Pancho Villa
Pancho Villa commanded the most effective army of the Mexican Revolution and invaded the United States. Born Doroteo Arango in 1878 in Durango to a sharecropping family, he was working the land as a child, and the account he gave of his own life begins with shooting a hacienda owner who had assaulted his sister and taking to the hills at sixteen. He spent his twenties as a bandit and a cattle rustler in Chihuahua. The revolution of 1910 turned that into a military career. He raised men for Madero, took Ciudad Juárez in 1911 in defiance of orders, was jailed by Huerta and escaped, and came back in 1913 to build the División del Norte — up to 50,000 men, with artillery, its own hospital trains and a system of railway supply that made it the only revolutionary force capable of a conventional campaign. He took Torreón and Zacatecas, and he and Zapata occupied Mexico City in December 1914, where they were photographed with Villa in the presidential chair, which he said was too big for him. He was then destroyed by Obregón at Celaya in April 1915, where he charged trenches, wire and machine guns repeatedly. The United States recognised Carranza, and Villa raided Columbus, New Mexico in March 1916, killing eighteen; a punitive expedition of some 10,000 American troops spent eleven months failing to find him. He accepted an amnesty and a hacienda in 1920 and was assassinated in 1923. He also had a contract with an American film company, which paid for exclusive rights to film his battles and reportedly influenced when some of them were fought. The reputation that survives him in Mexico is regional and unsettled: a bandit in the capital's histories and a hero in Chihuahua.
- Lived: 1878 CE – 1923 CE
- Nationality: Mexican
- Roles: revolutionary, military_leader, general
