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[Assistant] There are lots of things that I'll say silently to myself because I feel like if I say them out loud in a situation, there's a big chance that no one will know what I'm talking about.


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[Assistant] Uhm, or if I'm going on a trip, I'll always say like, two tickets to paradise, pack your bags, we're leaving the day after tomorrow. Like, there's just so much.


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[Assistant] And I feel like there's definitely Simpsons things. You know, nothing at all. Nothing at all.


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[Assistant] The thing that I always see referenced online is people go, well if you look closely at the symbol of your, uh, gas tank, it'll have a little arrow that shows you which side of your car your gas tank is on.


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[Assistant] My, for me it's like the wind, the windshield wiper, uhm, little like switch that I feel like I can never get it aligned back. That's just me.


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[Assistant] Well, I just, I feel like it's, I never know when it's like, properly aligned back to the starting place. But that's not-


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[Assistant] This holiday season the best deal in wireless can be found at Mint Mobile. Right now when you switch to Mint Mobile you can buy any 3 month plan and get another 3 months for free. As the first company to sell premium wireless service online only, Mint Mobile lets you safely order from home


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[Assistant] John Smith is a big proponent of Mint Mobile. He saves anywhere from $40 to $60 a month. If you want to save, save like Smith. I always say. Mint Mobile eliminates the traditional costs of retail and passes those savings along to you.


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[Assistant] And if you're not 100% satisfied, Mint Mobile has you covered with their 7 day money back guarantee. So switch to Mint Mobile and get premium wireless service starting at just 15 bucks a month.


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[Assistant] Man, we've gotten through a lot of questions. Uhm, I had a question that was a little bit more specific. I wanted to rephrase it to Funhaus.


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[Assistant] Aliens come out and announce themselves as being amongst our world for centuries, claiming they've been here blending in as humans.


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[Assistant] Oh yes, that is a big consideration. He's got so much time. He's doing it all. What does falling in love feel like?


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[Assistant] Have you ever, like, thought you've fallen in love, Ryan? Not to get too personal, you don't have to.


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[Assistant] What? She's getting a divorce? Ryan, she wants to give it another...


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[Assistant] I think you can't describe it. You shouldn't try. Uhm, it could be at risk for your personal safety if you do. Uhm, so don't do it.


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[Assistant] Sure, I think there's also value though to having...


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[Assistant] Would you ever do something like be the guinea pig on a show like The Bachelor?


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[Assistant] Cause like yea, I don't know that I would do well on a show like that where there are all these other emotions at play beyond just you trying to figure out if you have compatibility with this person.


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[Assistant] That bachelorette from this season, it seemed like she just really wanted to find, like, she was like, I know who I'm picking.


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[Assistant] And I've said this before, maybe even tweeted it, is I would watch the shit out of a reality dating show where it's...


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[Assistant] Widows, widowers trying to find love. Like they were married for, you know,


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[Assistant] 45 years, their partner who they love dearly passed away, sad. Okay, there's an emotional aspect here. Yea, that sounds like a sad.


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[Assistant] They're trying to find love again. And some of them will be rejected.


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[Assistant] I'm gonna watch this, I'm gonna watch this. And it's like, what are your interests, puttering around in the garden? Calling my grandkids. Sleeping.


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[Assistant] What exactly is the difference between rock and metal music?


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[Assistant] The responses are saying there's a level of intensity and complexity to metal, which I, maybe the, I don't know if I entirely agree with that. Metal tends to be heavier, more distorted. Is there not a complexity to rock? Eric Clapton's stuff is...


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[Assistant] Faster Thrasher, slower Doom.


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[Assistant] I feel that. My final question to you guys, knowing what we've talked about today about


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[Assistant] Yeah, uhm, you know, what we've learned about our, you know, past porn.


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[Assistant] Uh, how we like to spread positivity, all of that, what we think about the afterlife, talking about everything we've talked about.


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[Assistant] We did. Thinking through all that, how much would you pay to go to Jurassic World? Has it changed? Has it changed?


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[Assistant] That's no money at all. Oh, I know. Come on, don't be cheap. This is your wife you're taking with you, too. Oh, this is just for one ticket. That's just for me. Uhm, well, thank you guys so much for doing the show. Uh, we have a bunch of new merch in the store. The Funhaus Arcade Collection is really cool, so check it out. Coming up this weekend on the channel,


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[Assistant] Plus the stirring and epic conclusion of our film house search for the best holiday movie. This is the final episode of our bracket and, uh, you know, it was a tough one. What's the finals right now?


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[Assistant] I don't know if I can remember them without spoiling anything.


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[Assistant] And thank you so much to everyone watching and listening and subscribing and leaving reviews. Appreciate it and I hope that you have a really wonderful and safe holiday however you're celebrating.


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[Assistant] Tough year, so I also hope 2021 is better.


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[Assistant] This week's episode is brought to you by Audible. What would it look like if we all listened more?


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[Assistant] Listening to audiobooks inspires us, motivates us, even brings us closer together. And there's no better place to listen than Audible. Audible has the largest selection of audiobooks on the planet, and Audible members can choose three titles every month. One audiobook, and two Audible originals you can't hear anywhere else.


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[Assistant] Audible members also get access to exclusive audio fitness programs to start the new year off on the right foot. You can listen on any device, anytime, anywhere. At home, at the gym, on your commute, or just on the go.


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[Assistant] You'll also enjoy easy audiobook exchanges, rollover credits, and an audiobook library that you keep forever, even if you cancel. There's never been a better time to experience Audible.


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[Assistant] In honor of the fact that I am currently sitting in London and recording this, on all of episode 9.26 was recorded here too,


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[Assistant] I am going to recommend a book that is currently sitting in my own Audible library waiting for me to get to it, and that is Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist. Specifically, the one narrated by Simon Vance. I've mentioned a few times now how much I've enjoyed listening to Dickens on Audible. It's great and I highly recommend it.


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[Assistant] And I just saw the Dickens portrait at the National Portrait Gallery, so this all seems quite fitting.


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[Assistant] Welcome to the penultimate episode of series 9. The episode that will take us to the quote unquote end of the Mexican Revolution.


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[Assistant] And the man who will take us to that final endpoint is Alvaro Obregón.


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[Assistant] Who serves as the living bridge between the revolution and the post revolution. He was the last revolutionary caudillo who led the last successful revolt and used that victory to secure and entrench a stable civilian government that institutionalized a confusing and oftentimes contradictory memory of the revolution.


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[Assistant] Rooted in equal parts fact and fiction, reality and propaganda.


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[Assistant] In the spring of 1919, Obregon had been in retirement for close to two years, peacefully biding his time.


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[Assistant] The principle of no re-election had been embedded into the constitution of 1917, and so President Carranza would have no choice but to finally retire himself in 1920. So should Obregón choose to run for president, his victory was practically a foregone conclusion. And he very much planned to run.


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[Assistant] And so, though he was in retirement, Obregón kept touch with groups who might support him. Land reformers who couldn't believe Carranza was letting the Ascendados retrench themselves, middle class liberal constitutionalists who chafed at Carranza's high-handed authoritarian streak,


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[Assistant] Labor leaders who were still furious at Carranza's betrayal in 1916 after they had supplied him with the Red Battalions.


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[Assistant] In 1919, these groups were in just sort of a holding pattern, waiting for Carranza to leave the stage.


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[Assistant] Though he had been the premier hefe, the first chief of the revolution, Carranza had never really embodied the revolution. And so everyone turned to Obregón to finish what the revolution had started.


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[Assistant] But there was a bit of a hitch to this natural and seemingly inevitable transfer of power from Cronza to Obregon.


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[Assistant] Karanza decided he didn't want to transfer power to Oberon.


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[Assistant] Sure, he publicly supported the constitutionalist principle of no re-election, but that didn't mean Carranza wanted to give up power.


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[Assistant] His plan was to find some puppet and get him elected president so that Carranza could continue to rule from behind the scenes. And Obergón was a lot of things, but he was no man's puppet.


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[Assistant] So even before the 1920 elections were scheduled, Carranza started taking shots at Overground, publicly and privately, trying to undermine his former general's reputation.


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[Assistant] Carranza implied Obregón wasn't up for the job, that he didn't understand national issues or responsibilities, that he was merely a corrupt influence peddler.


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[Assistant] And one wonders if Quran's not doing a bit of projection here.


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[Assistant] With this Whisper campaign underway, Obergun concluded he wouldn't play the part of Gentleman Farmer any longer.


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[Assistant] Though he would always lean hard on the Washington-esque, oh I'm being reluctantly called to my duty, he also needed to state forthrightly that he was the man for the job, and if Mexico would have him as their president, that he would serve.


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[Assistant] On June the 1st, 1919, Obregón formally announced his candidacy.


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[Assistant] The theme of his campaign would be peace, reunification, and reconciliation.


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[Assistant] Obregón presented himself as a man of no faction and with no ambition but the glorious revival of Mexico.


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[Assistant] And as a part of this project of peace and reconciliation, Obergon actually played down his military career. He made it plain that he had retired from the army.


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[Assistant] The new Mexico should be a civilian Mexico. It was right and proper. And so he presented himself to the voters as a civilian in a suit, not a general in a uniform. And he promised to win this campaign at the ballot box, not on the battlefield.


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[Assistant] And I think that here in June of 1919, this was utterly sincere.


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[Assistant] Especially because given the coalition he was going to be able to muster and the national fame he enjoyed, there was no reason to think that Obregón would lose the 1920 election.


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[Assistant] There was, however, in June of 1919, another man in Mexico who had similar fame and name recognition, and who believed that he could be the one to unify the country in a post-revolutionary period of reconciliation and reconstruction, Felipe Ángeles.


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[Assistant] But rather than embracing a civilian posture, when Ángeles rejoined Pancho Villa in northern Mexico, he redawned his uniform.


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[Assistant] Villa and Ángeles hoped that 1919 would be like 1913 and 1914 all over again. And in many ways, the political landscape, at least in Chihuahua, looked the same.


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[Assistant] Meanwhile, Pancho Villa and Felipe Ángeles were leading a sturdy band of a few thousand dedicated rebels.


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[Assistant] And as the spring of 1919 dawn, one had to wonder if what had happened before would happen again. But it does not.


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[Assistant] Because, though there were similarities, there were also critical differences. For one, the economy of Chihuahua was wrecked. They simply could not arm, supply, feed, or provide horses for a new division del Norte. And more importantly, despite some early recruiting successes, the state was not exactly rallying to their banner.


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[Assistant] People were tired of fighting. When Villa's little army came through, the young men of a village would go off and hide in the hills. So Angelus would give his political speeches to women and children and old folks, but those who might fight stayed out of sight.


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[Assistant] But even still, VIA and Angelus launched their first strike on April the 12th, targeting the relatively lightly garrisoned city of Paran.


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[Assistant] The fight there was intent and bloody, but eventually the federal army unit garrisoning the city broke and fled. Viasmen then raided the city for supplies and departed.


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[Assistant] Over the next two months, they would continue to march around, on the list giving speeches, officers trying to get more volunteers.


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[Assistant] But they found very little enthusiasm. At best, they invoked a sort of sullen neutrality.


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[Assistant] This one last great campaign sputtered quickly and came to an ignoble end.


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[Assistant] About two weeks after Obregón announced his candidacy for president, Villa Ángeles and their little army of a few thousand rode for Juarez. Ángeles did not want to attack Juarez. Remember, his whole plan was to get back in good with the Americans, to forestall an American invasion of Mexico.


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[Assistant] And riding right up to the border and then firing guns into the air seemed like a really good way to trigger the very invasion Onholus wanted to avoid. But Via was determined.


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[Assistant] Partly it was because they needed supplies. Partly it was because the Juarez Garrison was pretty small and they might actually defeat them.


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[Assistant] But one also starts to get the feeling like via is maybe just asking for trouble.


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[Assistant] After a short and confusing battle, VIA's men took the city and forced the federal army units into a nearby army fort. On June the 16th, VIA planned to storm the fort.


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[Assistant] But the bullets flying into El Paso had brought down the worst case scenario on his head.


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[Assistant] The U.S. Army received permission to cross the border and drive via off.


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[Assistant] Facing the full force of the US Army via order to retreat, he couldn't beat them.


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[Assistant] And he would never again threaten a major city.


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[Assistant] This did not, however, turn out to be the American invasion Angelus and so many other Mexicans dreaded. And once their mission was complete, the U.S. Army went home.


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[Assistant] But the fact that they had even joined in the hostilities was the death of Angelus' dreams.


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[Assistant] There could be no reconciliation between Via and the Americans. Via hated the gringos as much as ever.


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[Assistant] The Americans thought via a bandit and a criminal, not a potential ally.


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[Assistant] In the aftermath of the debacle at Juarez, Villa and Angelus did not even have the food or supplies necessary to all stay together. So Villa once again scattered his forces into small bands. Angelus despondent.


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[Assistant] Both men could not have known that this would be the last time that they would see each other, but they likely suspected as much, and it was.


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[Assistant] The partnership of Villa and Ángeles was one of the most successful partnerships of the whole Mexican Revolution. But that was a lifetime ago. It was all over now.


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[Assistant] Meanwhile, the real actual movement towards a unified post-revolutionary peace was getting going just next door in Sonora, with Obregón's campaign for president. And he was building up a base of support out there.


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[Assistant] Though he took his oblique shots at Carranza, Obregón didn't want to be too provocative. Unlike Ángeles, for example, who kept pitching the abandonment of the Constitution of 1917, Obregón believed it legitimate and believed that it should be kept.


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[Assistant] And being a pretty skilled politician, Obdurgon said that he was happy to implement Article 27 as much as possible, and that some land redistribution was necessary.


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[Assistant] But he also let it be known through private backchannels that he wasn't gonna upend the world here.


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[Assistant] There would be no more confiscation of property. And to the Americans he said, look, I'm not gonna go crazy nationalizing everything.


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[Assistant] As for the labor rights that would be guaranteed by Article 123, Obergon was a free market capitalist, but he believed that there could be no peace unless some labor demands were recognized. This can't be owners and bosses exploiting poor workers. I mean, that's how we got into this mess.


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[Assistant] So in April of 1919, Obregón signed a secret pact of mutual support with the leaders of the union that had succeeded the CASA. Obregón said that he would implement laws that would make the promise of Article 123 a reality. In exchange, they would support his candidacy for president with organization, money, and votes.


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[Assistant] Obrigon could also, of course, count on support from the middle-class liberal constitutionalists who were aiming at something more like a parliamentary democracy for Mexico and certainly wanted more radical social reforms. Carranza had left them frustrated and dissatisfied.


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[Assistant] But Carranza's strongest support came from the clique of Sonoran leaders who had been together since the first shots of the revolution. I've only mentioned them in passing and haven't gone into detail on them, but this is Benjamin Hill, a guy named Adolfo de la Huerta, and most especially, Plutarco Elias Calles.


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[Assistant] These were the men who had organized and led the revolution that put Carranza in power in the first place, and they were now almost to a man ready to pitch him overboard.


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[Assistant] Obergon was also going to get critical support from one group that had battled him in the original conflict between the constitutionalists and the conventionists, and that is the Zapatistas.


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[Assistant] Because though there was always rivalries and infighting, jealousy and bickering,


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[Assistant] It turns out that there was a lot more holding the leaders of Morelos together than just mutual loyalty and respect for the man, Zapata.


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[Assistant] So, the death of Zapata was shocking, but it was not the end of the line for the movement he had started.


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[Assistant] In fact, even as General Pablo Gonzalez once again believed that he could declare victory, the assassination of Zapata, such an act of dishonest treachery,


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[Assistant] Hardened public opinion against Carranza and General Gonzalez and softened it towards the guerrillas who were still out there fighting.


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[Assistant] In the weeks and then months that followed Zapata's assassination, the fighters retreated into the hills and now numbered no more than 2,500 active soldiers, but those small.


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[Assistant] Out of power and with only limited military capacity, the Zapatistas fought on.


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[Assistant] Much of the credit for this goes to Hildardo Magagna, whose own skill as a political leader now fully revealed itself.


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[Assistant] Magaña spent those weeks and months after Zapata's death continuing his unceasing efforts to link the Zapatistas to a wider national cause, but also to solidify his own leadership in Morelos.


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[Assistant] If the various apatista chiefs splintered, that really would be the end of them.


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[Assistant] And the fact that Magania managed to talk them all into letting him be their leader was pretty remarkable, especially because Magania wasn't even a fighting man.


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[Assistant] But Magania wrote and met with and talked various Appetista generals, and in early September, he called a junta of all the recognized chiefs, many of whom, like De La O, had been fighting from the very beginning, and they had been there when they all got together for the first time and elected Zapata to be their leader.


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[Assistant] In another small vote of 32 assembled leaders or their surrogates, Magaña secured votes from 18 of them. His next closest rival got just 11.


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[Assistant] So with Magaña now officially head of the Liberating Army of the South, he proceeded to republish manifestos, reiterate their commitment to land and justice in the plan of Ayala.


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[Assistant] And six months after Zapata's death, the Zapatistas were all mostly working together towards the same goal under a single leader.


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[Assistant] It's amazing how much they held together. But like I said, they believed in the movement enough to subordinate their own individual egos.


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[Assistant] With his new mandate for command, Magaña continued his courtship of other potential national leaders and rebels. He talked to Felix Díaz, Pancho Villa, a guy named Palaeus who had opened up his own little rebellion around Tampico,


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[Assistant] And then, of course, when Obregón announced his candidacy for president in June of 1919, he automatically became the leader of anti-Carranza anything, anywhere.


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[Assistant] Obregonista agents and Magania began their first tentative talks with each other.


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[Assistant] But though both sides were wary, Magaña certainly saw in Obregon a more trustworthy potential ally than practically anywhere else, and also one that was almost sure to be sitting in the presidential palace by the end of the next year.


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[Assistant] One guy who was about to be taken out of the running for future leader of Mexico was Felipe Ángeles.


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[Assistant] On November the 15th, 1919, agents of the Federal Army captured Angelus.


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[Assistant] Since leaving VIA back in June, Angel has spent seven months just sort of wandering around northern Mexico with a couple of aides and bodyguards.


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[Assistant] What he was doing, or why he was doing it, is kind of a mystery.


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[Assistant] He could have gone back to the United States, maybe returned to politics as a respected exile. There's not really a good explanation for why he didn't. Maybe he was ashamed or embarrassed at his failure. Maybe he was depressed.


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[Assistant] It's been suggested that he was trying to make a martyr of himself, but wannabe martyrs don't spend seven months camping out and sleeping in caves and dodging enemy patrols. If you want to martyr yourself, you present yourself and dare them to take you alive.


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[Assistant] Even when Angelus' location was finally betrayed, it was only after a shootout at the cave in Chihuahua where he had been sleeping that he surrendered his gun and agreed to go peacefully.


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[Assistant] When Karanza found out that Angelus had been captured, he was not exactly happy about it.


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[Assistant] But the ambush and murder of Zapata had been surprisingly unpopular out there.


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[Assistant] And Angelus was famous both at home and abroad. He was known to be a respected and honorable man, so we can't just kill him.


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[Assistant] Instead, Carranza ordered the one big show trial of the Mexican Revolution.


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[Assistant] As you know, show trials in kangaroo courts have a long history in revolutionary and post-revolutionary upheavals.


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[Assistant] But the Mexican Revolution was pretty free of them. Mexican revolutionaries figured it was just easier to line you up against the wall, shoot you, and then claim you had been trying to escape. But this time there would be a trial.


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[Assistant] Much to the chagrin of the authorities though, when Angelus arrived in the city he was greeted as a popular hero. The people flocked to see him, the ladies of society undertook to make sure that he was comfortable and well fed.


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[Assistant] When the trial began, the theater was packed and clearly sympathetic to the defendant.


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[Assistant] What made this a show trial, though, is that the fix was in from the beginning.


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[Assistant] The five judges assigned to the court-martial were all vehemently anti-vista, and the verdict was decreed from the beginning.


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[Assistant] Analysts likely recognize this and so as his lawyers attempted to mount some legal arguments about the court's standing and the right to appeal,


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[Assistant] Angelus delivered political speeches. He reiterated that the time had come for peace and reconciliation. He did not denounce Carranza or insist that Mexico fight on. In fact, it was time to lay the guns down.


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[Assistant] But his biggest applause line came when he said that he believed that Mexico would never be peaceful until it had socialism and social justice, and that the revolution had been started because of unjust abuses by the bosses and the oligarchs and the hefeis politicos.


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[Assistant] The people had been right to rise up against all that. But like I said, this was not a trial. This was a show trial.


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[Assistant] And after this brief two-day spectacle and some speeches by Angelus, the predetermined verdict was handed down. Death. On November the 26th, 1919, Felipe Angelus was led to the wall. He was lined up against it, and he was executed by a firing squad. Five thousand people attended his funeral procession.


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[Assistant] Felipe Ángeles is mostly a footnote these days. He's overshadowed by larger figures and by the fact that he never really won.


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[Assistant] He contributed to this because he willingly put himself under Pancho Villa, whose personality is big enough to blot out the sun.


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[Assistant] But there are other worlds where Felipe Angelis became president of Mexico. Not much would have needed to change to make that happen. And I think he would have been a good president.


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[Assistant] He was honest. He was well educated in literature, economics, politics, and science.


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[Assistant] And as I said when I first introduced him, he did not just read books and papers, he wrote them as well.


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[Assistant] He also cared about the people of Mexico, even if it was in his own kind of condescending, patrician way.


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[Assistant] And if Pancho Villa had listened to him, maybe this series ends with Felipe Ángeles being elected president. I mean, who knows? But I can't say this for sure.


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[Assistant] There is no single turning point in the Mexican Revolution that turns harder than the events of the ten tragic days.


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[Assistant] What if Francisco Madero had insisted that the loyal and honest and skilled General Ángeles be put in charge of his forces in Mexico City instead of bowing to pressure and keeping the treacherous Huerta?


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[Assistant] Maybe the Mexican Revolution would have been reduced to 18 months of sporadic skirmishing to bring down the porfiriato and install democracy. Instead, it was 10 years of destructive violence.


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[Assistant] But none of those turning points ever turned in Analyst's direction, and he was never strong enough to make them turn in his direction.


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[Assistant] And so instead of going down in history as one of the greatest leaders in Mexican history, he is a footnote.


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[Assistant] After dispatching with Angelis, Carranza turned his attention back to the main problem of Obregon, who was campaigning to cheering crowds across the country.


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[Assistant] And though he was a respectable enough guy, decent diplomat, decent record,


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[Assistant] Bonillas had no national name recognition and had no party or clique or group of independent supporters. He would be entirely dependent on Carranza's political machine, and that was the whole point.


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[Assistant] Funniest would be a puppet to get Carranza around the no re-election rule.


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[Assistant] But he has also happened to be a Sonoran, which Carranza hoped might help split the vote in Overgun's home state.


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[Assistant] The nomination of Bonillas was the signal to Obregón and his friends that Carranza was really going to contest the election and try to halt Obregón's ascendancy.


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[Assistant] And they were worried he might not even accept the results if Openergon won.


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[Assistant] In one of those tragic ironies that we have seen so often in both the history of Rome and revolutions, it was Carranza's attempt to stay in power that led to his downfall.


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[Assistant] Sensing that Bonillas might not win, and that the Sonorans were sure to organize a resistance if Carranza tried to use force or fraud to install his man in office, Carranza started to make preemptive moves.


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[Assistant] Exercising dubious executive authority, Carranza replaced generals in Sonora with men who were loyal to him.


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[Assistant] He reorganized the military zones and transferred more troops into the state.


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[Assistant] And it was really super obvious that these moves were in preparation for maybe needing to strangle a revolt.


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[Assistant] Karanta did not understand that these moves were probably going to provoke that very revolt. And they did.


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[Assistant] There were a flurry of moves in the first week of April 1920.


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[Assistant] Carranza ordered Obregón to come testify in a trial in Mexico City involving some conspirators who'd worked with Felix Díaz.


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[Assistant] Without mentioning that Obregón was not being called as a witness but as a defendant.


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[Assistant] So Overton went and faced a judge on April the 6th where he discovered that they were coming after him on trumped up charges of conspiring with Felix Diaz.


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[Assistant] In the meantime, Carranza unilaterally dissolved the power of the Sonoran state government and assumed political and military control of the state.


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[Assistant] Which was, of course, vehemently opposed, and on April the 10th, the entire government of Sonora, from Governor de la Huerta on down, announced that they no longer recognized Carranza's authority. Here, finally, it was 1913 all over again.


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[Assistant] A state as a sovereign unit was now in revolt against an executive that they did not recognize.


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[Assistant] In Mexico City, Obregón was not happy at all about how this was playing out. He really did want to win at the ballot box, and he was furious that Carranza had forced this crisis, and furious that his own supporters in Sonora had embraced such an extreme response so quickly. But what was done was done.


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[Assistant] Obregón had a quick dinner conference with General Pablo González who agreed that Carranza had finally gone too far and the time had come to overthrow him.


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[Assistant] Correctly believing he was on the verge of being arrested and maybe winding up like Felipe Ángeles, Obregón got help from some railroad workers. And on April the 13th, they snuck him out of the city on a train bound for Iguaga, the capital of Guerrero.


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[Assistant] Over the next few days, Sonora was joined by other Mexican states who denounced Carranza and withdrew their recognition from his government.


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[Assistant] Sinaloa and Zacatecas joined in solidarity. Then the leaders of the state of Guerrero, where Obregon was right there with them, also signed up. But what were they signing up for? This was all being improvised.


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[Assistant] And that's when we get the last plan of the Mexican Revolution.


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[Assistant] We've had a lot of plans in the Mexican Revolution, right? There was Madero's plan of San Luis Potosi, Zapata's plan of Ayala, Carranza's plan of Guadalupe. There were others, but this would be the last. It was dubbed the plan of Agua Prieta.


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[Assistant] promulgated on April the 23rd 1920 from that far northern Sonoran border town.


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[Assistant] The authors of the plan denounced Carranza, accused him of betraying the Constitution, and declared their intention to remove him from power.


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[Assistant] The plan of Agua Prieta, however, did not put Obregón in charge of this movement. Instead, for political reasons, that role went officially to the governor of Sonora, Adolfo de la Huerta.


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[Assistant] De la Huerta was now given military authority and the ability to appoint interim governors to states who signed on to the plan.


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[Assistant] For Obregón personally, the plan of Agua Prieta was also a declaration that he was abandoning the presidential campaign because Carranza had betrayed the constitution and he could not, in good conscience, continue.


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[Assistant] And though he wanted to win at the ballot box, it was the battlefield to which Obregon would have to return.


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[Assistant] The plan of Agua Prieta was signed by 107 senior military officers and it created a new liberal constitutionalist army.


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[Assistant] Pablo Gonzalez signaled his support while holding personal authority over 22,000 troops in the vicinity of the federal district.


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[Assistant] The bulk of the political and military leadership of Mexico was lining up against Carranza.


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[Assistant] In Morelos, the Carranza-appointed governor called for an assembly of municipal leaders, and they were supposed to vote a show of support for Carranza, but instead they voted to back Obregón and the plan of Agua Prieta.


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[Assistant] Magania and the Zapatistas were overjoyed by this shockingly widespread and immediate rejection of President Carranza.


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[Assistant] It only confirmed that he had done the right thing by working to align the Zapatistas with Obregon.


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[Assistant] So up in the hills, the Zapatista rebels applauded this vote by the official state authorities, the very state authorities they had just been fighting. Suddenly, they were on the same side.


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[Assistant] On May the 2nd, Obregón departed Aguala headed north towards Mexico City.


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[Assistant] And to get there, he had to pass through Morelos, where he was met by a mixed group of civilian officials and Zapatista chiefs, including De La O, though Magaña himself was elsewhere.


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[Assistant] This group then moved as one towards the capital, with Obragoen being escorted by De La O's little Zapatista guerrilla army, which is a crazy turn of events.


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[Assistant] The implacable rebel now providing the personal bodyguard for the future president of Mexico.


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[Assistant] Recognizing that he could not hold Mexico City, Carranza decided to reestablish himself at Veracruz, which had served so successfully as his base of operations in 1914 and 1915.


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[Assistant] He still had a core of supporters with him, and they spent the first week of May 1920 loading up every rail car they could find with every valuable thing they could find from food to gold to bullets and ammunition.


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[Assistant] When it was all lined up, this convoy stretched out over eight miles. On May the 7th, the convoy departed the Capitol, but the trains never made it to Veracruz.


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[Assistant] Facing certain capture, Carranza and a small group of aides took off on horseback into the mountains heading north, probably with half a notion to make it to his old home state of Coahuila, where he might muster some last well of support. But he never made it there either.


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[Assistant] And while Carranza took off for the hills, Obregón and his entourage entered Mexico City on May the 9th.


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[Assistant] And if there was one thing Obrago knew how to do, it was enter Mexico City as a conquering hero.


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[Assistant] Karanza managed to stay on the run for the next two weeks.


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[Assistant] Eventually, he was contacted by General Rodolfo Herrera.


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[Assistant] A regional federal army commander who offered Carranza refuge in a small town.


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[Assistant] Herrero had already gone over to Obregón, and now took it upon himself to solve the great problem of what to do about Carranza.


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[Assistant] In the small hours of the morning of May the 21st, 1920, still night really, a group of gunmen surrounded the hut where Carranza slept and they opened fire. Then they burst in and they fired some more. When the smoke cleared,


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[Assistant] Venustiano Carranza, first chief of the Constitutionalist revolution and then president of Mexico, lay dead on the floor.


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[Assistant] What can you say about Carranza? His career is inexplicable.


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[Assistant] In times of rebellion and revolution, it is to charismatic leaders that people turn.


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[Assistant] Because you have to forge new centers of authority and power where none have existed before.


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[Assistant] Practically everybody we've talked about so far in the podcast, from Cromwell, to Believar, to Toussaint Louverture, to Nelvia and Sapata, had some kind of charismatic spark.


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[Assistant] But so far as I can tell, there's really nobody who walked away from a personal meeting with Carranza without thinking, God, what a cold dead fish of a man. He had anti-charisma.


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[Assistant] And yet from 1913 to 1920, Carranza held together a revolutionary coalition that eventually put him into power.


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[Assistant] Almost through sheer perseverance of determined unstoppable ego.


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[Assistant] There was a good two years where the starting point of any peaceful reconciliation in Mexico was an agreement that Carranza had to go.


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[Assistant] But he had built up just enough of a machine, secured just enough loyalty, though mostly through mercenary politicking, that he stayed and he stayed.


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[Assistant] The crazy old wizard looking dude from Coahuila had gotten what he wanted. He had been elected president of Mexico.


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[Assistant] But in the end, nobody actually wanted him to be president of Mexico. No one actually liked him. And when he died, no one really mourned his death.


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[Assistant] Mostly, they were just happy he was finally gone.


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[Assistant] With the death of Carranza, the authors of the plan of Agua Prieta found themselves in a much easier position.


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[Assistant] The national mood, military and civilian alike, was with them.


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[Assistant] The National Congress formally appointed Adolfo de la Huerta provisional president to oversee new elections, which would be scheduled for September.


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[Assistant] De la Huerta would not himself be a candidate. He was just there to hold the line until Obregón could be elected and sworn in.


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[Assistant] De La Huerta's brief term as provisional president was mostly about doing whatever it took to bring peace and stability after the latest round of armed rebellion.


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[Assistant] To have a sort of grand reset and refound a new post-revolutionary Mexico.


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[Assistant] So, for example, de la Huerta's emissaries went out and tracked down Felix Diaz, who was still out in the vicinity of Vera Cruz, and arranged safe passage for him out of the country in exchange for quitting the field.


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[Assistant] And this was a pretty okay deal for Diaz. Fighting against the unpopular Carranza, there was hope he might one day win.


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[Assistant] Fighting the popular Obra'gon, who the whole nation had just rallied to? Not so much. So Dias took the deal and he left for exile.


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[Assistant] He would remain in exile until he was finally allowed back into the country in 1937, and he would die in Veracruz in 1945.


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[Assistant] De la Huerta was also able to affect the end of the Zapatista rebellion.


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[Assistant] In an abrupt change of fortunes for the Zapatistas, Magaña's support for Obregón had paid off. And in a deal to bring peace, finally, to the tiny troubled state of Morelos,


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[Assistant] Various Zapatista chiefs were given commands in police or militia forces, while the soldiers were formally incorporated into the federal army as the Division of the South.


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[Assistant] Magania and De La O were both made divisional generals.


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[Assistant] After 10 years out in the cold, the Zapatistas would finally be working in concert with and under the auspices of a national government who was making more or less sincere promises.


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[Assistant] Now, Obdurgan was no radical land reformer, but he wanted peace. And the people of Moderelos rejoiced that they now had the opportunity to do what they had always wanted to do, which was just peacefully tend to their villages and families.


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[Assistant] Pancho Villa sent a message to De La Huerta. He said I'd like to negotiate a peaceful retirement for myself and my men.


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[Assistant] Via had waited long enough. The despised Carranza was now in the ground. It was time to lay down his arms and retire.


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[Assistant] Via was lucky that it was De La Huerta in the president's chair at that moment because De La Huerta was one of the few Sonoran leaders Via had not clashed with directly and who bore him no personal grudge.


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[Assistant] But it would still be a difficult negotiation because Obregón had a deeply personal grudge against Villa. He believed Villa needed to be shot or imprisoned or exiled, certainly not allowed to retire in peace.


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[Assistant] But Delach were to exercise some independence, with the suspicion being that he had his own future career to think about, and he wanted the prestige of being the one to tame Pancho Villa.


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[Assistant] And possibly to be the one who could call on via down the road.


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[Assistant] So, what Deila Huerta offered was that Via could have an oceanda for himself and for his remaining men to settle on.


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[Assistant] Via requested maybe a command in the local rurales to assist, as he said, in the curbing of banditry in the region.


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[Assistant] De la Huerta refused to allow Villa to hold any kind of military command, but after a few weeks of back and forth, they finally came to an acceptable agreement.


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[Assistant] The view would get a large and secluded Oceanda in northern Durango.


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[Assistant] Ultimately, 800 of Via's men would be granted a year's salary and given land to settle on near Via.


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[Assistant] The himself would be granted a large pension and allowed to keep 50 armed men as a bodyguard, and that bodyguard would be paid for by the government.


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[Assistant] Obertur Gunn was furious when he heard these terms, and when a formal written agreement was drawn up at the end of July, he refused to sign it.


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[Assistant] But the other leaders of the Agua Prieta coalition, eh, this was a price they could pay.


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[Assistant] If it would get Via to retire and make no more trouble, I mean let's do it. And Via seemed sincere. Carranza was dead. What would he even be fighting for if he kept fighting?


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[Assistant] The brief de la Huerta administration thus succeeded in corralling and pacifying the most violently rebellious parts of Mexico and get them to accept the legitimacy of the coming post-revolutionary regime.


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[Assistant] De la Huerta and his administration did not enjoy the same recognition from the United States. Then, in the throes of their own presidential election, and seriously ticked off, there was yet another rebellion-slashed armed coup, and that a democratically elected president of Mexico had once again been assassinated.


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[Assistant] So the United States refused to recognize de la Huerta's legitimacy.


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[Assistant] Though it was indicated through channels that the United States might overcome their democratic scruples if, say, de la Huerta annulled the offending Article 27 of the Constitution that so threatened American business interests in Mexico, de la Huerta refused. So Mexico braced again for an invasion, but that invasion did not come.


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[Assistant] And a nationwide democratic election was about to give OBRAGONE an un-ignorable mandate.


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[Assistant] On September the 5th, 1920, Mexico once again went back to the polls for the Democratic coronation of Alvaro Obregón.


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[Assistant] President-elect Obregón then wrote a note to Pancho Villa saying that his administration would honor its side of the bargain if Villa honored his side.


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[Assistant] It was time to end the Mexican Revolution, to end the cycles of violence and revenge, to bury all hatchets, to now rebuild and reform Mexico. The revolution had made both of them, but it was time to leave that in the past, and like Mexico, become something new.


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[Assistant] On December the 1st, 1920, Álvaro Obregón was sworn in as president of Mexico.


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[Assistant] And that is where we will arbitrarily mark the end of the Mexican Revolution.


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[Assistant] It had begun almost exactly 10 years earlier with the publication of Francisco Brero's Plant of San Luis Potosi.


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[Assistant] The elevation of Obragan begins a new era. It marks the end of the revolution and the beginning of the so-called Sonoran dynasty, which would control national politics for the next 14 years.


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[Assistant] And that is why this is such a convenient place to mark the end of the revolution proper.


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[Assistant] Obrigon and the Sonorans would pick through the rubble and stabilize Mexico using a mix of pragmatism, improvisation, and not a small amount of corrupt hypocrisy.


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[Assistant] Which is what we will be talking about next week in our final final episode. What had the Mexican Revolution meant? What would it mean in the future? What does it still mean today?


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[Assistant] This week's episode is brought to you by audible. What would it look like if we all listened more?


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[Assistant] Listening to audiobooks inspires us, motivates us, even brings us closer together. And there's no better place to listen than Audible. Audible has the largest selection of audiobooks on the planet. And Audible members can choose three titles every month. One audiobook and two Audible originals that you can't hear anywhere else.


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[Assistant] Audible members also get access to exclusive audio fitness programs to start their new year off on the right foot. You can listen on any device, anytime, anywhere. At home, at the gym, on your commute, or just on the go.


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[Assistant] You'll also enjoy easy audiobook exchanges, rollover credits, and an audiobook library you can keep forever even if you cancel your membership. So there's never been a better time to experience Audible.


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[Assistant] Now this week I'm going to encourage you to maybe lay some groundwork for our next series on the Russian Revolution by recommending the Great Courses section, A History of Russia, from Peter the Great to Gorbachev.


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[Assistant] It's twenty hours long, so it's going to go into quite a bit more detail on everything leading up to the revolution than I'm going to be able to get into. Not that I'm not going to try, mind you.


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[Assistant] But definitely download A History of Russia if you want to be fully brief for our next series on the Russian Revolution.


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[Assistant] In hindsight, we know that 1915 marked a great turning point in the Mexican Revolution.


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[Assistant] Looking back, it's easy to see that the revolutionary chaos had peaked. That the era of the year of the four emperors style cyclical regime change had drawn to a close.


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[Assistant] But as we discussed in last week's episode, in 1916, Mexico was in pretty bad shape and the revolution seemed very far from over. Pancho Villa was resurgent in the north. The Zapatistas continued their determined rebellion in the south. The American army remained planted on Mexican soil, humiliating Mexican national honor.


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[Assistant] The economy was in shambles, harvests were bad, the money was no good and disease was spreading.


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[Assistant] It would not be in any way surprising if this was all setting up the fall of Carranza. Taking his place in the line running from Porfirio Díaz to Francisco Madero to Victoriano Huerta. That he who wins the crown wins only the right to be overthrown.


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[Assistant] But Carranza is going to stick, and today I want to talk about how and why he managed to pull that off as Mexico begins the slow, halting, and painful transition from revolution to reconstruction.


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[Assistant] At the core of his ultimate success was that the Constitutionalists drew from a broad base of support, both in terms of class and geography, and this broad base of support was kept intact when Carranza moved into the presidential palace.


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[Assistant] Porfirio Diaz had led a Nero oligarchy. Victoriano Huerta a Nero military dictatorship. Neither of them had any real popular support.


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[Assistant] Now, Madero had broad national support, but remember he was so fixated on reconciling with the old regime that he left most of his most passionate supporters out in the cold, most especially the soldiers who had won the war for him.


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[Assistant] So for all the talk of Carranza being hated by everyone, he had carefully built up a coalition that could sustain him in office. Using a deft mix of public pronouncements, private assurances, and rewards for loyalty, Carranza had support from large segments of middle-class liberals, upper-class landowners, and lower-class peasants and workers. Obviously not everyone in those groups supported him, but he could claim supporters from at least a segment of all of them.


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[Assistant] In addition to the civilian support, he also of course had a strong and loyal military operation. Officers and common soldiers alike, whose fortunes were tied to his. Madero had demobilized the armed forces that had put him in power. Carranza did not make that mistake.


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[Assistant] But perhaps most importantly, Carranza had built the constitutionalist movement to be national in scope and unified under his control.


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[Assistant] Carranza's rivals like Villa and Zapata had only limited interest in national power.


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[Assistant] Their outlook was so federalist that the conventionists wound up being little more than a loose coalition of allies rather than a single unified force. In contrast, when Carranza had gone out looking for allies and supporters in different parts of Mexico, he looked for men willing to sign onto a more centralized chain of command.


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[Assistant] So, when the Constitutionalists defeated the Conventionists, it wasn't like, okay, we won, everyone retreat to your corners and look after your own affairs. It was, okay, we won and we have a centralized organizational structure, let's consolidate our hold on the whole country all at once.


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[Assistant] Remember, Carranza had very little time for people who did not bend a knee to Carranza. It's why he had enemies in Villa and Zapata. But it did mean the constitutionalists were more internally cohesive and unified when they took over.


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[Assistant] Now those were the sort of positive reasons Carranza was able to succeed. But there were also negative reasons too. Most especially corruption and repression.


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[Assistant] To keep all his underlings and supporters happy and loyal, Carranza was happy to turn a blind eye as his men rewarded themselves for their efforts. Nearly everyone in the constitutionalist leadership, civilian and soldier alike, took the opportunity to skim, plunder, profit, and extort from anything that was under their control.


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[Assistant] And upon their victory, they were in control of a lot. The food supply, the railroads, all nationalized property. Anywhere that anything went or anything that was bought and sold, somebody was taking a cut.


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[Assistant] And that was just the above board stuff. Below board was the ever-present economies of vice, right? Gambling, prostitution, drugs, and alcohol. Constitutionalist leadership took their cut of that too.


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[Assistant] Constitutionalist corruption was widespread and a constant source of complaint and unpopularity, but it was also a means of keeping all of those leaders out there loyal to the regime.


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[Assistant] Then there was the active repression of those who might threaten the new regime.


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[Assistant] This repression now targeted not just old porphyrians or Huerta stalwarts, but also Vistas and Zapatistas.


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[Assistant] Carranza adopted the familiar tactics of Mexican dictators. Intimidation, arrests, disappearances, deportation, up to and including assassination.


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[Assistant] These were heady days for spies and informants who could make a little cash ratting out on their neighbors. Oh, you see that guy over there? I once saw him cheer for Pancho Villa. Or saying, oh yes, I know where the local rebel band is, let me tell you.


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[Assistant] This too was a source of persistent unpopularity, but dictators wouldn't repress their people if it didn't often work.


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[Assistant] This too contributed mightily to Carranza's unpopularity, and not just out there with the people of Mexico who were being repressed, but also inside the ranks of the army who were the ones doing the repressing.


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[Assistant] Those soldiers had once been part of a noble cause, fighting the forces of tyranny and oppression. Now that they had won, they were forced to sink into the dull realities of garrison duty, defending the corrupt local magistrate not fighting against him, and it started to dawn on many in the army that they were no longer the good guys.


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[Assistant] Now, this is going to have long-term repercussions for Karanja, but in the short term, repression did help Karanja consolidate his hold on power.


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[Assistant] This repression, though, was meted out not just on Qur'an's enemies, but also on those who thought that they were his friends. And specifically here I'm talking about organized urban labor.


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[Assistant] Remember, in the fight against Pancho Villa, Carranza had painted himself as the friend of labor.


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[Assistant] He had promised them rights, encouraged their strikes, and secured an allegiance with the House of the World Worker, the CASA, that radically anarchist labor union. And they provided him with the famous Red Battalions who then went off to serve under Obregón in the Battles of the Bahio.


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[Assistant] Well, now that these guys had served his purposes, Karanza turned on them quite ruthlessly.


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[Assistant] Given the dark economic times that had taken hold by 1916, there was obviously a lot of labor unrest to go along with it. And in the spring of 1916, talk of a general strike was heating up.


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[Assistant] There was some expectation from the labor leaders that Carranza would be supportive of their efforts, but instead they got the other thing. Carranza had no interest in establishing the principle that labor wielded independent power inside the state, so when the CASA started planning its general strike, Carranza ordered the police and military to take action.


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[Assistant] They shut down union meetings, arrested leaders and banned publications.


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[Assistant] Though this anti-labor crackdown was not the end of the CASA, they would go into sharp decline, and would be eclipsed by the coming Regional Confederation of Mexican Workers, a new union which was more moderate in its goals and tactics.


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[Assistant] So over the winter of 1916-1917, despite all of those things I just told you, Carranza's position was still precarious. He had an organizational structure, and just enough people out there still buying his shtick as first chief of the revolution to hold national power.


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[Assistant] But all over Mexico he was challenged by local rebellions under still stubborn leaders like Villa and Zapata. And his falling out with the Americans was making it difficult to arm himself enough to go out and finish the job.


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[Assistant] And it is at this point that I must tell you that Carranza is also facing, in fact, a third major regional revolt that he would struggle to put down. This one was centered in the southeast, down between Veracruz and the Yucatan Peninsula.


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[Assistant] I think that maybe even Mexican history buffs lose track of this one, but it is a thing that happened, and I do need to talk about it, because it was led by Felix Díaz, nephew of Porfirio Díaz. Yes, that's right, Felix Díaz is back.


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[Assistant] Last time we talked about Felix Diaz, he was at the center of the Ten Tragic Days coup. He walked out of the infamous Pact of the Embassy meeting with Huerta and US Ambassador Wilson, believing that he would be elected president in the fall of 1913.


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[Assistant] But then remember where to double-crossed him, forced all of Dias' allies out of the government, and sent Dias himself on a special diplomatic mission to the moon.


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[Assistant] Then in episode 9.15, Dias returned briefly to contest the presidential election of 1913, but by then Huerta was putting the country on lockdown and dissolving the National Congress. So Dias went into meek exile and spent the next few years bouncing between Havana, New Orleans, and New York.


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[Assistant] As the nephew of Porfirio Diaz, Felix was still a valuable conservative asset, and during his time in exile, he was the center of his own reactionary plots to bring the old Porfiriato back.


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[Assistant] When the plot surrounding Huerta and Orozco got going in 1915, though, Díaz understandably refused to have anything to do with it because he now hated Huerta as much as anyone.


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[Assistant] Good thing he did too, because Orozco and Huerta boarded a train to their doom while Felix Díaz lived.


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[Assistant] In fact, now that Huerta was out of the equation, Felix Díaz became the great focus of a would-be counterrevolution.


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[Assistant] So Dias spied his opportunity to get back into the thick of things in early 1916.


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[Assistant] With the mighty Pancho Villa blasted to smithereens and the hated Huerta having kicked the bucket in American custody, Dias wrote and published what was dubbed the Plan of Tierra Colorado in February 1916, and then he sailed south from Galveston headed for Veracruz. From there, he planned to move on to Oaxaca, the ancestral homeland of the Dias clan.


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[Assistant] But his ship sank almost as soon as it left port, and Dias himself nearly drowned.


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[Assistant] He and his men washed up on shore in far northeastern Mexico. They were arrested, but they managed to talk their way out of jail without the police realizing that they literally had Felix Diaz in custody.


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[Assistant] From there, he made a dangerous journey south, passing through Carranza's Mexico City, still bound for Oaxaca, and he managed to slip through the Capitol undetected.


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[Assistant] When Diaz got to Oaxaca, he found plenty of men willing to rally to his banner.


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[Assistant] But I must stress that though Diaz was an agent of counterrevolution, he was not running around out there pitching counterrevolution per se. I mean, that's not gonna fly for mass recruitment.


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[Assistant] Instead, Díaz's plan of Tierra Colorado emphasized the liberal constitutionalism of Benito Juárez, liberal constitutionalism that had once motivated and defined his own famous uncle.


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[Assistant] In fact, if you go through Diaz's public program point by point, it's virtually indistinguishable from Carranza's. So you might be asking then, if it's the same program, then who's flocking to his banner? How does he sustain a rebellion in southeastern Mexico for the next few years?


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[Assistant] The most important element by far was regional resentment against the Carancistas, most of whom were considered alien northerners who had come down south to cheat and abuse the locals, rich and poor alike.


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[Assistant] So in many ways, Dias was simply giving his name to a regional revolt against Qur'an's men.


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[Assistant] The second most important element was ex-federal army officers. Career soldiers who had lost their jobs back in 1914 and now wanted to rebuild the old federal army under the old command structure, which Felix Dias promised to do.


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[Assistant] Finally, Dias drew international support, particularly because he was far more openly in favor of the Allies. The old Porfiriian elite had always been on great terms with the British and the French, and Dias promised to bring all those good terms back.


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[Assistant] Not only that, but there were major concerns among the Allies that Carranza's antagonistic relationship with the United States was pushing him closer to the Germans.


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[Assistant] So Díaz was thus able to harness regional unpopularity against Carranza with the military skill of professional soldiers and covert support from powerful international interests. Now, spoiler alert, Félix Díaz is not going to emerge from the Mexican Revolution bringing back the Porfiriato, but he would be a persistent headache for the next couple of years.


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[Assistant] So though Mexico was still a hot mess of chaos and rebellion, and Carranza's hold on power might slip at any moment, in the fall of 1916, he decided it was time to slap at least the veneer of triumphant legitimacy onto his regime. It was time to draft a new constitution for Mexico.


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[Assistant] Since the fall of Huerta back in 1914, it had never been entirely clear who or what the government of Mexico was, nor under what authority that government might be operating.


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[Assistant] And though the war against Huerta had begun as a defense of the old constitution, I mean, that's how they got their name, the Constitutionalists, as the Revolutionary War continued, that defense morphed into a promise that when the fighting was done, a new constitutional order would be established.


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[Assistant] This was partly the rationale behind the Aguascalientes convention. To get the ball rolling on a discussion of what post-revolution government would look like.


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[Assistant] But the convention had devolved into civil war, and the constitutional cant had been kicked down the road.


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[Assistant] But even after the constitutionalist victory in 1915, Carranza had not immediately drafted a new constitution. Instead, he said Mexico needed a brief period of pre-constitutional government to ensure the restoration of order. And I think here that he was hoping that Villa and Zapata and the rest would be soon stamped out.


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[Assistant] But when they weren't stamped out, Carranza decided, partly for propaganda reasons, to pretend like Mexico was secure and orderly again, and so the time had in fact come to restore constitutional order with a new post-revolutionary constitution.


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[Assistant] Though Mexico had been operating outside of constitutional government since at least the death of Madero, when Carranza called for a constitutional congress in the fall of 1916, he did not want them to drag out the process. So he implemented an aggressive timeline.


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[Assistant] Delegate elections would be held in October 1916. The Congress would convene in November and deliberate until January and then they were to have a finished document ready to promulgate in February 1917.


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[Assistant] So the framers of the Constitution of 1917 were not going to have time to carefully deliberate over their work. I mean, the Constitution of 1857 had taken a full year to develop. Carranza wanted this one done in a couple of months.


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[Assistant] The very quick pace of deliberations allowed things to slip in that, kind of by accident, made the Mexican Constitution of 1917, up to that point anyway, like the most radical constitution in the history of Western civilization.


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[Assistant] So the elections for this Congress took place in October 1916. Voting was technically on the basis of universal manhood suffrage and followed the districts laid out for the 1912 election, but these elections were not very well publicized, nor did they generate much excitement.


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[Assistant] Most people didn't know that they were happening, and those who did often cynically assumed that Carranza was just gonna present a draft of a constitution for the Congress to rubber stamp, so why bother participating in an orchestrated sham?


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[Assistant] Added to the cynicism was the assumption that the elections themselves would be a staged farce, which tended to lead to a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy as officially partisan constitutionalists swept the election because nobody else bothered to participate.


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[Assistant] Ultimately, 220 delegates were elected, which was not anywhere close to the full compliment that was expected, and many of the delegates were elected with just a few thousand votes, some with as few as a couple hundred.


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[Assistant] Unlike the Aguascalientes Convention, which was exclusively, purposefully an all-military affair, the Constituent Congress was almost entirely civilian.


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[Assistant] Only 70 of the delegates held any military rank at all, and most of them were like third-tier colonels or lieutenants, not the great revolutionary generals. Obrigon, for example, did not participate.


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[Assistant] The rest of the delegates were civilians, and more specifically, middle-class professionals, right? Doctors and journalists, and of course, the lawyers, who on their own made up 25% of the delegates. The lawyers provided what historian Alan Knight humorously dubbed, quote, the usual indigestible lump of legal expertise.


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[Assistant] Only a handful of delegates might be called working class, and only a handful of delegates might be dubbed rich osandado types.


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[Assistant] So the men who gathered in November were ideologically and socially aligned with each other. They were mostly middle-class professional liberals. It's hard to say that they came in with a broad democratic mandate, or like represented the population of Mexico, and many of them were well aware that the constitution that they were about to write might just land with a hollow thud.


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[Assistant] The Congress opened in the city of Querétaro at the Palace of Fine Arts in November 1916, and after the usual fights about credentials and who would be sat, they finally got down to real actual business.


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[Assistant] On December the 1st, Carranza himself delivered an opening draft that was based on the liberal constitution of 1857. I mean, it basically was the constitution of 1857, just reworded and reworked a bit.


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[Assistant] It had all the hallmarks, a federal system with a division of power between the national government and individual states, each with their own rights and responsibilities. In keeping with Kranz's own philosophy, his constitution had a strong presidency at the center, but it was checked by a two-house legislature on one side and an independent judiciary on the other.


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[Assistant] The draft also included the standard list of liberal civil rights and private property guarantees. Elections would be broadly democratic and based on universal manhood suffrage. And because this all goes back to the very, very, very beginning of the revolution, written into the Constitution was the principle of no re-election.


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[Assistant] But despite the cynicism that surrounded the Congress, Carranza presented his draft as a starting point that he expected would be amended to reflect current realities.


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[Assistant] But though his critics were wrong that Carranza would demand his draft simply be rubber stamped,


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[Assistant] They were right to be cynical and doubt his sincerity.


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[Assistant] But in being flexible about when into the Constitution now, some stuff slipped in that turned out to be incredibly radical.


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[Assistant] With this starting point in hand, the delegates then got to work in committees, working as fast as they could to go through everything line by line and approve individual articles by the February 1st deadline.


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[Assistant] Now a lot of what comes out is just a rubber stamping of the 1857-style liberal framework, so I won't go through all of that.


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[Assistant] And instead, we're gonna focus on the two famous articles that wound up making the Constitution of 1917 so radical, and then dwell on one very contentious point that would have a major impact on post-revolutionary power consolidation in the 1920s.


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[Assistant] So first of all, we have Article 27. That again is Article 27, which dealt with the all-important question of land.


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[Assistant] Article 27 asserted, among other things, that state and federal governments could confiscate and distribute land as they saw fit if they deemed it to be in the national interest. This first clause was rooted in a bit of ex post facto CYA.


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[Assistant] Carranza and the gang had confiscated a lot of property during the revolution and they were still holding it. They wanted a firm constitutional basis to legitimize those confiscations.


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[Assistant] Article 27 then went on to say though that the government could seize land in the future if it was just sitting idle and unused. This was meant to spark development because it established a kind of use it or lose it doctrine.


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[Assistant] But Article 27 then went even further and went on to entrench the philosophy of economic nationalism. It stated that oil, mineral, and other subsurface resources were owned by the nation and could only be extracted with permission and due concessions from the government.


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[Assistant] So though you could profit from the extraction, you could never own the resources that you were extracting. And then we go even further down that road because Article 27 said that those concessions could only be granted to Mexican citizens, not foreigners. And in fact, Article 27 established that foreign ownership of land in Mexico was now forbidden.


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[Assistant] All foreign titles to land would now be converted to mere leases.


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[Assistant] So Article 27 was a sweeping declaration of the state's control over the land and resources of the nation.


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[Assistant] The other famously radical part of the Constitution is Article 123. That again, Article 123. And this one dealt with labor.


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[Assistant] Article 123 required states and the federal government to pass laws guaranteeing worker rights.


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[Assistant] It stipulated that those laws must include minimum wages, maximum hours, regulations on the labor of women and children, guarantees for the safety of mines and factories, the abolition of debt peonage, wages must be paid in cash, not company script, and finally, the right to strike.


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[Assistant] This was the first time anything resembling labor demands had ever been incorporated into a political constitution.


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[Assistant] But the key thing to keep in mind is that Article 123 did not guarantee those things. It only said that the government needed to pass laws to guarantee them.


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[Assistant] And if the government didn't pass those laws, well, good luck on insisting what it says on a piece of paper. This is uh, cease quoting laws to those of us with machine guns.


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[Assistant] Now the funny thing is that both Article 23 and Article 123, the two most famous parts of the Mexican Constitution of 1917, both passed late at night after almost no debate in late January. The deadline was approaching to finish the draft, the clock was running out, and the delegates were just kind of saying yes to whatever came along.


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[Assistant] But there was another aspect of the Constitution that was also pretty radical, but which did stir heated debate. And that was the status of the Catholic Church.


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[Assistant] From Carranza on down, the constitutionalists as a rule were pretty anti-clerical.


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[Assistant] They were coming from a long tradition of Spanish liberalism that saw the church as a pillar of the conservative order, breeding superstition and ignorance while monopolizing land and property.


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[Assistant] That old anti-clerical liberalism now combined with nationalist impulses that naturally saw the international Catholic Church as an obstacle to the Mexicans pursuing their own national self-interest unimpeded.


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[Assistant] So, scattered across half a dozen articles in the Constitution of 1917 were clauses severely limiting the power, prestige, and wealth of the Church.


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[Assistant] So for example, the constitution stipulated that education would be universal and mandatory, but it would also be secular. No religious organization could run a primary or secondary school, so the church was just out of the education business.


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[Assistant] Furthermore, any ordained priest had to be born in Mexico and they would only be allowed to minister if they accepted restricted political rights. They would not enjoy freedom of speech or assembly and they could not vote.


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[Assistant] All of these clauses were hotly debated. On the one side, you had strong anti-clerical liberals, and on the other, not so much conservative Catholics, there weren't any of them around, but moderates, who thought that these clauses would upset the social order too much and invite counterrevolution.


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[Assistant] But the anti-clericals won out, and so the Constitution of 1917 emerged very anti-Catholic. This wasn't just the separation of church and state, this was the political and legal obliteration of the church.


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[Assistant] The new Mexican Constitution, and still the Mexican Constitution, I should add, was ratified and signed on February the 5th, 1917.


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[Assistant] It was, thanks to Article 27 and Article 123, the most radical political constitution existing in the world at that moment, though it would shortly lose that distinction first to the Bolshevik Constitution of 1918 and then the Weimar Constitution of 1919.


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[Assistant] The Mexican constitution was the first of a new breed of constitutions.


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[Assistant] Ever since written constitutions had become a thing back in the age of the democratic revolutions, they had always focused strictly on the legal and political organization of the nation. The balance of power within the state, the relationship of the state and the individual, the actual mechanisms of passing, enforcing, and reviewing laws.


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[Assistant] But now for the first time you have social rights and obligations and collective economic nationalism asserted alongside the rules of just how a bill becomes a law.


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[Assistant] But though the Constitution of 1917 would be quickly denounced as rad and socialist and, in short order, Bolshevik, it never really was in practice.


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[Assistant] For one thing, most of the language required the government to take additional lawmaking action, and Carranza and his successors were happy to pick and choose what they would prioritize.


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[Assistant] But even in its basic organizing philosophy, the Constitution was not about social revolution, so much as social cohesion.


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[Assistant] Having emerged from the shadows of a generation-long dictatorship, and then six years of revolution, at the heart of the Constitution of 1917 was an attempt to put the government in the middle of mediating and resolving conflict between various interests so that the chaos could be put in the past and replaced with a cohesive social order.


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[Assistant] So including worker rights and a new philosophy on how to deal with land, property, and resources was about ensuring that those who had been so frustrated that they had been driven into rebellion and revolution would now find constitutional recognition of their grievances.


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[Assistant] The Constitution was promulgated in February 1917, and elections were held in March for a new national government.


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[Assistant] Like the delegate elections to the constituent congress, these elections generated low turnout and little enthusiasm. It went without saying that Carranza was elected president, finally achieving the dream he had been striving for since February of 1913.


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[Assistant] He was no longer operating under some vague first chief title. He was now president of Mexico, elected to a four-year term that would expire in 1920.


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[Assistant] The only man who could have plausibly challenged Carranza was Obregon, who astutely declined to run.


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[Assistant] Obregón wanted to be president. He planned on being president. But four years isn't that long. So why have a confrontation with Carranza now, when you can just wait a little bit and re-election finally forces the old man to go away?


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[Assistant] So in the spring of 1917, President-elect Carranza, though now operating under a constitutional mandate, was still in a precarious position, and his regime could still be toppled at any moment.


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[Assistant] And I want to wrap up today not with Carranza's myriad domestic woes, we'll talk about those next week, but with an international crisis that put Carranza in a very tight spot.


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[Assistant] The Americans were still, as we know, not very happy with Carranza because he refused to show them his belly when they had demanded the right to invade Mexico whenever they wanted.


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[Assistant] General Pershing and his punitive expedition continue to sit up in Chihuahua.


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[Assistant] It became increasingly clear that Carranza was never going to give in, and increasingly likely that the United States was headed into World War I. So President Wilson ordered Pershing to withdraw once and for all, and on February the 7th, 1917, the U.S. Army pulled back across the border into the United States. The punitive expedition had been a complete failure.


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[Assistant] It had succeeded in neither its stated objective of capturing Pancho Villa, nor its unstated objective of exerting more dominance over Mexico. And so US history books would just prefer you didn't know about it.


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[Assistant] The withdrawal of the Americans was a political victory for Carranza to be sure, but he was still embargoed by the Americans. They not only continued to cut off his access to weapons, but now added additional economic blockades as like punishment for standing up to them.


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[Assistant] So, his relationship with the largest and most dominant power in the Americas was pretty bad. And that is not good.


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[Assistant] It was thanks to this breakdown in relations between Mexico and the United States that the Germans spied an opportunity.


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[Assistant] Increasingly frustrated about the debilitating stalemate in Europe, hardliners in the German High Command were recommending the return of unrestricted submarine warfare in the Atlantic to destroy the Allies' ability to resupply from the Americas, particularly the United States.


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[Assistant] Critics of the plan said that's going to immediately bring the United States into the war.


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[Assistant] In one of those fun moments where all history connects to all other history, the fate of the punitive expedition actually played a small role in German calculation. Because the hardliners were now able to make the argument that even if the Americans do join the war, so what, they're a paper tiger. Look, they can't even control their own border or hunt down a few dirty bandits.


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[Assistant] Now this is not to say that Pancho Villa was directly responsible for German strategy in the latter days of World War I, but in his own small way he was indirectly responsible.


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[Assistant] So the plan to restart unrestricted submarine warfare was approved, and along with that decision came the now infamous Zimmerman Telegram.


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[Assistant] Well, infamous if you're an American high school student studying American history because the Zimmerman Telegram is one of those phrases you have to memorize to correctly answer the question, why did the United States enter World War I? The answers, of course, being the Lusitania, unrestricted submarine warfare, and the Zimmerman Telegram.


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[Assistant] Not that anyone knows what the Zimmerman Telegram actually is, you just need to memorize it and put it on the test.


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[Assistant] The Zimmermann Telegram was a cable from Arthur Zimmermann, an official in the German Foreign Office, to the German ambassador in Mexico, and it was dated January 17, 1917.


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[Assistant] If Carranza did so, he was promised a generous supply of money and guns, and then, when the Central Powers won the war, Mexico's reward would be their lost territories of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.


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[Assistant] So this was a promise to help Mexico avenge the humiliating invasion and dismemberment of their country back in 1848.


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[Assistant] So the German ambassador relayed this message to Carranza, who then ordered a little committee to study the question.


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[Assistant] This committee came back and said, yes, this is insane and we should absolutely not do it.


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[Assistant] They outline three scenarios, all of them disastrous. First, if we declare war on the United States, the United States is just gonna give Pancho Villa an unlimited supply of guns and industrial war material. Can we withstand Pancho Villa with an unlimited supply of guns and industrial war material? Who knows, but we do not want to find out.


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[Assistant] And third, if by some miracle the central powers win and we survive and we get Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, what are we gonna do?


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[Assistant] Occupy them? Occupy Texas? How the hell are we gonna do that?


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[Assistant] And just a note, if anybody's listening out there and working for a foreign power who's thinking about invading and occupying the United States, good luck occupying Texas.


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[Assistant] So the unanimous conclusion of this committee was the German proposal was crazy, and Caranta agreed. Which was smart.


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[Assistant] Especially because the Zimmermann Telegram had been intercepted by British intelligence and shown to the Americans. It sparked immediate outrage, and combined with the February 1st, 1917 declaration by the Germans reinstating unrestricted submarine warfare, the United States entered World War I on the side of the Allies.


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[Assistant] Oh, also because of the Lusitania, even though that was back in 1914, but you still gotta put it on the test.


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[Assistant] Carranza was then able to parlay his own desire to stay neutral in the war into a promise of recognition and normalized relations with the United States. So, he was put in a very tight spot, and he played it very well.


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[Assistant] If the United States was still not thrilled with him personally, and after World War I was over, they would go looking for viable alternatives.


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[Assistant] And next week we will continue the seemingly endless rounds of domestic rebellion and foreign meddling.


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[Assistant] Carranza's inauguration also coincided with the retirement, or at least alleged retirement, of his most important, if not exactly most faithful general, Obregón.


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[Assistant] Obregón and Carranza had been through a lot together, and their fortunes were tied to one another. And Obregón had been smart enough to not try to run against Carranza for president now.


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[Assistant] But when he resigned as Minister of War in May of 1917 to go home and be a chickpea farmer, which he said was all he had ever wanted to be, he was transparently setting himself up to be called from his pastoral retirement like Cincinnati or George Washington.


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[Assistant] And though this pastoral retirement was calculated, I do think that Obregon truly hoped that he would never have to pick up a gun again.


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[Assistant] Uhm, sure, I'll say this, uh, not proud of it, no, I'm joking.


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[Assistant] They'll look at this and they'll be like, alright, she's not wrong.


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[Assistant] How do we start? Uh, well, it's a really cool show, uh, super action packed, animation is chef's kiss, and it's just sort of a, uh,


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[Assistant] A checkpoint where people who maybe haven't watched the other seasons, it's a way for them to join in on the fun with uh, Red vs. Blue.


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[Assistant] I remember in the beginning, they were trying to do it at home.


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[Assistant] So I had, so I had to get my closet set up.


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[Assistant] For the inevitable recording sessions, that was something. But then they were like, okay, no, we can go back to the studio. I'm like, thank God.


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[Assistant] But, so like, if, if you could make a character.


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[Assistant] And I, I'm like, oh man, I'm going to be like one of the cool, cool characters. You know, I'm the pro tag, right?


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[Assistant] I'm the cool- and then I see FaZe and I'm like, oh no I'm not!


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[Assistant] Yeaah. Yeaah, it is. I mean, yeaah. It's good. I like it.


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[Assistant] Yeah, it's, just imagine what the show was in the beginning. It was just a bunch of friends, you know. Can I curse?


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[Assistant] But I also know that like, that word is not-