forty-one
the new villista bourgeoisie
A secondary effect of the break with the Convencionistas was the defection of Luis Aguirre Benavides, Villa’s first secretary, who remained hidden somewhere in Mexico City. Later interviewed by Obregón, he refused to join his forces, instead writing a series of articles about Villa, “which I would regret for the rest of my life,” said Aguirre Benavides for having violated the confidentiality as Villa’s secretary.
In these articles, which were published in April 1915 in El Paso, Luis accused Villa of being a thief and of having become a millionaire via expropriations: the Batopilas gold and silver mines, the Chihuahua flour mill, the Naica mine, the Ignacio Rodríguez corporation mines, the Spanish haciendas, and Luis Terrazas’ haciendas between Chihuahua and Juárez. He extended his criticism to other Villista generals as well. Lt. Plácido Villanueva was managing the Pueblito hacienda of Ignacio Irigoyen, who had been assassinated by Villa in Chihuahua. Gen. Manuel Chao was running the El Saúz hacienda (formerly of the Terrazas). Gen. Rosalío Hernández controlled La Enramada, El Álamo, and La Bonita haciendas. Villa owned the Corral de Piedra, Santa Clara, and other haciendas to the north of Chihuahua running all the way up to Ciudad Juárez, and had appointed administrators to run them. Col. Porfirio Ornelas was exploiting ranches in the Ojinaga region, just as Col. Manuel Ochoa did in the Casas Grandes area. Gabino Durán oversaw the Batopilas gold and silver mines, passing along a large part of the profits to Villa, who then transferred the money to Hipólito who deposited it in US banks. Meanwhile, Hipólito himself administered the Naica mine, Miguel Baca Valles ran the Ignacio Rodríguez corporation’s mines (Almoloya, El Cigarrero), Fierro oversaw the Casas Grandes copper mines, Silvestre Terrazas managed the Chihuahua brewery, and Juan B. Baca edited Nuevo Mundo. Vidal de la Garza, Lázaro’s brother, ran the Chihuahua flour mill, Pedro Rodríguez managed the La Paz clothing factory, and the Río Florido cloth and string factory was overseen by José Martínez Valles. All the casinos and card houses in Ciudad Juárez were managed by Villa, although Hipólito did all the work.
Aguirre Benavides’ denunciation suggested, but did not explicitly accuse, Villa and his subordinates of personally enriching themselves from the entities under their control which they were exploiting, administering, and managing.
The US journalist John Kenneth Turner, who enjoyed a high degree of prestige in the country owing to his book Barbarous Mexico, echoed these accusations. This same Turner accepted $2,000 from Carrancistas to write a series of articles in the US press (republished in the El Paso del Norte newspaper) titled, “Villa as a man of the state” in which, for instance, he wrote: “Hipólito is a very brown, fat man, with a guttural voice and a droopy mustache. Before Pancho’s rise to power, Hipólito walked through the streets of Chihuahua riding the rump of a burro, clanging his knees against a pair of loosely attached milk cans in his job as a milkman. Now he dresses like the Duke of Venice [. . .]. Hipólito has a meatpacking plant in Ciudad Juárez and controls the Customs offices.” Turner reported that Eugenio Aguirre Benavides held the monopoly over gaming in Durango and that Urbina “wore three diamond rings on his hairy hands.” He exposed some of the less than legal machinations of Villa’s purchasing agents, such as how Sommerfeld earned seventy-two-and-a-half centavos per peso on dynamite import tariffs while Villa’s government only got twenty-seven-and-a-half centavos and noted that “they say Lázaro de la Garza had become a millionaire twice over in six months.”
These two series of articles would lay the basis in future years for a theory—which would then be consolidated amongst professional historians—claiming a new bourgeoisie was formed around Villa in the wake of the despoiling of the Chihuahua and Durango oligarchs, a new Villista bourgeoisie consisting of the expropriating generals.
Eric Wolf explained that “Many properties passed into the hands of Villa’s generals, who used them to assure themselves a higher standard of living, converting themselves in this way [. . .] into a new bourgeoisie within the Army of the North.” Alan Knight added: “For many northern leaders, their aims did not include national power nor the affirmation of community or agrarian rights, rather they were limited to their confiscated hacienda and their pleasant retirement in the company of other veterans; the easy life of the ex-condottiere or a Brazilian colonel. Upon attaining this goal prematurely, Urbina paid for his impatience with his life. Villa managed to enjoy it, but only briefly, in Canutillo in 1920.” Enrique Krauze, whose superficial research led him to fall into each and every common trope applied to Villismo, could not help but fall for this one, “Villa distributed many haciendas as war booty among his lieutenants,” and MacLynn declared that “The strongmen of the North led an existence [. . .] imitating the lives of the hacendados they had defeated. The consistent ambition of a northern strongman was to confiscate property in order to live like the gentlemen.”
But Alan Knight had his doubts, writing that “To speak of a new bourgeoisie formed from Villista generals converted into hacendados is, to say the least, premature and perhaps unjustified.”
Unjustified, indeed. Between 1913 and 1915, which is when the expropriations took place, the Villista cadre and generals could not have “imitated the hacendados they had defeated,” nor ease into a “pleasant retirement” because, among other reasons, they spent these years waging constant battles, almost without periods of calm.
What Luis Aguirre Benavides described in detail was the financing of the Division of the North’s war machine—and he knew exactly what he was talking about because he had very often managed these enterprises’ accounts from his position as Villa’s secretary, perhaps making his insinuations even less fair (while in Kenneth Turner’s case we are dealing with an innocent writer for hire, without of any real knowledge). The haciendas and businesses, the properties administered by Villa and the Division of the North’s Finance Agency, with Hipólito at its head, produced profits that were not directed into Pancho’s pockets and those of his brother, rather they financed the military apparatus, being converted into salaries for the troops, food, munitions, coal, trains, etc. The Ciudad Juárez meatpacking plant purchased from Sherman and Weaver for $20,000 gold pesos and handed over to Juanita Torres “as a gift,” directed its revenue to Silvestre Terrazas in the Secretary of Government. And that wasn’t all: Aguirre Benavides provisioned his brigade with resources gained from his control of Customs; Abel Serratos paid for his troops from the income gained from the slaughterhouses and butcher shops of Guanajuato; monies from the haciendas administered by Rosalío Hernández maintained Camargo’s Faithful combatants, and the money that Durán obtained from the Batopilas mines went straight to the Finance Agency in Juárez, while Silvestre Terrazas ran the whole operation for the government of Chihuahua. Maybe Fierro bought himself a ten-carat ring with the taxes extracted from the Casas Grandes mines, but he controlled the mines for just two years, and he used the income to finance the cavalry brigade with which he would attack Obregón’s rearguard.
It was an improvised and efficient, very efficient, machine, but it was also dangerous. The private and the state—that is, the Division of the North, a state operating within territory controlled by the Villistas, and later the ephemeral Convencionista national state—were sometimes mixed up, even many times. Large amounts of cash and gold passed through the revolutionary commanders’ hands and, although their first duty was to keep the war machine well-greased and in good working order, perhaps they squandered or wasted some of it. Some was spent on meals, drinking binges, or prostitutes and was never accounted for (“Sir, you count all the money?” Villa had previously asked Pani).
Those were funds which Villa frequently disposed of liberally—as when he divvied up the funds from the Banco Minero among his generals by the handful and they stuffed it into their handkerchiefs or hats—and where those administering the funds were responsible only to him and to the essential necessities: that their men eat, they be clothed, the horses pastured, and that there be money for coal and bullets as well as money for the widows, and to pay the enormous costs of the medical trains. Villa kept this strange and tangled machine working with frequent threats to “put things in order.” And, in practice, a definition of “abuse” was generated, that is, anything that broke with the main priorities: first the combatants and the fighting, then the commanders’ pockets.
With the exception of Urbina, for whom a desire to enrich himself cost him his life—his Las Nieves ranch was a true latifundio, with 300,000 sheep—and Villa’s purchasing agents in the United States (Sommerfeld, Carothers, de la Garza), neither Ochoa, nor Chao, nor Terrazas, nor Hernández, nor Durán, became rich. And we could add Ornelas and Aguirre Benavides to the list. Primitivo Uro, who played a key role in this machine, died in poverty. Hipólito, on whom the hatreds and gun sights of Villismo’s detractors were concentrated, did nothing more or less than earn a small fortune with commissions from the arms manufacturers with whom he placed orders, which he then invested in jewelry for his wife . . . before turning it all over to Pancho to finance the Villista guerrilla war in 1916.
