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In
the Line of Fire
El Paso and the Battle of Juarezby
Mike Cox | |
On
June 29, during a gun battle in Juarez, Mexico, seven stray AK 47 rifle rounds
flew across the Rio Grande and hit city hall in downtown El
Paso.
No one got hurt – at least on the Texas
side of the river – but violence in another country had spilled over into the
United States. While Juarez has been in turmoil for several years as rival drug
cartels fight for control of the lucrative drug smuggling business in their part
of the world, the incident earlier this summer marked the first time during the
21st century Mexican narco wars that gunfire has reached El
Paso from its struggling sister city.
Nearly a hundred years have
gone by since the last time it happened.
When Oscar Branch Colquitt ran
for governor in 1910, he told Texans he believed the Rangers—already much smaller
in size than their reputation—had outlived their usefulness. He thought local
officers could handle law enforcement in the state. But when growing unrest south
of the border erupted into violence in the fall of 1910, Colquitt realized he
had been wrong about the Rangers.
Long-time Mexican President Porfirio
Diaz allowed a presidential election because it looked democratic, but the eighty-year-old
dictator had no intention of leaving office. However, when reform-minded opponent
Francisco I. Madero, the intellectual son of a wealthy landowner, seemed to be
making inroads on the incumbent, the candidate found himself in prison. Bailed
out by his family, Madero on October 5, 1910 left San Luis Potosi for Texas,
where he began fomenting revolution. From San
Antonio, he soon issued a proclamation urging the Mexican people to remove
Diaz from power.
The crack of rifle fire shattered an uneasy calm on December
15, when insurrectos loyal to Madero engaged Diaz soldiers four miles upriver
from Ojinaga, the Mexican town opposite Presidio.
Down
river, Eagle Pass
newspaper editor Joseph O. Boehmer reprinted a clipping from a New York newspaper.
According to “a well known citizen who has lately returned from the western borders
of Texas,” Eagle
Pass lay at the center of the revolution. Texans, however, could rest easy
as long as the Rangers rode the river:
“That portion of Texas
bordering on the Rio Grande . . . is being guarded from the invasion of the Mexican
revolutionists by the grandest, bravest body of horsemen ever assembled under
the stars and stripes or flag of any country, viz: the Texas rangers. They are
in a measure similar to the Pennsylvania constabulary or the mounted police of
Canada, all young, alert, brawny, keen-eyed Texans and frontiersmen, quick on
the trigger, can shoot from the hip, swing the lasso and are unequaled horsemen,
superior in fact to the Cossacks of Russia.”
Calling the story “the most
magnificent lie about Eagle
Pass it has ever been our pleasure to read,” Boehmer continued:
“Naturally
we would like to see one of those magnificent Texas rangers. We have lived here
some twenty years and nary a dad-burned Texas ranger have we seen in Eagle
Pass yet.”
Texas did not have many rangers
in those days, but most of them were stationed along the border, where by 1911
the violence had intensified. By March 2 that year, rebel fighters held Mexican
federal forces under siege in Ojinaga. U.S. troops marched from Marfa to the border
to make sure the fighting did not spread into Texas.
At
Juarez, rebels attacked at 10:30 a.m. on May 8. Errant bullets whizzing across
the Rio Grande into El Paso
killed five U.S. citizens and wounded 15.
“We are all…watching the fight
at Juarez,” Ranger Capt. John R. Hughes said in a telegram to the state adjutant
general in Austin. “Wish you and all
the force could be here to enjoy the Fun.”
Meanwhile, local retailers did
a brisk business selling field glasses with many El Pasoans cheerfully paying
a dollar for access to rooftops affording a view across the Rio Grande. “Stay
away from the danger zone,” the A.D. Foster Co. advertised in the city’s two newspapers,
“but See Everything Across the River Today” by taking advantage of low prices
on “field glasses…of the finest foreign make.”
Under the watchful eyes
of Hughes and thousands of other El Pasoans, the Battle of Juarez ended two days
later with Madero’s soldiers in control. The revolutionaries had killed as many
as a hundred federal troops while losing only 15 of their own in taking the city,
which Madero quickly proclaimed Mexico’s provisional capital.
As Madero
struggled to return Juarez to some sense of normalcy, in El
Paso the Hotel Taxi Cab and Auto Co. offered round-trip tours of the battle-scarred
city across the river starting at 50 cents a head.
On May 25, faced with
similar defeats elsewhere in his country, Diaz resigned and fled to Europe with
his former vice president. In November 1911, a year after starting the revolution,
Madero became the republic’s new president. El
Paso and the border felt more at ease, but the revolution soon flared again
and continued for nearly a decade.
Some of El
Paso’s older buildings still bear bullet pockmarks from that long-ago revolution.
And now the border city is in the line of fire again.
© Mike Cox
"Texas Tales"
July
22 ,
2010 column |
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