On March 9th, 1916, US troops in the border areas of New Mexico and Texas were put on full alert and told to prepare for an invasion of [Music] Mexico. Soon, thousands of soldiers were pouring out of bases across America and heading south to join their brothers in a hunt for just one man. an idealistic, opportunistic, brutal, kind, and charismatic Mexican revolutionary who called himself Francisco Panchcho Villa.

Via was and still is in Mexico a mythical figure. Until that March day, Panchcho Villa had been a mythical figure in the United States, too. Initially, he was well-loved by the American people as sort of a Robin Hood character, Viva Villa, you know, and uh he’s a very popular character. But a shocking nighttime raid across the US border had transformed Via into a wanted man.

Via became the great villain in American media and public opinion. He was a great menace to the United States. He had to be hunted down at any cost. The mission was to capture Vega, dead or alive. In the hours before dawn on March 9th, 1916, most of the residents of the tiny desert town of Columbus, New Mexico were still in bed.

Troops in the nearby garrison were still in their bunks. The local sheriff’s office was locked up tight. But not everyone in Columbus was asleep. Out at the edge of town, 500 armed Mexicans under the command of bandit and revolutionary Poncho Villa were about to launch a stunning attack. They swarmed into the town.

and took the Americans by surprise. Before the residents knew what had hit them, Columbus was ablaze. When the American troops awoke, they could see in the fire who were American civilians and who were the vehistas. And they fired with machine guns into the vehistas who soon had to retreat.

 The American troops pursued them across the border, but couldn’t catch them. and about 100 Mexicans and 16 Americans died in that attack. The first foreign invaders to attack the US mainland since the War of 1812 had been beaten back, but not before the town of Columbus had been devastated. As the survivors in Columbus kept an anxious watch in case Via’s men returned, Americans across the nation demanded to know how and why this outrageous attack had happened and just what President Woodrow Wilson intended to do about it. This was an election

year and Woodro Wilson was under pressure to do something about Mexico. He was attacked by his enemies as a man who was soft on Mexico, who couldn’t defend the United States. And so he decided to send an army called the Punitive Expedition into Mexico. They were going to hunt down a man most Americans had thought of as a friend right up to the eve of his raid on Columbus.

 For over 20 years, Via had lived a double life as both a bandit and the leader of a revolutionary army. Stories of his exploits had made him seem like a romantic, even admirable figure. Via had even become a Hollywood star after legendary director DW Griffith sent crews to Mexico to film his latest exploits and restage some they had missed.

 The movie was a hit and cemented Ponchovia’s fame north of the border. But it also made it hard for Americans to see the real Via through the myth that both he and Hollywood were creating. Pavilla was an extremely complex person and character with a almost a mythical status which makes his interpretation of his life and who he was very very difficult thing to do.

 He’s originally from Durango an area of northern Mexico. He was the son of basically debt pionage parents. They lived landless on a hosienda owned by a very wealthy hassander and they would work the land for basically a pittance. Via and his family were just a few of the millions of poor Mexicans whose lives and livelihoods were being destroyed by the policies of Pfiio Diaz, Mexico’s ruler for 35 years.

Porfidio Diaz was the unquestioned dictator of Mexico, the man who determined everything. And some of the things he did were not bad. He was trying to bring Mexico into the modern period, build infrastructure, build railroads, build the oil industry in the early 1910s. But the other side of the coin was because of the building of the railroads, land values rose rapidly.

 a lot of foreign investment came in. So there was a real incentive to take land away from the poorest groups of society and the Diaz government protected these land seizures. What we see are more and more and more of the Mexicans becoming more and more landless to the point where by 1910 about 300 families own about 70% of the land.

 Thousands of peasants suddenly had the feeling they had lost their freedom. They had lost their autonomy and if they protested they were either sent to the army or massacred. Via and his family were part of this newly disenfranchised class. But when Via came home one day to find the man who owned their hienda trying to rape his sister, he decided he had had enough.

He shot and wounded the rapist, left the hienda and peasant life behind and began to reinvent himself as a man outside the law. He left his native state of Durango, went to the neighboring state of Chihuahua, and that’s where he started his career. Via would spend the next 15 years prowling Chihuahua’s rocky deserts, making his living as an outlaw and a cattle rustler.

To the oppressed peasants of Chihuahua, his crimes made him seem like a fighter for their cause, especially when he raided the herds of the wealthy Hiendas. Before the land owners controlled these lands, it was open range, accessible to everyone. Then suddenly they were fenced in, belonged to large land owners and as a result people felt frustrated and if someone stole cattle from there it was not seen as an act of banditry but as an act of indication of traditional rights.

 But Via was just getting started. In 1910, he began transforming his rag tag outlaw gang into a real army and transforming himself into one of the leaders of a widespread revolution to win back the rights stolen from Mexican peasants under dictator Piio Diaz. He managed to organize out of all these people without a doubt the most formidable army the Mexican revolution would witness.

 at its height something in the order of 50,000 men. He was in fact a professional army that are quite striking especially if one considers that Via was not himself a very educated man. He cared for his soldiers. He knew them, cared for them. When they were ill, he sent them to a hospital. If they told him, “My family has no money,” he gave them money.

 He made it a point every night to eat at their campfire and partake of their food. Partly out of solidarity, partly to prevent himself from being poisoned. He had a prodigious memory, remembered his soldiers, talked to everyone about his family, and so he had established a genuine link to his soldiers. As the revolution continued, Via and his army went from victory to victory.

 His soldiers began to claim that their general was unbeatable. He was the only leader of the revolution where people went into battle shouting his name. Vivya was a rallying cry of his army. [Music] Via’s men weren’t the only ones shouting his name. It was on the lips of the Mexican people, too. They knew that Via was the son of peasants and saw him as one of the few leaders of the revolution who really understood what they were fighting for, really cared about their past wrongs and future well-being.

He had a genuine agenda for social change that that was centrally concerned with the u needs of poor people. Whenever he came into a town, he forced the richest people in the town to give him a large contribution and the first thing he did was to give food and money to the poor. That obviously created a kind of Robin Hood legend about him and he became extremely popular.

[Music] The myths of Via are so large. There are at least a hundred revolutionary ballads or curedos about Via and his men that refer to his life, his origins, his revolutionary leadership. We have the outlaw, the bandit, the independent revolutionary leader, the lover. He had at least 27 unofficial wives and one official wife.

He loved to dress as a dandy and he had tailor everywhere and he loved the folklore and culture of his [Music] people. But he could be savage, kill enemies. But even that did not detract from another image that the poor appreciated very much. The image of the avenger. There was the feeling that when he killed large estate owners or federal officers, he was going to avenge the wrongs that these people had inflicted on [Music] them.

 So his cruelty even which was at times genuine could reflect positively Anna’s personality because of that image of the adventure. Via’s legend got a boost in May of 1911 when he and his army helped to win the fight against Pfiio Diaz. But as soon as they had deposed and exiled their common enemy, Via’s allies in the revolution, many of them generals with armies of their own, began to pursue their own agendas and to turn their armies against each other.

Soon, the rising chaos in Mexico was causing alarm thousands of miles away in Washington, DC. President Wilson was already worried about the outbreak of World War I in Europe. He couldn’t afford to have another war raging just south of his borders, too. The US government had an interest in stability in Mexico, especially as the war in Europe became larger and larger.

The United States wanted to identify which of these factions was likeliest to be friendly to the United States and to guarantee the kind of stability that the US needed. President Wilson for a while was very interested in sort of working with VIA and and in fact to start thinking of VIA as potentially the new leader for Mexico, which is a striking proposition when one thinks about it now.

 But before Wilson could make up his mind about who to back in Mexico, a wealthy landowner named Venustiano Karansza declared himself the new leader of the revolution. Via refused to bow to Karansza’s authority. Karansa was an estate owner and a man of the old regime in Vya’s eyes while Via came from the lowest classes of society. hated the whole upper class and for him garansa was a symbol of this upper class.

 One of the main conflicts was what should be done with Mexico’s large estates. Via believed they should be divided among the peasants. Karansa wanted to return to their former owners. In 1915, Via and Karanza sent their armies against each other to establish the direction of the revolution once and for all.

 But for the first time in his career as a general, Via lost. His defeat came at the hands of Karanza’s craftiest general, Alvaro Oreon. Via never saw it coming. And the defeat is is basically a Waterlue of his own making. Obergon sets up trenches and he sets up machine gun nests and Via really ignores all of these signs. What Via had not learned but had been shown in World War I was that cavalry was ineffective when it charged against infantry masked in trenches and with machine guns firing at them.

The European powers soon abandoned cavalry charges, but Vya still believed in them. And so he assaulted Oreon’s trenches in frontal assaults that destroyed his army. That was his fall from grace in Mexico and in Washington DC too. Karansza’s victory over Via prompted President Wilson to make a decision that would change the course of the Mexican Revolution and plant the seeds for Via’s raid on Columbus.

Woodro Wilson recognized Karansa. Not only did he recognize Karansa, but he allowed Karansa’s troops to come through US territory and attack Vya in the state of Sonora where Via had gone on a military campaign. Via considered this a breach of neutrality and an act of war. Via feared that Karanza had struck a deal with Wilson, a deal that gave the US a right to interfere in Mexican affairs whenever it saw fit.

 To Via, this arrangement would reduce Mexico to nothing more than an American colony and could not be allowed to stand. Via believed wrongly, probably as it turns out, that Karansa had struck a deal with the United States and he needed to create a situation that would provoke a US invasion of Mexico in order to shatter the alliance between Karansa and the United States.

 Via realized that the best way to provoke an American invasion of Mexico was to attack the US. Columbus, New Mexico seemed like a perfect target. If the US counteratt attacked, Karansza would be forced to make some difficult choices. The government of Karansa would be faced with two alternatives. Either he did not resist and unmask himself as an agent of the United States or he resisted in the agreement that Via believed existed between the United States and Mexico would be broken.

Via put his scheme into action on the night of March 9th, 1916 with his raid on Columbus. When Wilson responded by sending a punitive expedition into Mexico, Via’s plan seemed to be right on track. All he had to do now was elude capture until Karanza was forced to show his hand. [Music] Vya used guerilla tactics.

 We had popular support and they were incapable of really catching him. The area that we’re talking about is absolutely huge and the geography of it is one of the most rugged, inhospitable areas of the world. Very mountainous, very dry, lots of caves and ravines. And they’re really getting nowhere in finding out where Via is.

 They know he’s around, but they can’t get him. And that has to be frustrating. And no one was more frustrated than Brigadier General John J. Persing, the career army officer Woodro Wilson had chosen to lead the punitive expedition into Mexico. Persing had predicted that finding Via would be as hard as finding a rat in a cornfield, and the Mexican people weren’t exactly eager to help him out.

The uh United States Army believed that if they went in and had enough money to make peasant lives better and to you know pay for information on VIA that they would be able to win the hearts and minds of the peasants. But this did not come to pass. Persing and the punitive expedition seemed to get a break when scouts brought back word that Via had been shot in the leg by one of his own men during a skirmish with Karansza’s troops.

But the news wasn’t as good as it seemed. Ponchovilla became impossible to find once he was wounded. And he literally went into the hills and hid. In fact, myths have him uh living in a cave for about 2 months uh as water and food would be lifted up to him uh in a in in a bucket as the place where he was hiding was almost impossible to get to.

The punitive expedition passed by close but had no idea that we was there. And after a few months, although he still had tremendous pain in his leg and had difficulties moving and riding, he finally emerged and then started a huge military campaign. Via’s plan to force Karanza to take a stand on the American invasion didn’t seem to be working.

 Via will face what we call two-front war. He is fighting the conistas and running from Persing at the same time. It’s quite amazing that he’s able to survive given those circumstances. His fellow Mexicans were especially impressed by the way Via eluded Persing at every turn. All of a sudden he had Persing’s columns, you know, going up and down Chihuahua and various parts of the Sierra trying to chase him and of course not being able to find him and kill him as they hoped they would do very quickly.

 So that the myth of Via, the outlaw, Via the one who could elude American persecution, Via the one who could attack the United States in its own territory with impunity did a lot I think to create Via’s image as being a great hero. [Music] If you look at the effects of a punitive expedition on the size of Via’s following, he does increase his numbers uh quite dramatically as the anti-Americanism leads to more people following Via.

 When he left the cave in the later part of 1916, he was joined by nearly 10,000 men. Not so much because they were for Vya, but because they resented the American occupation of their country. Mexicans were angered most of all by the way Persing and the punitive expedition kept pushing deeper and deeper into their country without bothering to ask for permission to proceed.

 We must remember that as recently as 1898, the US had fought with Spain in the, you know, over Cuba and Puerto Rico and the Philippines had annexed Puerto Rico, had taken over Cuba very close to Mexico and the Mexicans were also very aware of that. Finally, Via’s scheme to drive a wedge between Karanza and Woodro Wilson began to pay off.

Karanza, desperate to prove that he hadn’t sold Mexico out to the US, was forced to take a stand against Persing in the name of national sovereignty. [Music] As the Americans penetrated more and more into Mexico, Karansa finally gave them an ultimatum. If you don’t stop, there will be war between our two countries.

The Americans ignored the Mexican ultimatum. But when they got to the small town of El Carzal, Kuransza’s troops were waiting for them. The Karanista commander told the American commander, “I have orders to resist you should you march in.” And the American commander took the decision, “I won’t let any Mexican interfere with my affairs.” And ordered a charge.

To the Americans surprise, the Karanistas won the battle, inflicting heavy losses on the US troops and taking 23 prisoners. And what that led to in the United States was uh increasing calls for the Persing expedition to be cancelled and pulled back. But Wilson didn’t pull Persing and his men back, and he wouldn’t let them move forward either.

Wilson gave orders to the punitive expedition not to march further south but to remain in the northern part of the state of Chihuahua. During that time, Via captured the capital city of Chihuahua, which did not greatly help the prestige of either Persing or the US Army. Wilson couldn’t seem to decide whether he wanted the punitive expedition to stay in Mexico or head for home.

Persing and his men were left with nothing to do but sit tight in camp while their commanderin-chief made up his mind. [Music] The result was catastrophic for the United States. On the one hand, they were still seen as invaders. On the other hand, since they couldn’t advance south, they couldn’t effectively defeat VIA.

 So, they had the worst of both sides. But by January 1917, the catastrophe in Mexico was being overshadowed by the growing war in Europe. As chances that America would be forced to enter World War I increased, Woodro Wilson ordered Persing to bring the punitive expedition out of Mexico for [Music] good. As they marched back across the border into the United States, the Americans tried to put the best face on their retreat.

 But it was hard to argue that the punitive expedition had been a success. The Punitive Expedition’s goal was to either capture V or destroy his army. When they entered Mexico, VIA had 500 men. When they left Mexico, VIA had 10,000. So obviously, they failed. I do not think that Persing ever had a chance of catching Via.

 Without the support of the peasants and without really knowing the geography as well as they needed to, Persing did not have a hope. And it indeed was a wild goose chase. Persing would have more success on his next assignment as the leader of America’s victorious expeditionary force to Europe during World War I.

 But in Mexico, Persing’s retreat became the defining moment in Ponchovilla’s life and legend. There was one famous ballot that’s still being sung today. A via in an airplane waving goodbye to the American troops and the shamefaced Americans crossing the border, not even looking into each other’s faces, defeated by the vistas.

 Obviously, Vya was never in an airplane, but this kind of legend now emerged and it was seen as a great victory for Vi. But that was just the legend. In real life, things didn’t turn out the way Via had planned. The years from 1917 to 20 were VIA’s worst years, basically because he began losing popular support. People in Chihuahua thought fighting Karansa was hopeless, would not lead to anything.

While Vya wanted to continue fighting, and that to him was the worst period in his life. In 1920, Via gave up the fight and retired to a remote hosianda only to be ambushed 3 years later on his way to visit one of his wives. The real Ponchovilla died in a hail of bullets, but the legend lives [Music] on.

 He really has come to represent and especially to foreigners uh what Mexico uh was and is today. He is still a hero to millions of Mexicans. When I presented my book on vi hundreds of people from Chihuahua came, the rooms were overcrowded. Whenever I lecture or anyone else lectures on VA, people from the poorest segments of society come to listen.

 They still see him as the avenger of their wrongs. And in that sense, in spite of his cruelty that he sometimes manifested, he remains one of the most popular figures of the Mexican Revolution. via the Mexican who dare to stand up against the powerful neighbor, who dare to fight for the rights of the poor. Via the Avenger, via the Robin Hood, and via the uncorruptible.

 Those are the legacies that remain today.