A Lost Leader

ZAPATA AND THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION by John Womack Jr. 435 pages. Knopf. $10.

A revolution is fought by flesh and blood men, not by saints, and every revolution ends with the creation of a new privileged class. I assure you that if I had not been a man able to take advantage of his breaks, I would still be scratching corn-rows in Michoacan, and just as my father was, I would be satisfied.

The quote is from Carlos Fuentes' novel Where the A ir Is Clear. The speaker is a former Mexican revolutionary who has turned businessman. Emiliano Zapata, a flesh-and-blood revolutionary with the unappeasable single-mindedness of a saint, no doubt would have spat at such words. He was a horse trainer and farmer who led the land-hungry campesinos of Mexico's south-central state of Morelos during the Mexican Revolution, which began in 1910. To Zapata opportunists like the character in the Fuentes book were cabrones(s.o.b.'s). "As soon as they see a little chance, right away they want to get in on it, and they take off to brown-nose the next big shot on the rise," he told Francisco (Pancho) Villa, his more flamboyant and barbaric northern counterpart. Villa later retired from the field with a $250,000 government "grant." Zapata was cut down in an ambush set by men who thought that death was the best cure for incorruptibility.

John Womack Jr.'s social history of the Mexican Revolution is scholarly, engrossing and highly sympathetic to Zapata. A Harvard professor of Latin American history, Womack, 31, clearly shows that Zapata's fidelity and incorruptibility were deeply rooted in the bitter struggle of Morelos farmers to guard their land titles and water rights. Their enemies were the rich landowners constantly seeking to add acreage to their already vast haciendas.

Outside his home ground, Zapata was frequently regarded as an obstinate savage by the succession of national leaders who rose and fell in the bloody welter of an inconclusive revolution. What he and his people wanted was set down with forceful simplicity in the Plan de Ayala, the catechism of Zapatismo and a landmark document in the history of Mexico's agrarian reform. Perhaps the most important point in the plan was the one that called for the surrender of one-third of hacienda lands to the farmers.

On this basic aim there could be no compromise with the politicians and intellectuals in Mexico City. Even alliances with other guerrilla generals had to be entered into with a measure of mistrust. This is particularly true of Zapata's relations with Villa, whose army of drifters, muleskinners, railroad laborers and bandits were "more a force of nature than of politics." Like Zapatismo, Villismo was a populist movement. But unlike Zapata's farmers, Villa's hordes had few fixed aims.

Staying True. When the Constitutionalist Venustiano Carranza and his "new, nationalist entrepreneurs" became powerful in 1914, Zapata met his match in tenacity and deadly seriousness. The Carrancistas plundered, says Womack, "not for fun but on business." Zapata recognized that Carranza posed a serious threat to the Plan de Ayala. Even the thought of meeting Carranza's envoys filled Zapata with dread.

Departing from the nuts and bolts of his narrative, Womack offers a penetrating bit of speculation on Zapata's character: "A man obsessed with staying true, he could not betray a promise for the life of him. But courage of one kind can hint at cowardice of another; and Zapata was afraid--not for himself, but of himself, of unwittingly betraying the trust his peers and their people had invested in him."

Honor Guard. In the end it was not the shifting political alliances, treachery and lack of supplies that blunted the Morelos resistance, but the flu epidemic of 1918. Thousands died and thousands more fled farther south to warmer temperatures. Still, Zapata's perseverance and popularity in the backlands became increasingly embarrassing to Carranza, particularly since the campaign for the 1920 presidential election was under way. In a complicated plot, Zapata was lured to a hacienda in his home country, where he was shot to pieces by the honor guard that had been drawn up to welcome him. Za-patismo was, however, larger than any one man. In the spring of 1920, Carranza was overthrown, and the Mexican Revolution resumed its populist direction under the leadership of Alvaro Obregon.

No precis can offer more than a hint of the scope and complexity of Zapata and the Mexican Revolution without distortion. A true understanding of the magnitude of the events it relates--and their implications for a world still in revolution--emerges slowly and painfully through the volume and texture of the book's details. Yet Womack's narrative skill, judgment and overriding compassion never allow the weight of scholarship to squeeze the life out of what is first and foremost the tragic story of a man and a people who simply wanted to be left alone to raise their corn, beans and children.

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