‘Muchachos! Before it gets dark…we’ll burst into Celaya in blood and fire!’ So predicted General Pancho Villa as he watched his famous Division del Norte head out of Salamancha, Mexico, early on April 6, 1915. During Mexico’s five-year-old revolution the division had earned a reputation of invincibility and its commander had become a folk hero. Always attacking, Villa relied on his cavalry’s boldness and fury to put his enemies to flight, and that was how he planned to rout General Alvaro Obregon’s Constitutionalist army from Celaya. That tactic, however, was just what Obregon was counting on. By the spring of 1915, Mexico’s chaotic revolution had entered its bloodiest phase. Fighting began in 1910 as guerrilla supporters of reformer Francisco Madero battled President Porfirio Diaz’s government troops. After a series of rebel victories, Diaz resigned in May 1911. Madero was appointed president that autumn, but he alienated many of the guerrilla leaders, such as Emiliano Zapata and Pascual Orozco, and fighting between the new government and various rebel bands erupted.

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A new phase of the revolution began in February 1913, when Federal Army General Victoriano Huerta staged a coup d’etat and had the president murdered. Coahuila Governor Venustiano Carranza, a Madero supporter, reacted by denouncing Huerta, advocating a return to constitutional rule, and declaring himself first chief of the Constitutionalist army. He formed a loose alliance with former revolutionary leaders, such as Francisco ‘Pancho’ Villa, and fighting spread across the country. Hoping to hasten the fall of Huerta, the United States intervened in April 1914 by shelling and then occupying the Gulf port of Veracruz. That summer, offensives by the various revolutionary armies forced Huerta to flee the country, and Carranza’s main army, commanded by General Obregon, occupied Mexico City.

The victorious coalition, however, quickly fell apart. The rural-based Villistas and Zapatistas demanded immediate radical reforms, which put them at odds with the more moderate Carranza, de facto head of the interim government. In October, the Constitutionalists walked out of a conference to resolve the factions’ differences-the Convention of Aguascalientes–and Villa and Zapata formed a Conventionist government to rival Carranza’s. The ‘War of the Factions’ soon broke out.

Villa, at thirty-seven the revolution’s most charismatic leader, had found his metier in war. Despite his near-illiteracy, he rose rapidly from guerrilla leader to brigadier general of irregular cavalry to de facto warlord of north-central Mexico. ‘His method of fighting is astonishingly like Napoleon’s,’ American journalist John Reed wrote. He summarized Villa’s strengths as’secrecy, quickness of movement, the adaptation of his plans to the character of the country and of his soldiers–the value of intimate relations with the rank and file, and of building up a tradition among the enemy that his army is invincible, and that he himself bears a charmed life….’ During the 1913-14 anti-Huerta campaigns, Villa commanded the biggest army–the Division del Norte–and won the crucial victories. But he was much too independent for Carranza, who declined to promote him to general de division–like Obregon.

Alvaro Obregon, a former farmer and politician, had commanded loyalist troops in his native Sonora during Pascual Orozco’s 1912 uprising against the Madero government. Obregon had serious political differences with Carranza, but realized that neither Villa nor Zapata, the only leaders with the national following and political ideology to offer a possible alternative to Carranza, were competent to govern the republic. Because neither would disband his army, any Conventionist president would be their puppet. And when their tentative alliance inevitably collapsed, chaos would surely follow. Obregon decided he had to defeat Villa and Zapata, and support Carranza for a presidential term, but would build his own support network and succeed him in the presidential chair.

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