Emiliano Zapata
Emiliano Zapata fought for the return of village land in one Mexican state for nine years and was shot at a meeting arranged to betray him. Born in 1879 in Anenecuilco in Morelos, he was not one of the landless — his family owned a little land and some horses — and he was elected head of his village council at thirty on the strength of a lawsuit about the boundaries. Morelos was sugar country. The great estates had been expanding into the villages' communal land for decades under Díaz's survey laws, taking fields and water rights, and the villages held colonial-era titles that the courts would not honour. He joined Madero's rising in 1910 on a promise of land and broke with him within six months, when the new president told the villages to wait for legal process. The Plan de Ayala of November 1911 is his answer: land, liberty, immediate restitution of stolen fields to the villages that held title, and expropriation of a third of the great estates with compensation. His army was the villages themselves — men who farmed and fought in their own districts, went home for the harvest, and could not be defeated because they could not be found. He held Morelos through the fall of Madero, Huerta and the Convention, and redistributed land there while the fighting continued. Carranza's forces arranged a fake defection, and a colonel had him shot at the hacienda of Chinameca in April 1919. The land reform was written into the 1917 constitution.
- Lived: 1879 CE – 1919 CE
- Nationality: Mexican
- Roles: revolutionary, military_leader, agrarian_leader
