Pancho Villa
Mexican revolutionary general who commanded the Division of the North in the Mexican Revolution.
Biography
Pancho Villa was born José Doroteo Arango Arámbula in 1878 on a hacienda in San Juan del Río, Durango, the son of sharecroppers. He had little schooling and worked as a sharecropper, muleteer, butcher and bricklayer, and spent years as a bandit in the Sierra Madre. When the Mexican Revolution broke out in 1910 he joined Francisco Madero's movement against Porfirio Díaz and became one of its most effective commanders.
After Victoriano Huerta overthrew Madero in 1913, Villa fought him at the head of the Division of the North within Venustiano Carranza's Constitutionalist movement, and briefly governed Chihuahua. Once Huerta fell he broke with Carranza, dominated the Convention of Aguascalientes in late 1914 and allied with Emiliano Zapata; for a time the United States considered recognising him.
Álvaro Obregón decisively defeated Villa in 1915, and in 1916 Villa raided Columbus, New Mexico, provoking an American punitive expedition that failed to catch him. After Carranza's fall in 1920 he accepted an amnesty and retired to an estate at Canutillo. He was assassinated at Parral in 1923. Long left out of official history, he became a popular hero and in 1976 his remains were moved to the Monument to the Revolution.
