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Huerta: A Political Portrait
The story of Victoriano Huerta and his role in the Mexican Revolution and his presidency.
- GenresNonfiction
272 pages, Hardcover
First published March 1, 1972
3 people want to read
About the author
Michael C. Meyer
19 books1 followerA specialist in the history of Mexico, Michael Carl Meyer, was Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Arizona, where he taught from 1973 until his retirement in 1996. He earned his Ph.D. in 1963 from the University of New Mexico, and taught at the University of Nebraska, from 1963 until he took up his post at the University of Arizona.
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November 18, 2025
Victoriano Huerta possessed an exceptional military career and was an extraordinarily intelligent man, a disciplined soldier who rose through sheer ability in the Porfirian army. From the very beginning of the Madero presidency, he was systematically undermined. Francisco Madero, resentful that his own peace negotiations with Emiliano Zapata had collapsed, falsely blamed Huerta and slandered him at every turn. Madero baselessly accused Huerta of plotting rebellion with Bernardo Reyes, forced him into retirement, then recalled him only when Pascual Orozco began winning in the north. Even then, Madero remained cold, suspicious, and constantly undercut his best general.
During the Decena Trágica (the Ten Tragic Days) of February 1913, Huerta repeatedly ordered his troops to protect civilians and minimize destruction in Mexico City. The assassination of Madero and Pino Suárez afterward carries only slight circumstantial evidence against Huerta personally; no direct order has ever been proven.
Huerta was a devoted family man, frugal to a fault. He refused to move into Chapultepec Palace, preferring a modest private home. He never used the presidency to enrich himself or his relatives and left office without taking a single peso from the treasury.
Physically tough, he once had eye surgery performed without anesthesia. He enjoyed brandy but was never the helpless drunkard of revolutionary propaganda; no contemporary account shows him impaired while making decisions, and the “marijuana addict” charge is pure fiction.
The Huerta regime, fighting a multi-front civil war, was responsible for at most 35–100 extrajudicial executions (documentation points to the lower figure), an astonishingly small number compared to the tens of thousands murdered under later “virtuous” revolutionary governments, especially the Calles regime, which killed over 70,000 yet is still praised in official Mexican history.
Congress was deliberately infiltrated by Carranza’s agents, who blocked every initiative. When liberals refused to confirm the eminently qualified Catholic educator Eduardo Tamariz as Minister of Education solely because of his religion, and insulted Huerta personally in session after session, he dissolved the Chamber, an action forced by obstruction, not mere authoritarian whim.
Despite the war, Huerta held elections in October 1913 and won them. Critics who screamed about “no elections in wartime” were the same Carrancistas who refused to accept any result that did not give them total power.
Far from being a counter-revolutionary, Huerta allocated a higher percentage of the budget to social expenditures than either Madero or Carranza. His administration was the only one between 1910 and 1922 to devote more than 10% of the annual budget to social programs. Madero, despite all his anti-Díaz rhetoric, spent only 7.8% on education (barely more than Díaz’s 7.2%) and never touched the hated científico school model. Huerta’s first budget projected 9.9% for education alone, raised teacher salaries 25% (a raise the revolutionaries cut back the moment he was gone), and introduced sweeping reforms through ministers Vera Estañol and García Naranjo that official history has deliberately buried.
Huerta created the first government agency dedicated to protecting indigenous arts (Instituto Etnográfico), appointed full-blooded Indian Aureliano Urrutia as Minister of the Interior, sent teams to organize community projects in native villages, distributed free corn seed, restored seized Yaqui and Mayo lands, created a Ministry of Agriculture (which Carranza immediately abolished), doubled funds for the Caja de Préstamos, and attempted land-tax reforms to break up haciendas, reforms blocked by the same “liberal” deputies who claimed to favor agrarian change.
On labor, Huerta expanded the Labor Department, threatened factory closures for violations, mediated in favor of unions, supported strikes, and created a special employment agency for the unemployed.
The Constitutionalists waged total scorched-earth war: they tore up railways, burned crops, “requisitioned” (stole) cattle to sell in the United States, starved the population, and sent the peso crashing from 49¢ to 29¢ in a year. Their supporters in Congress blocked foreign loans that could have kept the government functioning. In battle after battle they shelled cities indiscriminately, massacred prisoners, and committed widespread rape.
Huerta issued repeated amnesties and sent peace delegations; every delegation was arrested on sight. When the United States invaded Veracruz in 1914, flagrantly violating the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the Constitutionalists refused to set aside differences to defend the national soil, proving they cared more about power than country. They exploited the diversion of federal troops to seize Zacatecas and other key points.
Seeing no other path to peace, Huerta resigned on 8 July 1914, declaring that he had promised to restore peace “cost what it may,” and the cost had become his own head. He left office poorer than when he entered.
The moment he was gone, the Constitutionalists began slaughtering one another exactly as he had predicted. In exile he was hounded by the U.S. government, imprisoned under brutal conditions, denied reasonable bail, and watched his wife and children mistreated. His close ally Pascual Orozco was assassinated by U.S. agents. Broken in health and spirit, Huerta died a Catholic in 1916, buried beside his friend Orozco.
As for the harsher measures—forced conscription, the heavy militarization of the country—place yourself in Mexico in 1913: a nation collapsing into anarchy, its cities burning, its people starving, its railways torn up, its women and children at the mercy of roaming bands whose only creed was rape, murder, and scorched earth. What would you have done? We have no right to judge a man of that brutal age by the comforts of 2025. Huerta did what he believed was necessary to hold a bleeding country together against enemies who rejected compromise, elections, and even the defense of their own soil when the Americans landed at Veracruz.
Even if he bore responsibility for Madero’s death (and the evidence remains thin and circumstantial), Madero himself had come to power by overthrowing a legally elected government. Huerta, by contrast, ascended strictly within the constitutional forms of the day. Show me one celebrated revolutionary hero—Carranza, Villa, Zapata, Obregón, Calles—who does not have rivers of innocent blood on his hands. By any honest accounting, they were monsters. Huerta stands virtually alone among them in repeatedly placing Mexico’s survival above personal ambition.
In the end he resigned not from cowardice or defeatism, but from the terrible clarity that only his own removal might spare the nation further carnage. History, penned by the victors and their apologists, has smeared him as a drunken, barbaric fiend and buried him under a mountain of lies. It is heartbreaking to see a man who genuinely did so much for his people—often more than the so-called revolutionaries ever managed—dragged through the mud century after century. I hope this reassessment, however small, brings at least some measure of justice to his memory and a little comfort to his family, who have carried the weight of that slander for generations.
This book tears away the filth and reveals the truth: Victoriano Huerta was a hard, principled patriot who held the line until the only way to save his country from the evil that had consumed it was to lay down power himself.
During the Decena Trágica (the Ten Tragic Days) of February 1913, Huerta repeatedly ordered his troops to protect civilians and minimize destruction in Mexico City. The assassination of Madero and Pino Suárez afterward carries only slight circumstantial evidence against Huerta personally; no direct order has ever been proven.
Huerta was a devoted family man, frugal to a fault. He refused to move into Chapultepec Palace, preferring a modest private home. He never used the presidency to enrich himself or his relatives and left office without taking a single peso from the treasury.
Physically tough, he once had eye surgery performed without anesthesia. He enjoyed brandy but was never the helpless drunkard of revolutionary propaganda; no contemporary account shows him impaired while making decisions, and the “marijuana addict” charge is pure fiction.
The Huerta regime, fighting a multi-front civil war, was responsible for at most 35–100 extrajudicial executions (documentation points to the lower figure), an astonishingly small number compared to the tens of thousands murdered under later “virtuous” revolutionary governments, especially the Calles regime, which killed over 70,000 yet is still praised in official Mexican history.
Congress was deliberately infiltrated by Carranza’s agents, who blocked every initiative. When liberals refused to confirm the eminently qualified Catholic educator Eduardo Tamariz as Minister of Education solely because of his religion, and insulted Huerta personally in session after session, he dissolved the Chamber, an action forced by obstruction, not mere authoritarian whim.
Despite the war, Huerta held elections in October 1913 and won them. Critics who screamed about “no elections in wartime” were the same Carrancistas who refused to accept any result that did not give them total power.
Far from being a counter-revolutionary, Huerta allocated a higher percentage of the budget to social expenditures than either Madero or Carranza. His administration was the only one between 1910 and 1922 to devote more than 10% of the annual budget to social programs. Madero, despite all his anti-Díaz rhetoric, spent only 7.8% on education (barely more than Díaz’s 7.2%) and never touched the hated científico school model. Huerta’s first budget projected 9.9% for education alone, raised teacher salaries 25% (a raise the revolutionaries cut back the moment he was gone), and introduced sweeping reforms through ministers Vera Estañol and García Naranjo that official history has deliberately buried.
Huerta created the first government agency dedicated to protecting indigenous arts (Instituto Etnográfico), appointed full-blooded Indian Aureliano Urrutia as Minister of the Interior, sent teams to organize community projects in native villages, distributed free corn seed, restored seized Yaqui and Mayo lands, created a Ministry of Agriculture (which Carranza immediately abolished), doubled funds for the Caja de Préstamos, and attempted land-tax reforms to break up haciendas, reforms blocked by the same “liberal” deputies who claimed to favor agrarian change.
On labor, Huerta expanded the Labor Department, threatened factory closures for violations, mediated in favor of unions, supported strikes, and created a special employment agency for the unemployed.
The Constitutionalists waged total scorched-earth war: they tore up railways, burned crops, “requisitioned” (stole) cattle to sell in the United States, starved the population, and sent the peso crashing from 49¢ to 29¢ in a year. Their supporters in Congress blocked foreign loans that could have kept the government functioning. In battle after battle they shelled cities indiscriminately, massacred prisoners, and committed widespread rape.
Huerta issued repeated amnesties and sent peace delegations; every delegation was arrested on sight. When the United States invaded Veracruz in 1914, flagrantly violating the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the Constitutionalists refused to set aside differences to defend the national soil, proving they cared more about power than country. They exploited the diversion of federal troops to seize Zacatecas and other key points.
Seeing no other path to peace, Huerta resigned on 8 July 1914, declaring that he had promised to restore peace “cost what it may,” and the cost had become his own head. He left office poorer than when he entered.
The moment he was gone, the Constitutionalists began slaughtering one another exactly as he had predicted. In exile he was hounded by the U.S. government, imprisoned under brutal conditions, denied reasonable bail, and watched his wife and children mistreated. His close ally Pascual Orozco was assassinated by U.S. agents. Broken in health and spirit, Huerta died a Catholic in 1916, buried beside his friend Orozco.
As for the harsher measures—forced conscription, the heavy militarization of the country—place yourself in Mexico in 1913: a nation collapsing into anarchy, its cities burning, its people starving, its railways torn up, its women and children at the mercy of roaming bands whose only creed was rape, murder, and scorched earth. What would you have done? We have no right to judge a man of that brutal age by the comforts of 2025. Huerta did what he believed was necessary to hold a bleeding country together against enemies who rejected compromise, elections, and even the defense of their own soil when the Americans landed at Veracruz.
Even if he bore responsibility for Madero’s death (and the evidence remains thin and circumstantial), Madero himself had come to power by overthrowing a legally elected government. Huerta, by contrast, ascended strictly within the constitutional forms of the day. Show me one celebrated revolutionary hero—Carranza, Villa, Zapata, Obregón, Calles—who does not have rivers of innocent blood on his hands. By any honest accounting, they were monsters. Huerta stands virtually alone among them in repeatedly placing Mexico’s survival above personal ambition.
In the end he resigned not from cowardice or defeatism, but from the terrible clarity that only his own removal might spare the nation further carnage. History, penned by the victors and their apologists, has smeared him as a drunken, barbaric fiend and buried him under a mountain of lies. It is heartbreaking to see a man who genuinely did so much for his people—often more than the so-called revolutionaries ever managed—dragged through the mud century after century. I hope this reassessment, however small, brings at least some measure of justice to his memory and a little comfort to his family, who have carried the weight of that slander for generations.
This book tears away the filth and reveals the truth: Victoriano Huerta was a hard, principled patriot who held the line until the only way to save his country from the evil that had consumed it was to lay down power himself.
February 25, 2016
Victorino Huerta was a prominent figure in the Mexican Revolution 1910-1920. This is an excellent biography of the man. Good for the fan of general history, and a must read for anyone interested in the Mexican Revolution.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews