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Porfirio Díaz ruled Mexico until 1911 by courting American, British and French capital for railways, mines and oil, and the same rail lines let him ship rural police to crush distant revolts in days. By 1900 more than 90 percent of communal indigenous lands had been sold off or expropriated, leaving an estimated 9.5 million landless peasants in debt peonage on haciendas, some covering over a million acres. When Díaz reversed his hint of open elections in 1910, Francisco I. Madero, heir to a rich landowning family, escaped jail to the United States and issued the Plan de San Luis Potosí under the slogan effective voting, no reelection. Pancho Villa and Pascual Orozco beat the federal army at Ciudad Juárez, and Díaz sailed for France.

Madero demobilized his rebels, kept the old federal army and stalled on land reform, and in February 1913, during the Ten Tragic Days, General Victoriano Huerta forced him out and had him killed. Venustiano Carranza’s Plan of Guadalupe united Carranza, Álvaro Obregón, Villa and Emiliano Zapata against Huerta, whose army was dissolved in 1914. The Aguascalientes convention failed, and the winners fought each other until Obregón, having studied World War I reports, broke Villa’s cavalry at Celaya in April 1915. The 1917 Constitution followed, then a Sonoran coup in 1920, the party that became the PRI, and Lázaro Cárdenas, who nationalized oil in 1938 and handed power to a civilian in 1940.

• Díaz allowed Arizona Rangers across the border to suppress striking Mexican miners at Cananea.
• At Celaya Obregón used irrigation ditches, barbed wire, trenches and interlocking machine guns against wave after wave of Villa’s horsemen.
• Zapata’s fighters in Morelos dismantled sugar haciendas and returned land to villages while the civil war still raged, then melted back into farming.
• Obregón remarked that no general can withstand a cannonball of 50,000 pesos, and rivals were bought off with graft.
• Zapata, killed in a 1919 ambush ordered by Carranza, later inspired the 1994 EZLN uprising in Chiapas.