Pancho Villa

Who was Pancho Villa? I’d never heard of him before I did this essay, but I guess you must’ve because you looked him up and you found this article. Anyways, I’m doing an essay on him.

Pancho Villa was a Spanish bandit and revolutionary leader at the end of the 1800’s and beginning of the 1900’s. He was born Doroteo Arango on June 5, 1878, in San Juan, Mexico. His father died when he was fifteen, and so Doroteo worked as a sharecropper to earn money for his mother and sisters. They were very poor.

When Doroteo was 16, he came home from work to discover his landlord had raped his 12-yr-old sister. Doroteo grabbed a pistol and shot the man, and was forced to leave town shortly afterwards, to escape the law.

Doroteo joined a gang of bandits living in the mountains near his homeland. For several years lived of stolen cattle and other crimes. It was during this time that he picked up the name ‘Pancho Villa’. That was the name of the leader of the bandits, and when he was shot in a raid, Doroteo inherited the name. His bandit gang frequently stole from the higher class of society, and gave what they took to the poor, so Pancho, as their leader, was know as a sort of modern day Robin Hood.
After a while, Pancho’s gang became so infamous that it (they?) began to attract the attention of a group of rebels in Mexico. They wanted Pancho to join them in their quest to overthrow Porfirio Diaz, the president of Mexico at that time. The leader of this rebel group was named Francisco Madero. He convinced Pancho to use his guerilla skills to aid in the revolution.

Pancho worked with Madero from October 1910 to May 1911. He resigned because of a dislike for one of his fellow commanders, a man called Orozco, and because of Maria Luz Corral, whom he married on the 29 of that month.

Madero had succeeded in his revolution and became president of Mexico in 1911.
This made Orozco angry, because he felt he should have token the role of president, not Madero. Orozco started his own rebellion in the spring on 1912. Pancho worked for Madero again, rallying troops alongside General Victoriano Huerta.

But Huerta apparently didn’t like Pancho, because in June of that year, he accused him of stealing a horse (maybe Pancho actually did steal it, I dunno), and got Pancho sent to prison. He broke out in December, 6 months after being incarcerated.

By the time he escaped, Huerta had switched sides, killed Madero, and proclaimed himself president. Pancho opposed Huerta, along with his new ally, Venustiano Carranza. For the next few years, they were very successful, capturing town after town, finally conquering they whole area of Chihuahua. But in the end, Pancho and Carranza split and became enemies.

This turned into a big civil war in Mexico, but the United States took sides, too (they supported Carranza). To retaliate, Pancho Villa attacked a U.S. town called Columbus, in New Mexico. The U.S. sent a fairly large task force (several thousand soldiers) trying to capture Pancho, but they never found him.

In 1920, Carranza was assassinated, and Adolfo De la Huerta (why is it that all these Mexican’s first names end in ‘O’ ?!?) He wanted peace, a negotiated a peace treaty with Pancho, who was glad to accept and retire from warfare. He was shot three years later on the streets of Chihuahua. His assassin(s?) was never caught.