the Colon. "Carranza would capitulate if the Americans invaded."

"Look at the way that he supported Villa over the expulsion of Spaniards from Torreon, as soon as Spain begged the United States to intervene," agreed El Chacol.

"It's too bad America would not go to war for the cause of Spain, but we are still too close to events in Cuba and the Philippines," Victoriano Huerta muttered. "They need a further reminder that we are here."

The man in the white skull mask lifted his glass. "Would you like me to arrange for something to happen?"

"How is your friend in Washington?" replied the dictator.

"He is very well," the Jackal said, "and he is eager that the occupation be under way, so that his patrons can get back to business without their people being shot at... besides having to pay taxes to Carranza, Obregon, Villa and several others, as well as ourselves."

"Go make this thing happen," Huerta said.

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