Battle of Juarez

How Lou Carpentier helped win the Battle of Juárez (and didn't even know it)

Pascual Orozco and Pancho Villa generally get credit for Francisco Madero’s victory in the battle of Juárez.  It wasn't always so.    They launched the attack against orders, and their irregulars showed remarkable initiative,  tunneling through the walls of houses as they advanced, and raining improvised hand grenades on the surprised federal troops, defeating the federal garrison in three days.

How Antonio Chico survived the battle of Juárez

Antonio Chico was a bombastic, colorful, one-eyed Andaluzian bullfighter—a brute of a man, showing down the Juárez bulls at the time of Madero's insurrection.

How General Juan Navarro survived the battle of Juárez

The rebel prisoners from the battle of Cierro Prieto were bayonetted to death on the orders of General Juan Navarro, so you might imagine the mood among the insurrectos when Navarro was finally captured in Juárez, 5 months later.   

Friedrich Katz provides an excellent account the caos after the fall of Juárez in The Life and Times of Pancho Villa, although it was journalist Timothy Turner who really had the inside scoop:

“When I returned to Juárez after my sleep, a good solid twelve hours of it, I ran right into a lot of excitement.  Orozco’s and Villa’s men were running around yelling “¡Muera Navarro!” and it was sure that if they had found the old federal commander they would have killed him then and there.  They had been drinking and were worked up into a fury, paying no attention to those insurrecto officers who tried to calm them”

“I figured that to be in at the kill, if there was to be one, I had better find Navarro first and wait where he was”. --Bullets, Bottles and Gardenias

How Guisueppi Garibaldi survived the battle of Juárez

There are a lot of different versions of the first battle of Juárez.   Here is a good overview by Óscar Jáquez Martínez:

The battle of Juárez began very suddenly and without the knowledge of the Federals or Francisco Madero.  Against Madero’s orders a fairly large body of  insurrectos attacked the border city.  The group was led by Pancho Villa and Pascual Orozco and was joined by most of the foreign legion.  The insurrectos followed the irrigation ditch leading to Juárez and thus were not detected by General Navarro’s men.  The rebels fell upon the Federals and by the afternoon of May 8 began a general assault on the city.  On the second day the battle was fought almost entirely in the center of the city and by nightfall the rebels held all of Juárez except the bullring, the cuartel, and the church.  On the third day the rebels captured all of Juárez and General Navarro surrendered with five hundred men.  Colonel Garibaldi received Navarro’s sword.   -U.S.-Mexico Borderlands

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