Alvaro Obregon
It seems like almost every year that May Day and Cinco de Mayo fall within a week of each other, and interestingly enough 2020 is no exception to this trend. So, while we're all out this week drinking Coronas, avoiding Corona Viruses, and preparing for the end of the fucking world, I'd like to talk about a working-class Mexican Revolutionary who rose from poverty to Presidente, organized an army of disgruntled laborers into a fighting force that could stand face-to-face against the might of a professional army, overthrew multiple tyrannical regimes, and became such a hero to the people of Mexico that after his arm got blown off by a grenade his supporters stuck the severed hand in a jar of formaldehyde and put it on public display for 70+ years after this guy's death.
Antonio Banderas never played him in a movie, like he did with Pancho Villa, and Rage Against the Machine wrote far more lyrics about the life of Emiliano Zapata, but Mexican Revolutionary commander Alvaro Obregon has one interesting thing on both those guys:
He crushed them both on the field of battle. And stomped them so hard that neither was ever heard from again.
so the first line of this article was a joke, please don't @ me
Alvaro Obregon was born in Siquisiva, a small village in the Mexican state of Sonora, in February of 1880. He grew up in extreme poverty, raised by his mother and his three older sisters, and as soon as he was old enough to lift a shovel he started going a variety of backbreaking, soul-crushing day jobs – he was a tenant farmer, worked on a sugar mill, ran a lathe, sold shoes door-to-door, and basically scraped by paycheck-to-paycheck, putting away whatever small scraps of wealth he could accumulate. Eventually, after years of hard work, Obregon managed to save up enough to buy a small chunk of property – a little chickpea farm in Sonora. He moved his family in there, went to work growing garbanzos, and then some kind of plague swept through Sonora and claimed the lives of Obregon's wife and three kids.
For many guys, that's kind of the end of the story. Hard work, misery, and tragedy, then you bury yourself in the bottom of a tequila bottle until the world forgets about you. Well, not Alvaro Obregon. This guy buried himself into his work, built up his farm, and in his spare time he invented a mechanical chickpea harvester, got a deal with a local machinist who could build them, and started selling these contraptions around the valley where he grew up.
Then war broke out in Mexico, and Obregon found his true calling – as a badass military commander who vents his rage by crushing all who stand before him.
The term "Mexican Revolution" makes the decade of the 1910s sound like it was one continuous, clearly-defined conflict between rebels and federales, with the fate of Mexico hanging in the balance. However, if you've ever tried to actually read the history of the Mexican Revolution, you'll discover that it's really just a big sequence of dudes with hard-to-remember names assassinating each other, declaring themselves President, and then being assassinated by their best friend. It's really convoluted, there's a ton of crazy political shit going on, and in terms of being an ungodly clusterfuck this thing is closer to the Bad Parts of the Roman Empire than something like the American Revolution. I'll attempt to summarize it as we go, but my neighbors' building is under construction and the non-stop hammering is rendering me largely incapable of forming complete thoughts and processing complex information, so bear with me on this one.
For almost the entire 31 years of Alvaro Obregon's life, the country of Mexico was run by a single person – Presidente-por-Vida Porifiro Diaz. Diaz was a powerful dictator who was pretty brutal about crushing all opposition (this, of course, is how you stay in power for 30+ years in Latin America), but in November of 1911 Diaz was overthrown by one of his top generals, a guy named Madero, who led a bloody coup that resulted in the ouster of the Presidente. Then, pretty much immediately, Madero's top general tried to overthrow him, because apparently everyone just wasn't done shooting each other just yet.
Obregon wasn't part of Madero's revolution (he was too busy drawing schematics for farm equipment and coming up with dope recipes involving garbanzo beans), but in 1912 he signed on to help defend Madero from this coup. He recruited the Fourth Irregular Battalion of Sonora, a home-grown guerilla group comprised primarily of Yaqui and Mayo Indians who were basically one step removed from being Apaches in Sombreros. Riding at the head of this war band (he spoke both Native languages fluently, having worked side-by-side with these peoples for his entire life) with a badass rifle, an even more badass sombrero, bandoliers of large-caliber rounds, and heavy pistols strapped to both thighs, Obregon immediately started putting on a clinic in military tactics, crushing one enemy after another up and down his home state in a surprising series of hit-and-run attacks. In eight months of fighting he led surprise raids, set clever traps for enemy forces, implemented every piece of modern technology he could get his hands on, and demolished his foes in literally every single battle he commanded.
By April of 1912, the war was over, and Madero's presidency held power. Obregon went home, disbanded his forces, granted his troops with small patches of land to thank them for their service, and went back to his chickpea farm.
Two months later, Madero was overthrown and murdered in a coup d'etat by a DIFFERENT one of his generals, who executed the president and vice-president and illegally seized power over Mexico for himself.
Obregon sighed, grabbed his well-worn rifle, and went back to work.
Obregon's home state, Sonora, had refused to recognize this usurper as president, so naturally that guy sent the entire Mexican Army to kick Sonora's face into the back of its skull, but what they weren't expecting was fucking Alvaro Obregon to be waiting there for them with heavy machine guns and barbed wire. Obregon, now a Colonel thanks to all the heroics of the previous conflict, led the Army of Sonora against a far-superior invading force and not only held them back, but moved forward and started driving towards Mexico City with the intent of kicking this usurper's balls off and bringing Democracy back to Mexico.
And he wasn't the only person – two other guys were currently driving towards Mexico City with their own armies as well. These dudes were Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata, two of the most famous and celebrated heroes in Mexican History, and together with Obregon they formed a powerful alliance bent on defeating The Man and reinstating a Constitution in Mexico.
While all three armies performed well against the Federales, Obregon actually commanded the army that reached Mexico City first, triumphantly crushing the usurper's troops outside the city walls and then personally forcing that asshole to sign a peace treaty on the hood of his car in the middle of a crowded street. Then, since Obregon thought that the usurper had taken over due to foreign influence, he decreed that all the foreign businessmen in Mexico City had to grab a broom and a wheelbarrow and clean up the rubble and wreckage from the siege. Which is pretty baller, honestly.
Well, naturally, Pancho Villa, Zapata, and Obregon's boss (a guy named Carranza) couldn't agree on how best to create a country, so they all decided to go to war with each other pretty much immediately. Obregon was a pretty chill dude, and didn't really love the idea of more war, and plus he had friends in the armies of both Villa and Zapata, so he did the manly thing and went to both camps trying to reason with the commanders and figure something out that didn't involve more bloodshed. But, when you're dealing with huge egos, shit doesn't really go down like that, and when Obregon asked Pancho Villa to come back to the negotiating table Villa pulled a gun on him and threatened to shoot Obregon in the fucking face.
Ok, we can be that way then too, I guess.
Obregon had two major advantages over all of the enemies he faced during the Mexican Revolution. First, he was smarter than them. He had a photographic memory and quick reflexes – the story goes that he was a crack poker player, because if you shuffled a deck in front of him he could watch the shuffle and then tell you the order of the cards in the deck. He was clever, studied tactics, understood people, and was an inherently great general even though he never had any real formal training. Second, he implemented every modern piece of military tech he could get his hands on. He read everything he could about modern warfare, and was intently following what was going on in Europe, which at the time was in the opening years of World War I. Remember, this dude designed and built a fucking chickpea-harvesting tractor in his garage, so he was pretty tech-savvy, and when he could track down things like belt-fed machine guns, field artillery, barbed wire and land mines he didn't hesitate to find new and interesting ways of incorporating it on the battlefield. Meanwhile, his enemies grew up in the old days of the cowboys and banditos and preferred wild cavalry charges on horseback with six-shooters.
Alvaro Obregon first moved south against Zapata, crushing his caballeros at the Battle of Puebla in 1915. Zapata was killed shortly afterwards. Then, in just a few weeks, Obregon wheeled North and turned on Pancho Villa, who, at the battles of Celaya in April 1915, led a series of heroic yet futile cavalry charges at Obregon's disciplined troops. The thing Zapata and Villa used to talk shit on Obregon about was how he was too cautious and not aggressive enough – Villa and Zapata were horse warriors who led heroic, brave, balls-out charges, while Obregon's strategies were far more similar to the warfare that was going down between France and Germany in 1915. But, in the end, Obregon proved that the days of the Wild West were over, and he drove his point across with a few thousand rounds of LMG fire in wide, sweeping arcs across the Mexican countryside.
But it came with a price, as well – at the final Battle of Celaya, Obregon was personally overseeing the defenses, manning a position at the front, when a Villista hand grenade landed nearby and blew off Obregon's right arm at the elbow. The pain was so excruciating that the General actually tried to cap himself in the head to put himself out of his misery, but he was stopped by an adjutant, regrouped, and then, after the battle, actually walked around on the battlefield trying to figure out where his arm went. When someone asked him what the fuck he was doing, Obregon replied, "it's not so easy to abandon such a necessary thing as an arm".
Which, I mean, is a super chill thing to say in a situation like that.
They eventually found his arm, put it in a jar, and it was on display at a national monument to Alvaro Obregon until like the mid-1980s.
Obregon was the hero of the Revolution, actually ended up earning the support of the surviving Villistas and Zapatistas, and was elected President of Mexico in 1920. He built schools and libraries, commissioned murals across Mexico, fostered an art community that included people like Frida Kahlo, negotiated the end of the U.S. Punitive Expedition, built a military academy, established the Mexican Air Force, and opened a school for military medicine. His years in office were a much-needed break from the constant warfare that had been ripping Mexico apart for over a decade.
On his way out the door, Obregon caught wind that one of his former Generals was planning a coupe against the democratically-elected president that had been voted in to succeed Obregon as president. Obregon personally led an attack against this guy and his supporters, crushing them after a short series of skirmishes. When he captured one of the coup's organizers, that guy was a lawyer and he was like, "No way dude, it's illegal to have me executed by military tribunal because I'm a civilian." So Obregon gave that asshole a battlefield commission to General in the Mexican Army and then had him shot the next day.
Obregon returned home to his chickpea farm, and lived there for another four years. He ran for and won the presidency again in 1928, but was assassinated by some lunatic artist before he could take office. He was 48 years old.
There's still a statue of him in Mexico City.
Links:
Books:
Buchenau, Jürgen. The Last Caudillo. Germany: Wiley, 2011.
Hall, Linda Biesele. Álvaro Obregón. United States: Texas A & M University Press, 1981.
Magill, Frank Northen. Dictionary of World Biography. United Kingdom: Taylor & Francis, 1999.