Mexican Revolution so short a time would not occur with volunteers, and the army resorted to the "leva", forced conscription. The revolutionary forces had no problem with voluntary recruitment. Most Mexican men avoided government conscription at all cost and the ones dragooned into the forces were sent to areas far away from home and were reluctant to fight. Conscripts deserted, mutinied, and attacked and murdered their officers. In April 1914, U.S. opposition to Huerta culminated in the seizure and occupation of the port of Veracruz by U.S. marines and sailors. Initially intended, in part, to prevent a German merchant vessel from delivering
German interest in the Caribbean President Theodore Roosevelt forced the Germans to back down by sending his own fleet and threatening war if the Germans landed. By 1904 German naval strategists had turned their attention to Mexico where they hoped to establish a naval base in a Mexican port on the Caribbean. They dropped that plan. In 1917 they proposed a military alliance in a war against the United States in the Zimmermann Telegram, which accelerated American entry into World War I. German interest in the Caribbean German interest in the Caribbean was a series of unsuccessful proposals made by the Imperial German Navy (Kaiserliche