Rodolfo Fierro

The Benton Case and the April 1914 U.S. Invasion of Veracruz

Pancho Villa’s pal, Rodolpho Fierro, put a bullet in the head of one of Her Majesty’s Subjects, a certain Scotsman named William Benton.   God and his angels must have seen it as just one in a long series of summary executions throughout the sanguine course of the Mexican Revolution, but the British tend to see privation of the life of a Subject as a threat to the hegemony of the empire itself, and are disposed to make a scene, even over such a scoundrel as Benton.

"I realized at once that this was the acid test..."

After the battle of Tierra Blanca, Pancho Villa  asks Ivor Thord-Gray to go to Tucson, Arizona to pick up a shipment of guns:

“I realized at once that this was the acid test, the work of that murderous Fierro standing there smirking and anticipating, no doubt, my falling into the hands of the U.S. Border Patrol, for “El Carnicero” hated all gringos.”

Thord-Gray in the Battle of Tierra Blanca

The battle of Tierra-Blanca was the first engagement for Ivor Thord-Gray in the Mexican Revolution. Although it wasn’t the most important fight, the most enduring imagery of the entire revolution arguably comes out of this engagement, and Thord-Gray has a hand in it: Villa’s right hand man, the old railroader Rodolfo Fierro, straps dynamite onto the cattle catcher of a captured train, and runs the detached engine full speed into loaded Federal troop trains. Tell me you havn’t seen this image. This obligatory cinemagraphic scene was set up in reality by Thord-Gray:

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