Brief biography of

Pancho Villa

Doroteo Arango was born in the summer of 1878 (?) in San Juan del Río, Durango, the son of Arango and Micaela Arambula. As an illiterate farmhand, Villa was never presented with the opportunity to attend school. As a boy he worked on the hacienda attending to cattle and horses. Because Villa was raised on the hacienda he saw firsthand the abusive labor practices applied against his family and others in his social class. Villa watched as the debts of the laborer-father were inherited by the son. The abuse of the landowners knew no bounds.

Returning from the fields one afternoon in 1894, Villa entered his home to find his twelve year old sister Martina had been the victim of  a sexual assault at the hands of Lopez Negrete, a man who oversaw the workers on the hacienda. Doroteo wasted no time in killing the man and so began his life as a fugitive. He headed for the Sierra de la Silla in order to evade the "rurales," rural police.

Little record exists of the next four or five years of his life, during which time he changed his name to Francisco Villa to evade the law. By the time he was 20, Villa had moved northward to Chihuahua, working on and off as a miner in Parral while selling stolen cattle in Chihuahua. In 1899 he returned to mining, this time in Santa Eulalia near Chihuahua, but he soon tired of the laborer's life and added bank robbery to cattle rustling and murder on the list of crimes for which he was wanted by the Díaz government.

Villa's Robin Hood story began after he established himself and his bandit followers in the sierras in 1900. During the period of 1900-09 he became a legendary hero to the poor for skillfully evading the Porfiriato's rurales. In 1910 Villa and his men came down from the hills to join Francisco I. Madero's revolutionary forces, thereby making a historical transition from bandidos to revolucionarios. The charismatic figure was able to recruit an army of thousands, including a substantial number of Americans, some of whom were made captains in the División del Norte. Following Madero's short-lived victory and assassination, Villa remained in command of his División del Norte army in resistance--along with Coahuila's Venustiano Carranza and Sonora's Alvaro Obregón--against the 1913-14 Victoriano Huerta dictatorship. In true Robin Hood style, he broke up the vast land holdings of local hacendados and parceled them out to the widows and orphans of his fallen soldiers.  

A split among the revolutionary leaders soon created a rift between Villa and Carranza. When the U.S. government came out openly in support of the Carranza presidency, Villa retaliated by raiding U.S border towns, most notably Columbus, New Mexico. On the U.S. side of the border, Villa's image plummeted while many in Mexico saw Villa as an avenger of decades of American oppression. After two U.S. Army "punitive expeditions" into Mexico in 1916 and 1919 failed to route Villa, the Mexican government accepted his surrender and retired Villa on a general's salary to a parcel of  land 25,000 acres in size in Canutillo, Durango. Furthermore, his men were presented with lands at Rio Conchos and military pay for one year.

Villa would not forget the hard lessons that he learned as a young man on the cruel system of the haciendas. Villa would not make the same mistakes. He attempted tremendous agrarian reform on his land. First, he studied the new techniques of contour plowing and crop rotation. Villa remembered the unfair economics used by the hacienda owners and made refreshing changes. He founded a bank which readily made loans to farmers. The loans were provided with uncommonly low interest rates. The low rates allowed the farmers to buy the necessary tools and seeds for their fields. In turn, the farmers were more comfortable in their work environment because they did not have tremendously debts looming over their heads. The children who occupied Villa's land were provided with a school. Although Villa had never received a formal education, he realized the importance of education in the lives of the children. Education promised that these children had the opportunity to make a better life for themselves when they became adults. It could be said that Villa's management of his hacienda reflected his goals for the people of Mexico. But the happiness he found was short lived.

On the morning of July 20, 1923, Pancho Villa was assassinated in Parral, Chihuahua.He and five of his followers were gunned down by seven armed men. The exact reason for his murder, the killers themselves, and who sent them is still not known.

Today Villa is remembered with pride by most Mexicans for having led the most important military campaigns of the constitutionalist revolution, in which his troops were victorious as far south as Zacatecas and Mexico City, east as far as Tampico, and west as far as Casas Grandes. Because of Villa's Columbus escapade and subsequent evasion of U.S. troops, he is also often cited as the only foreign military personage ever to have successfully invaded continental U.S. territory.