Victoriano Huerta

Victoriano Huerta was born in Colotlán, Jalisco on December 22, 1850.  He always identified himself as indigenous and he learned to write and read at a young age. In 1869, General Donato Guerra recruited Huerta to be his personal secretary and in 1872, with the help from both Guerra and Benito Juarez, Huerta enrolled in the Mexican National Military Academy. After his graduation in 1877, he met his future wife, Emilia Águila Moya, while working at Corps of Engineers. He married Emilia in 1880 and only had 11 children.  During Diaz’s reign as president, Victoriano rose the ranks in the military and became general and fought for Porfirio Diaz. But after Diaz’s exile, Huerta changed his allegiance to Francisco Madero and fought against all of the anti-Madero groups. Victoriano Huerta saw that Madero was basically doing nothing and he thought “Hey I can be president”, so with the help of Henry Lane Wilson, Huerta decided to trick Madero into a meeting, where he killed both Madero and vice-president, José María Pino Suárez.  After the death of Madero, it was the beginning of La decena trágica, tragic ten days, which caused a lot of riot and chaos in Mexico. In this time, Victoriano Huerta became president of Mexico. He does change some things, such as raising teacher’s salary. But there was a problem in Mexico, Zapata’s plan of distributing land was ignored by Huerta. Also there were still many people angry at Huerta because of his betrayal to Francisco Madero.  So many people from the north and the south were fighting with Huerta, but the thing was that Huerta was losing a lot of man power. So Victoriano decided to do something called “LEVA”, which was getting people off the street, dressing them into uniform, and forcing them to battle against both the north and the south. But Victoriano’s army went against him because they really did not want to fight in the war. 

President Woodrow Wilson was angry at Henry Lane Wilson for giving money to a dictator, which at the time was, of course, Victoriano Huerta. But not only was Wilson angry at Henry for giving Huerta money, but also he was angry at the Germans, who at the time were enemies of the United States, because they too supplied Huerta with money.