The residents of Texas’ westernmost town awoke on Nov. 15, 1913, to the familiar sound of gunfire in the streets of Juarez.
The life-and-death struggle Mexicans called a revolution began three years earlier, when Francisco Madero challenged the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz. The aging tyrant responded with the iron-fisted repression that had kept him in power for 34 years and forced the mild-mannered intellectual to flee the country for the safety of San Antonio.
Abraham Gonzales followed his hero into Lone Star exile but selected sympathetic El Paso for his home away from home. He recruited guerrillas, passed the sombrero for donations and established a munitions pipeline.
Taking advantage of lax laws, which permitted the purchase of war material for export, Gonzales bought in bulk from an arms supplier in New York. The guns and ammunition were shipped to an El Paso sporting goods dealer, who not only handled the merchandise for free but often paid the freight charges out of his own pocket.
After a brief return to Mexico cut short by a military setback, Madero checked into an El Paso hotel in the spring of 1911. While their timid leader licked their wounds, Pascual Orozco and Pancho Villa fought the Diaz defenders for control of Juarez.
Oblivious to stray bullets and artillery shells, El Pasoans watched the three days of fireworks from rooftops, boxcars and the banks of the Rio Grande. The fall of Juarez to the rebels on May 14 resulted in the resignation of Diaz and his replacement by Madero.
But the do-nothing policies of the democratic dreamer soon alienated his more militant supporters. Juarez once more became a bloody battleground, as Orosco’s “Red Flaggers” stormed the city and flooded El Paso with panic-stricken refugees.
The very merchants, who had made a killing selling everything under the sun to the revolutionaries, now howled in protest. Blaming “the deplorable state of affairs in El Paso” on “the continued anarchy in Juarez,” Mayor C.E. Kelly demanded federal protection in a strongly worded appeal to President Taft.
Army troops at Fort Bliss entered the city to restore order and close the crossing points. Reinforcements rushed to the scene from San Antonio along with National Guard units and Texas Rangers mobilized by Gov. Oscar Colquitt.
The eventual eviction of the “Red Flaggers” from Juarez by Madero loyalists brought a welcomed return to the serene status quo. For a few peaceful months, it was business as usual on the border.
But all bets were suddenly off after Gen. Victoriano Huerta overthrew and murdered Madero in February 1913. El Pasoans braced for another round of fighting in their troubled sister city.
Pancho Villa had spent the three months prior to the Huerta coup in El Paso, where he had taken refuge following a close call with a firing squad. He dramatically reappeared in northern Mexico, rallied his ragtag regiments and in the name of the martyred Madero struck at Chihuahua in November 1913.
The inconclusive clash deteriorated into a siege, which was definitely not Villa’s style. He rode north with just his cavalry in the hope of surprising the Juarez garrison.
The villistas turned a captured coal train into a Trojan horse on wheels and rolled right into the heart of the sleeping city before dawn on Nov. 15, 1913. Khaki-clad peasants silently surrounded the main barracks and mowed down the government soldiers as they came running out the door.
Most officers followed the example of their cowardly commander, who disguised as a peon headed for El Paso as fast as four legs could carry him. He was found later that morning hiding under a bed in the backroom of a store.
A hail of lead ended the frantic flight of a lieutenant in the middle of the international bridge. American soldiers at the opposite end of the span reacted to numerous near misses by charging the villistas, who wisely raised their rifles over their heads in symbolic apology.
El Pasoans returned from an afternoon tour of Juarez with reports of bodies on nearly every block. The majority were not combat casualties but victims of Villa’s roving death squads.
Speaking to American newspapermen in the same hall where Diaz toasted Taft in 1909, the victor justified the executions. “It must be done. Traitors must pay the penalty.”
Villa did express regret for the slaying of an American taxi driver outside a Juarez gambling den and the wounding of a messenger boy on an El Paso avenue. But he hastened to add, “I will continue to protect American lives and property in the future as I have always done in the past.”
That cynical pledge was broken two and a half years later by Villa’s unprovoked raid on Columbus, N.M.
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