Mexican Revolution

The Mexican Revolution was a prolonged and multi-sided armed conflict fought from 1910 to roughly 1920, beginning as a rebellion against the long dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz and evolving into a complex civil war among rival revolutionary factions that fundamentally reshaped Mexican society and government. Francisco Madero's initial call to arms toppled Diaz in 1911, but Madero's own assassination in a 1913 coup by Victoriano Huerta plunged the country into a wider war among constitutionalist forces under Venustiano Carranza, and popular revolutionary armies led by Emiliano Zapata in the south and Pancho Villa in the north, each pursuing distinct visions of land reform and social change. Years of shifting alliances and brutal fighting, including Villa's 1916 raid into Columbus, New Mexico, that provoked a U.S. punitive expedition, eventually consolidated power under Carranza and the 1917 Constitution, though political violence, including the assassinations of Zapata in 1919 and Carranza himself in 1920, continued for years afterward. The revolution killed an estimated one to two million people and produced the political framework, land reform principles and one-party system that would govern Mexico for most of the twentieth century.