Pascual Orozco was a tough revolutionary warlord. He seems to have favored the powerful Winchester Model 1895, which was chambered for rifle rounds like the .30-40 Krag and the mighty .30-06.
On August 30, 1915, — a long and bloody century ago — a posse including 13 Texas Rangers caught former revolutionary warlord Pascual Orozco and four compañeros in the Texas badlands near the Rio Grande and gunned them down.
Ostensibly, Orozco had raided a ranch and stole horses. Such incidents were not uncommon on the turbulent border during the Mexican Revolution — but that’s not really what was going on. The perennial rebel Orozco was headed into Mexico to get back into the fray.
Pascual Orozco is one of the more colorful and enigmatic figures among the wild cast of characters that played the game of thrones in Mexico 1910-1920. When Francisco Madero somewhat tentatively led a revolution to overthrow the dictator Porfirio Diaz, Orozco — a mule skinner, mining investor and freighter — quickly became a major force to be reckoned with. He raised and equipped a paramilitary force. Along with Pancho Villa, he would provide the force behind the ideals of the Madero revolution.
Indeed, the 1910 Revolution would have fizzled out if left up to the intellectual, mystical and rather passive Madero. It was the tough guys who took the initiative and made a war of it.
Against Madero’s wishes, Orozco and Villa launched an assault on Ciudad Juarez in 1911. Their defeat of the Federal garrison in Juarez, led directly to the elderly Porfirio throwing in the towel and sailing off to exile in Spain. Madero assumed the presidency, put there in no small part by Pascual Orozco.
Orozco and Pancho Villa were allies in the initial Revolution of 1910, then became deadly enemies in Orozco’s 1912 rebellion and the cataclysmic 1913 Revolution.
Madero proved an ineffectual president and he failed to deliver on many of his promises. Orozco neither respected nor liked Madero and saw him as little improvement over Diaz. He rebelled against the Madero government in 1912. Madero deployed General Victoriano Huerta to suppress the rebellion and Pancho Villa rode as an irregular against Orozco’s forces, known as Colorados for their blood red flag.
Villa had a sentimental attachment to Madero and grew to hate Orozco’s guts for rebelling against the little presidente. Orozco was defeated and fled into exile in Los Angeles. Ironically, Villa, too, was forced into exile after he ran afoul of Huerta and was imprisoned and escaped.
Huerta, who was a bastard of the first water, engineered a coup in 1913 and murdered Madero and his brother Gustavo and became defacto dictator of Mexico. Villa crossed the Rio Grande to take him on and the game was on again.
Orozco came back to Mexico — and allied himself with Huerta.
Confused? Yeah, well, ain’t we all. In the bloody welter of the Mexican Revolution, allies became enemies and enemies became allies as a rogues gallery of warlords maneuvered politically and battled savagely for power. It’s difficult to discern what Orozco really believed in and what he was trying to accomplish.
Orozco’s actions and motives are hard to understand. He comes across as an opportunist.
His Colorados served as a savage paramilitary adjunct of Huerta’s army, and they were much more effective than the Federal troops, mostly comprised of demoralized conscripts far from home. The Colorados were tough foes of Villa’s troops in Chihuahua, and the fighting between them was of the take-no-prisoners variety. Well, actually — the take-prisoners-then-put-them-up-against-a-wall-and-shoot-’em variety.
When Huerta fell in 1914, Orozco was forced into exile in the U.S. again.
Huerta and Orozco plotted a return to power in 1915, financed by German agents who desperately wanted to embroil the United States in a conflict along its southern border — and keep it from joining Britain and France in the war that was consuming Europe.
The plan fizzled. Huerta was arrested in the U.S. and died in jail. Orozco and his core cadre were shot to rags in the Texas badlands. Just one of the multitude of Mexican revolutionaries who went down in a hail of lead.
For two very different views of the Orozco killing, see:
The fate of every one of the Warlords of the Mexican Revolution.
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