The Secret War in El Paso: Mexican Revolutionary Intrigue, 1906-1920 by Charles H. Harris & Louis R. Sadler

Author:Charles H. Harris & Louis R. Sadler [Harris, Charles H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Published: 2016-05-20T06:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 14

Villa, Columbus, Spies

Advertising the Carranza government’s control of Chihuahua, Mexican consul Andrés García hosted a banquet on January 7 in the private dining room of the Paso del Norte Hotel for General Jacinto Treviño, Carranza’s commander in Chihuahua. Besides Treviño’s staff and the staff of the consulate, among the many attendees were General Gabriel Gavira, commander of the Juárez garrison, and C. S. T. Folsom, El Paso attorney for the Carranza regime.1 On January 10, General Eulalio Contreras, Villa’s commander in Palomas, surrendered with his four hundred troops to the Carranza government.2

The U.S. authorities continued to investigate the failed new movement and at the same time prepared to try General Huerta and his associates for neutrality violations. The Bureau intensified its efforts to locate key witnesses. Emil Holmdahl obligingly assisted in this endeavor, using his association with his codefendant José Orozco, who was currently in the county jail, to do so.3 With the appeal of his neutrality conviction pending, Holmdahl was eager to earn merit with the authorities. His other codefendant, Victor Ochoa, was also eager to help, although the Bureau took a rather jaundiced view of him, Agent Frederick Guy commenting that “Ochoa is occasionally correct in his statements.”4

The government’s case was presented to the federal grand jury on January 6, but it was an open question whether Huerta would be in attendance at his forthcoming trial.5 His physical condition was rapidly deteriorating. On November 5 he had been transferred for humanitarian reasons from detention in Fort Bliss back to his home in El Paso. An operation on January 1, 1916, to drain fluid from his abdomen brought little relief.6 The procedure was repeated on January 3 but produced no improvement, nor did a repetition on January 7. Huerta seemed to improve slightly three days later, but he took a turn for the worse and died at his home at 8:35 p.m. on January 13, 1916. He was buried next to Pascual Orozco in an unpretentious grave in Concordia Cemetery. Huerta’s secretary, General José Alessio Robles, issued a statement condemning the U.S. government for its treatment of Huerta and charging it with responsibility for his death.7

Unlike the outpouring of sympathy that accompanied Orozco’s funeral, there was no great public manifestation when Huerta died, for his death was overshadowed by the aftermath of the Santa Isabel massacre. On January 8, 1916, eighteen American mining personnel, several of them well known in El Paso, were traveling by train to reopen a mine in Cusihuiriachic, west of the city of Chihuahua. The Carranza government had assured them that it controlled the area and that it was safe for them to travel. Shortly after the train passed through the way station of Santa Isabel, some forty miles west of Chihuahua, a band of villistas stopped it, forced the Americans to get off, and gleefully shot them down. Only one lived to tell the tale.8 The massacre caused a sensation in El Paso, and it significantly increased the tension between Anglos and Hispanics that had grown during the revolution.

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