Emiliano Zapata
August 8, 1879 – April 10, 1919
Mexican revolutionary who led the peasant Liberation Army of the South in the Mexican Revolution under the call for land reform.
Biography
Emiliano Zapata was born in 1879 in Anenecuilco, Morelos, into a respected local family of small farmers and horse handlers. He worked as a farmer, muleteer and horse trainer, and grew up amid his village's long struggle against sugar haciendas that were absorbing peasant land and water. He became active early in local opposition to the Porfirio Díaz regime and its landowners.
When the Mexican Revolution began in 1910, Zapata led the peasant rising in Morelos and built the Liberation Army of the South, whose victory at Cuautla in 1911 helped bring down Díaz. When President Francisco Madero failed to deliver land reform and treated the Zapatistas as bandits, Zapata issued the Plan of Ayala in November 1911, demanding the return of land to villages and redistribution of hacienda holdings.
Zapata fought the federal army under Madero and then Victoriano Huerta, and after Huerta's fall he refused to recognise Venustiano Carranza, siding with Pancho Villa against him. He carried out land reform in Morelos and waged guerrilla war against Carrancista forces until he was killed in an ambush at Chinameca in April 1919. His agrarian demands shaped Article 27 of the 1917 Constitution, and he remains a national symbol and the namesake of the later Zapatista movement.
