The gulf between the rich and the poor grew wider under Díaz, and the political clout of the lower classes declined.  Diaz was once quoted as saying of his own people, “The Mexican people would amount to nothing without being driven by the whip.”  Opposition to Díaz surfaced when Francisco I. Madero, who was educated in Europe and at the University of California, began to gain recognition and political power.

In a 1908 interview with the U.S. journalist James Creelman, President Porfirio Díaz stated that Mexico was ready for democracy and elections and that he would step down to allow other candidates to compete for the presidency.  Díaz planned on retiring in Europe and allowing a younger man to take over his presidency. However, because of the unrest and dissension that occurred following this statement Díaz decided to run again in 1910 for the last time, with an eye toward arranging a succession in the middle of his term.

Franciso I. Madero ran against Porfirio Díaz in the 1910 election.  Diaz thought he could control this election as he had the previous seven.  Díaz did not approve of Madero as his successor and had Madero jailed on Election Day in 1910.  Díaz was announced the winner of the election by a landslide, providing the initial impetus for the outbreak of the Revolution.  

Díaz had had Madero released Madero from prison in October 1910.  Grossly underestimating his foe, Díaz referred to Madero as el loquito (“the little madman”) saying that Madero should be in a lunatic asylum rather than in prison.  Madero fled to the United States where he issued the “Plan of San Luis,” a manifesto which declared that the elections had been a fraud and that he would not recognize Porfirio Díaz as the legitimate President of the Republic.

Madero then made the daring move of declaring himself President Pro-Temp until new elections could be held.  Madero promised to return all land which had been confiscated from the peasants, and he called for universal voting rights and for a limit of one term for the president.  Madero’s call for an uprising on November 20, 1910 marked the beginning of the Mexican Revolution.

On November 14th, in Cuchillo Parado in the state of Chihuahua, Toribio Ortega and a small group of followers took up arms.  On the 18th in Puebla, Diaz's authorities uncovered preparations for an uprising in the home of the brothers Maximo and Aquiles Serdán, who where made to pay with their lives. Back in Chihuahua, Madero was able to persuade Pascual Orozco, and Francisco “Pancho” Villa to join the revolution.  Though they had no military experience, Orozco and Villa proved to be excellent strategists, and they earned the allegiance of the people of northern Mexico, who were particularly unhappy about the abusive ranchers and landlords who ran the North.

In March of 1911, Emaiano Zapata led the uprising of the peasants of Morelos to claim their rights over local land and water. At the same time, armed revolt began in many other parts of the country. The “Maderista” troops, and the national anger which inspired them, defeated the army of Diaz within six months.  

The decisive victory of the Mexican Revolution was the capture of Ciudad Juarez, just across the river from El Paso, by Orozco and Villa.  Porfirio Diaz, unable to control the spread of the growing insurgence, then resigned as President in May 1911, with the signing of the Treaty of Ciudad Juárez, and fled to exile in France, where he died in 1915.

With the collapse of the Díaz regime, the Mexican Congress elected Francisco León de la Barra as President Pro-Temp and called for national popular elections, which resulted in the victory of Francisco I. Madero as President and José María Pino Suárez as Vice-President.

Madero was opposed by Emiliano Zapata who did not wish to wait for an orderly implementation of Madero's desired land reforms.  Zapata denounced Madero as president and took the position for himself.  Zapata controlled the state of Morelos, where he chased out the estate owners and divided their lands to the peasants.  Later, in 1919, Zapata was assassinated by Jesus Guajardo acting under orders from General Pablo Gonzalez.

Madero proved to be an ineffective leader and the Mexican Revolution quickly spun out of his control.  He was deposed and executed by the Porfirista military and Madero’s own aides, who he had neglected to replace with revolutionary supporters. His assassination was followed by the most violent period of the revolution in Mexico (1913–1917), lasting until the Constitution of 1917 when the revolutionary president Venustiano Carranza achieved some degree of stability.  Followers of Madero were known as Maderistas.

Emiliano Zapata was born in 1879 in the Mexican state of Morelos, the son of a farmer.  He proved to be a natural born leader and his destiny soon revealed itself.  His father died when he was 17 and shortly thereafter, Emiliano assumed the responsibility of providing for his family.  Zapata was of Mestizo blood and he spoke Nahuatl, the indigenous language of central Mexico. Widely respected by his community, the village elected Zapata to be their leader in 1909. He quickly recruited an insurgent army of farmers from his village to protect the farms in their immediate community.  Zapata and his men fought the government troops in the south of Mexico while Pancho Villa fought in the north.

Pancho Villa was born Doroteo Arangol in Durango on June 5, 1878, the son of a field laborer.  As an adolescent Villa became a fugitive after killing a man who assaulted his sister.  Fleeing to the mountains, he changed his name and became a bandit. In 1910 he joined the rebellion led by Francisco Madero, which was successful. When Madero was assassinated in 1913 Villa formed an army several thousand strong which came to be known as the Division del Norte (the Division of the North). Later Villa fought on the side of Venustiano Carranza and the Constitutionalists.

Madero entered Mexico City in June 1911 and in October became president by a near unanimous margin in an honest election, a rare occurrence in Mexican history.

For the trusting and inexperienced Madero, the honeymoon was brief.  Zapata, angry with Madero’s slow pace with land reform and broke with him even before his inauguration.  In March 1912 Pascual Orozco went into rebellion, but from the right.  Angered at not being named governor of Chihuahua, Orozco sold out to the state’s cattle barons and became leader of a band of counterrevolutionary white guards defending the big ranchers, and their vast land holdings.

To defeat Orozco, Madero called on the services of a regular general named Victoriano Huerta.  José Victoriano Huerta Márquez (December 22, 1850, – January 13, 1916, who died in El Paso, Texas) was a Mexican military officer and president of Mexico from 1913-14.  Huerta’s supporters were known as Huertistas during the Mexican Revolution.  Huerta is still vilified by modern-day Mexicans, who generally refer to him as El Chacal (the Jackal).

During the Porfirio Díaz administration Huerta rose to the rank of general and fought to subdue the Chan Santa Cruz Maya peoples of the Yucatan and against the rebels of Emiliano Zapata.  On the eve of the 1910 Revolution Huerta was involved in the innocuous project of reforming the uniforms of the Federal Army for the Díaz administration.

Huerta could be considered Madero’s Grant--if Ulysses S. Grant had staged a coup and overthrown Lincoln.  Like Grant, Huerta was both an able soldier and a heavy drinker.  He smashed Orozco’s forces in four decisive engagements and, during the campaign, sentenced Pancho Villa to death. The pretext was a trivial episode about improperly requisitioning a horse, behind Huerta’s action was a deep-seated hatred of Villa. Villa, a nondrinker despite his freewheeling sexual exploits, called Huerta el borrachito (“the little drunkard”) while Huerta caustically referred to Villa as “the honorary general.”  A last minute reprieve from Madero saved Villa’s life and he was instead imprisoned in Mexico City.

Huerta initially pledged allegiance to the administration of Francisco I. Madero and successfully crushed anti-Madero revolts.  However, Huerta secretly plotted with United States ambassador to Mexico, Henry Lane Wilson, the dismissed general Bernardo Reyes, and Feliz Díaz’s, who was Porfirio Díaz’s nephew, to overthrow Madero. This episode in Mexican history is known as La decena trágica.  

Villa broke out of jail on Christmas Eve and was in El Paso when Huerta engineered the coup that overthrew Madero.  In February 1913 Huerta staged a fake 10-day artillery duel with a fake rival, Felix Díaz, nephew of the old dictator. The battle was phony only in the sense that Huerta and Díaz were secretly in cahoots; the loss of life to civilians was all too real.  The purpose of the spurious engagement was to create a state of confusion in which Huerta could seize power from Madero.  

Following a confused few days of fighting in Mexico City between loyalist and rebel factions of the Army, on February 18, 1913 Huerta had Madero and vice-president, José María Pino Suárez, seized and imprisoned in the National Palace.  The conspirators then met at the United States Embassy to sign el Pacto de la Embajada (The Embassy Pact), which provided for Madero and Pino Suárez’s exile and Huerta’s takeover of the Mexican government.

Henry Lane Wilson, the US Ambassador, was an aggressive advocate of dollar diplomacy.  He was drawn to Huerta; both were alcoholics.  Wilson detested Madero and consequently was involved in Huerta’s conspiracy to overthrow him.

Madero was deposed on the 18th and four days later he and his vice-president, José Pino Suarez, were shot to death after being removed from their jail cells. Nobody believed Huerta's story that the two men had been killed in the crossfire when a rescue was attempted.

Huerta set himself up as a military dictator but soon faced a challenge from the north. His enemies were Pancho Villa; a former federal senator named Venustiano Carranza; and an ambitious, iron-willed ex-schoolteacher from Sonora named Álvaro Obregón.  Adding to Huerta's troubles was the U.S. occupation of Veracruz. This action stemmed from Mexico's refusal to give a twenty-one gun salute as an apology for having arrested nine American bluejackets who allegedly entered a prohibited zone in Tampico. Throughout 1913-14 Huerta's forces were steadily driven back toward the capital. The campaign's most memorable engagement was the June 23, 1914 capture of Zacatecas by Villa's superbly equipped División del Norte (Division of the North). The fall of Zacatecas finished Huerta.  He resigned June 15 and two days later he was on a German freighter bound for Spain.

Victory over Huerta did not bring peace but a new clash between revolutionary leaders that pitted Villa and Zapata against Carranza and Obregón.  At first the Villa-Zapata forces had the upper hand, with the leaders holding an epic December 4, 1914 meeting in Mexico City following an abortive convention in Aguascalientes.  Then the tide began to turn.  Carranza's forces, known as the Constitutionalists, had been bottled up in Veracruz but bit by bit, thanks mainly to the superb generalship of Obregón, they began to prevail against the Zapatistas and Villistas.

By April 1915 World War I had been raging for six months. Though Obregón was without formal military training, he studied the trench warfare tactics of the Western Front and used them to defeat Villa in two crucial battles at Celaya, Guanajuato.  He then drove Villa north--losing an arm in one engagement--and by the end of 1915 Villa was reduced to pretty much what he‘d been at the outset of the Revolution: a marauding bandit prowling the Chihuahua sierra.

As for the Zapatistas, they really weren’t interested in extending their domain outside their jungly and mountainous home state of Morelos. There the Revolution had been won.  They seized Puebla but made no further move toward reducing Carranza's stronghold in Veracruz.

The Carranza-Obregón forces, which now controlled most of Mexico, received a big boost when the United States extended de facto recognition to Carranza on October 19, 1915.  This infuriated Villa, who had always been friendly to the U.S., and led to the March 1916 Villista raid on Columbus, New Mexico. The attack claimed the lives of eight American soldiers and ten civilians and resulted in the so-called Punitive Expedition of 1916-17, when American cavalry units under General “Black Jack” Pershing wandered through northern Mexico for ten months but completely failed in their attempt to capture Villa.

Venustiano Carranza de la Garza, (December 28, 1859 – May 21, 1920) who had been ruling provisionally (thus replacing the dictatorial Huerta regime in the summer of 1914) was known by followers as “the First Chief”, officially became president on March 11, 1917, in an election in which he won 797,305 votes against the 11,615 garnered by his closest rival..  Carranza made land reform an important part of administration.  This resulted in the ejido, or farm cooperative program, that redistributed much of the country’s land from the wealthy land holders to the peasants. The ejidos are still in place today and comprise nearly half of all the farmland in Mexico.  During his administration he organized a convention that, on February 5, 1917, produced the Constitution, which is still in effect today.  

Although the 1917 Constitution also contained provisions to improve the lot of workers and peasant farmers, these were ignored by the Carranza government. Corruption was endemic and strikes were mercilessly broken.  But Carranza did manage to rid himself of a major enemy:  Emiliano Zapata.  Zapata was slain April 10, 1919, being led into a trap by Col. Jesús Guajardo, a federal officer who set up the ambush by pretending to defect to the Zapatistas.

General Álvaro Obregón Salido (February 19, 1880 – July 17, 1928) was the President of Mexico from 1920 to 1924.  A successful Sonoran chickpea farmer and municipal president of Huatabampo, Obregón first volunteered for military service in 1912, when he supported the regime of Franciso I. Madero against a rebellion in Chihuahua led by Pascual Orozco.  This was his first display of what would prove to be considerable military skills.  Following la decena trágica, Obregón offered his military services to the Sonoran government in opposition to the regime of Victoriano Huerta.  He supported Sonora’s decision to follow Venustiano Carranza as leader of a revolution against the Huerta regime, and Carranza appointed Obregón commander-in-chief of the revolutionary forces in northwestern Mexico. In 1913, Obregón’s troops advanced south throughout western Mexico.  Following tensions with Pancho Villa, Carranza ordered Obregón to accelerate his march to ensure that Obregón’s forces, loyal to Carranza, entered Mexico City before the forces of Pancho Villa.  Obregón spent 1915 leading Carrancista forces against troops loyal to both Villa and Emilian Zapata, both former allies of Carranza.

On June 3, 1915, at the Battle of Celya, Obregón lost his right arm.  Following the pacification of the Villistas and Zapatistas, Carranza appointed Obregón as his minister of war in 1915.  In 1917, however, Obregón resigned from cabinet in order to distance himself from Carranza and position himself for to run for the presidency in 1920.

General Álvaro Obregón Salido went into temporary retirement, returning to his native Sonora to raise chick peas.  But on June 1, 1919, using the massive popularity he had achieved as the military victor of the Mexican Revolution, Obregón declared his candidacy for the June 1920 presidential election.  In the fall of 1919 Carranza announced that he would support Ignacio Bonillas, then Mexican ambassador in Washington.

It was a disastrous choice.  Bonillas, an M.I.T. graduate, had spent so little of his life in Mexico that political enemies claimed he had difficulty speaking the language of his ancestors.  They derisively called him “Meester” Bonillas and the clever Obregón lost no time tapping into this sentiment.  During the campaign pro-Obregón railroad workers kept Bonillas from making a scheduled appearance by derailing his train. Deliberately fabricated rumors then went out that Bonillas had canceled the appearance because it interfered with a Spanish lesson he was taking.

Carranza retaliated with a reign of terror against Obregón campaign workers.  Obregón, fearing that he was about to be arrested, fled Mexico City and took refuge in Chilpancingo, capital of the State of Guerrero.  On April 20 he announced that he was giving up the presidential campaign and would take arms against Carranza.

The Carranza regime collapsed like a house of cards.  While generals went over to Obregón en masse, Carranza and his corrupt followers loaded up an eight-car “Golden Train” with all the money and valuables they could lay their hands on and prepared to leave for Veracruz.  During the journey, attacks on the “Golden Train” caused Carranza to abandon it in an attempt to escape on foot.   On May 20, in a hut near the Puebla village of Tlaxcalantongo, he was treacherously murdered in his sleep by followers of a local bandit-turned-general named Rodolfo Herrero.  Herrero had previously welcomed Carranza and promised him refuge.  

On June 1, 1920 Governor Adolfo de la Huerta of Sonora was installed by Congress as interim president.
He served out the rest of Carranza’s term until elections could be held, and Obregón won the election with overwhelming support.  

As Governor of the northern state of Sonora Adolfo de la Huerta led the Revolution of Agua Prieta that put an end to the presidency of Venustiano Carranza who was killed during the revolt.  It was then that Adolfo de la Huerta was appointed interim President by congress.  Pancho Villa and his army surrendered during de la Huerta’s presidency.

Adolfo de la Huerta became the Secretary of Finance and Public Credit in the Obregón administration.  In that role, negotiated the de la Huerta-Lamont Treaty, signed in 1922 between Mexico and the International Committee of Bankers on Mexcio (ICBM) concerning Mexico’s substantial post-Mexican Revolution debts. The treaty was negotiated the chairman of the ICBM, Thomas Lamont.  It was considered the initial step in the normalization of the foreign relations of Mexico, and was the basis of the next several decades of Mexican foreign financing agreements.

De la Huerta should not be confused with Victorian Huerta, “The Jackal”, who was President of Mexico from 1913 to 1914.

In the regular election, held October 26, 1920, Obregón defeated Alfredo Robles Domínguez, a candidate backed by the Catholic Church, by a 1,131,751 to 47,442 margin. At midnight of November 30, 1920, Álvaro Obregón raised his remaining arm and took the oath of office as President of Mexico.  

Obregón's presidency was the first stable presidency since the launching of the Mexican Revolution. He oversaw massive educational reform with Mexican muralism flourishing, an art movement of a Marxist nature, or related to a social and political situation of post-revolutionary Mexico), moderate land reform, and labor laws sponsored by the increasingly powerful Regional Confederation of Mexican Workers. At the Bucareli Conference, he secured U.S. recognition of his regime.

De la Huerta, Obregón finance minister, started a failed revolt in 1923-24 in Veracruz and Jalisco against president Álvaro Obregón, whom he denounced as corrupt after Obregón endorsed Calles as his successor., forcing Obregón to return to the battlefield to crush the rebellion. Catholics, conservatives and a considerable portion of the army officers, who felt Obregón had reversed Carranza's policy of favoring the army at the expense of the farmer-labor sector, supported de la Huerta.  Returning to the battlefield to crush the rebellion with his superb organizing ability and popular support, in a decisive battle at Ocotlán, Jalisco, Obregón's forces crushed the rebel forces Obregón crushed the rebellion and forced De La Huerta into exile.  On March 7, 1924, de la Huerta fled to Los Angeles and Obregón ordered the execution of every rebel officer with a rank higher than a major.[

In 1924, Obregón's handpicked successor, Plutarco Elías Calles, was elected as president, and although Obregón ostensibly retired to Sonora, he remained influential under Calles. In 1926, the Mexican Congress eliminated the one-term term limit for the presidency, allowing Obregón to run for re-election in 1928. Obregón won the election, but before he could begin his term, he was assassinated by José de León Toral, who was a Roman Catholic angered by the Calles government’s treatment of Catholics and a supporter of Roman Catholics in the Cristero War.  Alvaro Obregón, the last of the great figures of the Revolution, was only 48 years old when he was shot.

The most tumultuous phase of the Mexican Revolution was now over.  The 1910 Revolution is generally considered to have lasted until 1920, although the country continued to have sporadic, but comparatively minor, outbreaks of warfare well into the 1920s.  The Cristero War  of 1926 to 1929 was the most significant relapse of bloodshed.

The Cristero War (also known as the Cristiada) of 1926 to 1929 was an uprising and counter-revolution against the Mexican government then in power.  The rebellion principally resulted from the Mexican government’s persecution of Roman Catholics and was exacerbated by the strict enforcement of the provisions of the Mexican Constitution of 1917 which had expanded anti-clerical laws.  After a period of peaceful resistance, a number of skirmishes took place in 1926.  The formal rebellions began on January 2, 1927, with the rebels were called Cristeros because they felt they were fighting for “Cristo Rey” (Christ the King).  The rebellion ended by diplomatic means brokered by the then United States Ambassador to Mexico, Dwight Whitney Morrow.

The 1910 Revolution, together with the end of the 1926-29 Cristero War, triggered the creation of the National Revolutionary Party in 1929 (renamed the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, in 1946). Under a variety of leaders, the PRI held power until the general election of 2000 in which Vicente Fox, of the National Action Party (PAN) was elected president of Mexico and the PAN gained majority control of the Mexican Congress.

November 20th–when Madero called for an uprising against Porfirio Díaz–is the traditional date on which the Día de la Revolución is celebrated, but since 2006 it has been celebrated on the third Monday in November.  The Día de la Revolución is a Mexican federal holiday; workers are entitled to a day off with pay.  Although the Día de la Revolución is a federal holiday that celebrates a very important part of Mexican history it is not celebrated enthusiastically as is the case with El Grito, which celebrates Mexico’s independence from Spain.