Mills - Treacherous passage: Germanys secret plot against the United States in Mexico during World War I

the federal gunboat Tampico began over love for a woman. It was said that twenty-four-year-old Lieutenant Hilario Malpica, the ships executive officer, had fallen for a brown-eyed beauty whose family was devoted to the Constitutionalist cause. For weeks, Malpica had secretly plotted to take over the Mexican warship for the Constitutionalist rebel forces. His opportunity came on the night of February 22, 1914, when half the ships company had been granted shore leave to celebrate the Carnival at Guaymas. Aided by Rabatet, the paymaster, and engineering officers Estrada and Johnson, Malpica took charge of the remaining crew members, then boldly informed Captain Castellanos and Chief Engineer Smith that their ship was under mutiny, and invited them to join the rebel forces. The invitation was rejected out of hand.

If you make no resistance you will not be harmed, Malpica told them evenly, and at the first opportunity you will be handed over to the federal government.

His former superiors acquiesced, and the rebels gained their first naval gunboat without a struggle. Now fully in command, Malpica gave orders to set course for Topolobampo on the Gulf of California in northwestern Mexico, a port that had recently been captured by the Constitutionalists.

truly devastating. Unfortunately for the mutineers, however, the Tampicos steering gear broke down in the effort and she was forced to turn away, continuing on course to Topolobampo.

from the state of Chiapas, Belisario Domnguez, gave a public speech denouncing Huerta as a tyrant, Domnguez was brutally murdered, his bullet-ridden body found weeks later in a roadside ditch. In the Mexican congress, Huerta was harshly castigated for the crime. In retaliation, Huerta dissolved the congress and ordered 110 congressmen to be arrested and hauled off to prison. Despite these repressive actions, Huertas military dictatorship had the support of powerful factions in Mexico, including the hacendados, large landowners who wanted to retain their vast landholdings from populist confiscation, the Mexican Army, and initially, the church.

Outside Mexico City, opposition grew quickly against President Huerta, El Usurpador, the usurper who had murdered Madero. The governor of the state of Coahuila, tall and dignified former senator Venustiano Carranza, demanded the immediate ouster of Huerta and restoration of the Constitution of 1857, which had guaranteed Mexican citizens freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of assembly. Carranza proclaimed himself Primer Jefe (First Chief ) of the Constitutionalists, and named Alvaro Obregn, a rancher from Sonora, as commander in chief of a Constitutionalist army in the northwest. Obregn proved an able organizer and military strategist, raising a powerful army that captured one federal town after another. Also allied with Carranza in the north was bandit-turned-revolutionary Pancho Villa, who transformed a ragtag group of disaffected workers from rural mining camps, haciendas, and villages into a sizable army that pursued Huertas forces like a desert horde. In southern Mexico, Emiliano Zapata, who for years had been leading a campesino revolt against the hacendados who had stolen their land, similarly turned his followers against the Huerta government. By early 1914, less than a year after Huerta had assumed power, over 70 percent of Mexican territory was controlled by the Constitutionalist forces. Now with the mutiny on the