MEXICO’S GREATEST BANDIT

Evening Star, Issue 21623, 19 January 1934, Page 12

MEXICO’S GREATEST BANDIT

THE STIRRING LIFE OF PANCHO VILLA BECOMES GENERAL OF AN ARMY What a country Mexico is! _ Revolution and slaughter and banditry and dark-eyed love; fierce drinking, the frenzy of the jota dance in_ dens of licence; men’s hearts aflame, with bloodlust as the wild hills at sunrise !_ A country of primary colours and primal passions, in which peon becomes bandit, bandit revolutionary plotter,, and plotter the deliverer of his people, intrepid commander of 10,000 lusty men (writes Trevor Allen, in * John o’ London’s Weekly’). Such a man was Pancho Villa. Son of a peon on a big ranch, he felt the terror of the master’s. lash, and made repeated attempts to escape into the bandit country of the notorious Don Ignacio Parra, where he could livethe freebooter life of the outlaw. For in Mexico, says Mr Edgcumb ■ Pinchon in a colourful life of this rebel (‘Viva Villa!’), “ the grafter, the politician, the pious exploiter of the* mass are committed to the flames of a ferociously sardonic humour; while on the other hand a thousand, ballads < celebrate the Mexican’s complete admiration of the outlaw—of the man who takes what he wants without subterfuge, and gambles his life at the, game.’’ , . . MEETING DON IGNACIO: At last, when he had been again chased into the hills, recaptured, /and secretly condemned to be shot “ on the run,” Villa succeeded. He presented himself before Don Ignacio, plunderer of bullion which he marketed with the Navajo Indians of New Mexico and Arizona, stealer of herds which he drove through the mountains of Sonora to the corrals of the Texas and Arizona cattlemen. . “I, know who you are,” the bandit chided him. “ You are nothing but a spy for the rurales.” • “ Mi jefe, why do you say that to me when my hands are bound?” “ You mean that if your hands were free -?” “ I will kill vou.'mi jefe, unless you killed me first.” • • So the young Villa became one of his trusty men and .went spying for him in Guanacevi, where there were rich silver mines, the produce of which was transferred by diligence 200 kilometres through the mountains to the nearest railhead. Owing to the danger of ambush, no rejgular schedule or route was followed; the stage, drawn by eight fast horses, with armed guards, was escorted by a troop of rurales pledged to defend the , half a million pesos’ worth of silver with their lives. Villa served his master well. A week after his departure' “ three bloodsmeared rurales, reeling out of the saddles, blunder info the jefe politico’s office. ‘ The captain, the lieutenant, the sergeant—half our men killed! The whole troop cut to pieces! . . The papers spring, to headlines . • . ‘ Don Ignacio ( Swoops Again!’ ” THE FINEST OF EVERYTHING. And when Don Ignacio had struck yet again and again, young Villa found himself in clover, for “the girl with the smile like light on a spangle reappears at her window. And Pancho, toiling with the guitar all summer, becomes a madman. The rodeo• approaches. He roves the stockyards for a mount that shall dazzle the adored. He plunges into the Calle de Libertad, his pockets sagging with silver. if He must have the finest harness, the finest clothes, the finest ornaments, the finest bay gelding—and the .finest women. That is Villa, the man whose army is to depose, in. the fullness of time, the tyrant Diaz in one of the bloodiest, most ruthless revolutions, in the history of that tempestuous land. But before thatt here is another ambush in which “ the, slaughter is atrocious. . \ . The bandidos.go down like mown wheat, Don Ignacio, with magnificent bravado, extricates himself from the melee and leaps to the top of the diligence better to direct the fight, and in the act pitches head first ■to Hie ground again, a bullet through : his lungs as Tomas Urbina, , in . charge of the rearguard, comes floundering with his men up the trail, bursting through the jam and sweeping the rout; with him in utter animal terror. Pancho gathers Don Ignacio in his arms, and charges, with them, roaring: Up the ravine to your left! Up the ravine to your left!’ ” . While Villa was becoming increasingly notorious for his bandit exploits Porfirio Diaz was becoming the mosthated President Mexico . had ■ known. When, in 1906, he replied to the striking miners of Oananea with bullets, did it not take days to burn the dead? 'And in Orinzaba, where 40,000. men, women, and children left the cotton mills to demand a few, centavos increase in pay, was not the strike broken by a planned massacre of such proportions that two trains were required to carry off the dead and dying? _ Villa burned with hatred of the Presidentbutcher, collected a rebel force, marched to_ depose him and instate Medero in his stead. In the subsequent fighting the peonbandit became general of an army of 10,000' men. - • • In the end Villa himself was ambushed and slain in the-streets of Parral. The townsfolk surged by the catafalque in ; the Hotel Hidalgo to gaze upon “the stallion torso and-uncon-querable head.” Street vendors did a roaring trade in picture post cards of hia butchered body with its forty-seven wounds—“a nice picture to hang beside the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe!” This is a vital, full-blooded narrative of the kind which bridges most tastes —highbrow, midbrow, lowbrow. Mr Pincnon writes of his Mexico as Brangwyn might paint it—with an opulent magnificence. It is a yarn which makes one restless to be up and away doing reckless deeds. I revelled in every page of it.