Venustiano Carranza
Venustiano Carranza won the Mexican Revolution and was shot by his own side five years later. Born in 1859 in Coahuila into a landowning family, he was a municipal president and then a senator under Porfirio Díaz for two decades before joining Madero's movement, which is the key to everything he did: he was a constitutionalist and a member of the northern elite, not a revolutionary. When Huerta murdered Madero in 1913, Carranza was governor of Coahuila and refused to recognise the new government, issuing the Plan of Guadalupe — a document that named him first chief of a constitutionalist army and said nothing whatever about land or labour. He assembled the northern armies, with Obregón, Villa and Zapata all fighting Huerta for their own reasons, and won. The revolution then turned on itself. The convention at Aguascalientes in 1914 tried to reconcile the factions and failed, Villa and Zapata took Mexico City, and Carranza withdrew to Veracruz and won the resulting war through Obregón, who beat Villa at Celaya in 1915 with trenches, wire and machine guns. He convened the constitutional convention of 1917 and found it more radical than he was: the constitution it produced put subsoil rights in the nation, limited the working day, guaranteed the right to strike and provided for land redistribution, most of which he had not wanted and none of which he implemented enthusiastically. Zapata was assassinated on his orders in 1919. He tried to impose a civilian successor in 1920, was driven out by Obregón's revolt, and was killed in a mountain hut. He is the reason Mexico has the constitution it has and was not the man who wanted it. His other durable legacy is the Carranza doctrine, asserting that no state may intervene in another's internal affairs and that foreigners are entitled to no more than nationals, which Mexican diplomacy has cited ever since.
- Lived: 1859 CE – 1920 CE
- Nationality: Mexican
- Roles: president, revolutionary, head_of_state, politician
