Emiliano Zapata
1879–1919 1 entry
Biography
Emiliano Zapata was a Mexican revolutionary, a leader of the peasants of the south in the Mexican Revolution. He was born in 1879 in Anenecuilco, in the state of Morelos, into a family of small farmers and horse breeders, at a time when great sugar estates were swallowing the land of the villages. In 1909 his village chose him to defend its rights to the land, and in 1910 he joined the revolution against the long dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz.
When the new president, Francisco Madero, failed to return the land, Zapata proclaimed the Plan of Ayala in 1911, which demanded that land, woods and water be given back to the villages, under the motto “Reform, Liberty, Justice and Law”. For almost a decade his Liberation Army of the South fought one government after another, and in 1914 he and Pancho Villa held Mexico City for a time. In April 1919 he was lured into an ambush at the hacienda of Chinameca and killed. His ideas of land reform were written into the Mexican constitution, and his name lives on in the word Zapatismo.
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