35th President of Mexico
19 February 1913 – 15 July 1914
|Preceded by||Pedro Lascuráin|
|Succeeded by||Francisco S. Carvajal|
22 December 1850|
Agua Gorda, Colotlán, Jalisco
|Died||13 January 1916
El Paso, Texas,
|Political party||No Party|
José Victoriano Huerta Márquez (Spanish pronunciation: [biktoˈɾjano ˈwerta]; 22 December 1850 – 13 January 1916) was a Mexican military officer and president of Mexico. Huerta's supporters were known as Huertistas during the Mexican Revolution. Huerta is still vilified by modern-day Mexicans, who generally refer to him as El Chacal ("The Jackal") or El Usurpador ("The Usurper").
Victoriano Huerta was born in the settlement of Agua Gorda within the municipality of Colotlán, Jalisco, son of Jesús Huerta and María Lázara del Refugio Márquez. He identified himself as indigenous, and both his parents are reported to have been ethnically Huichol. Huerta learned to read and write at a school run by the local priest. In 1869 he was employed by the visiting General Donato Guerra to serve as his personal secretary. In that role, he distinguished himself and with General Guerra's support, Huerta gained admission to the Mexican National Military Academy (Heroico Colegio Militar) at Chapultepec in Mexico City in 1872. President Benito Juárez praised Cadet Huerta when inspecting the Academy, noting that the Army needed officers of indigenous origins.
Upon graduating from the military academy in 1877, Huerta was commissioned into the Corps of Engineers. He spent the early years of his military career undertaking topographic studies in the states of Puebla and Veracruz, where he met Emilia Águila Moya, his future wife. He married Emilia Águila on 21 November 1880 in Mexico City. Together they had eleven children. The names of his children surviving him in 1916 were Jorge, Maria Elisa, Victor, Luz, Elena, Dagoberto, Eva and Celia.
|A graphical timeline is available at
Timeline of the Mexican Revolution
By 1890 Huerta had reached the rank of Colonel of Engineers, under the administration of Porfirio Díaz. In December 1900 Huerta commanded a successful military campaign against Yaqui rebels in Sonora. Two years later he suppressed a Maya peoples' rising in Yucatan. He was then promoted to Brigadier General and awarded the Medal of Military Merit  In 1905 Huerta was appointed to head a committee tasked with reforming the uniforms of the Federal Army. In 1907 he retired from the army on grounds of ill-health, having developed cataracts while serving in the southern jungles. He then applied his technical training by taking up the position of Head of Public Works in Monterrey and planning a new street layout for the city.
On the eve of the 1910 Revolution against the long-established Díaz regime, Huerta was teaching mathematics in Mexico City. He applied successfully to rejoin the Federal Army with his former rank. He did not play a major role in the early stages of the Revolution, although he commanded the military escort which gave Díaz safe conduct into exile, Huerta initially pledged allegiance to the new administration of Francisco Madero, and he was retained by the Madero administration to crush anti-Madero revolts by rebel generals such as Pascual Orozco. However, Huerta secretly plotted with United States Ambassador to Mexico Henry Lane Wilson, cashiered general Bernardo Reyes, and Félix Díaz, Porfirio Díaz's nephew, to overthrow Madero. This episode in Mexican history is known as La decena trágica (Ten Tragic Days). Following a confused few days of fighting in Mexico City between loyalist and rebel factions of the Army, Huerta had Madero and vice-president José María Pino Suárez seized and briefly imprisoned on 18 February 1913 in the National Palace. The conspirators then met at the U.S. Embassy to sign el Pacto de la Embajada (The Embassy Pact), which provided for the exile of Madero and Pino Suárez, and Huerta's takeover of the Mexican government.
To give the coup the appearance of legitimacy, Huerta had foreign minister Pedro Lascuráin assume the presidency; under the 1857 Constitution of Mexico, the foreign minister stood third in line for the presidency behind the vice-president and attorney general; Madero's attorney general had also been ousted in the coup. Lascuráin then appointed Huerta as interior minister—constitutionally, fourth in line for the presidency. After less than an hour in office (some sources say as little as 15 minutes), Lascuráin resigned, handing the presidency to Huerta. At a late-night special session of Congress surrounded by Huerta's troops, the legislators endorsed his assumption of power. Four days later Madero and Pino Suárez were taken from the National Palace to prison at night and shot by officers of the rurales (federal mounted police) who were assumed to be acting on Huerta's orders.
Huerta established a harsh military dictatorship. U.S. President Woodrow Wilson became hostile to the Huerta administration, recalled ambassador Henry Lane Wilson, and demanded Huerta step aside for democratic elections. When Huerta refused, and with the situation further exacerbated by the Tampico Affair, President Wilson landed U.S. troops to occupy Mexico's most important seaport, Veracruz.
The reaction to the Huerta usurpation was Venustiano Carranza's Plan of Guadalupe, which called for the creation of a Constitutional Army to oust Huerta and restore constitutional government. Supporters of the plan included Emiliano Zapata, Francisco "Pancho" Villa and Álvaro Obregón. After repeated field defeats of Huerta's Federal Army by Obregón and Villa, climaxing in the Battle of Zacatecas, Huerta bowed to pressure and resigned the presidency on 15 July 1914.
Exile and late life
During 1915, he negotiated with Captain Franz von Rintelen of German Navy Intelligence for money to purchase weapons and arrange U-boat landings to provide support, while offering (perhaps as a bargaining chip) to make war on the U.S., which Germany hoped would end munitions supplies to the Allies. Their meetings, held at the Manhattan Hotel (as well as another New York hotel, "probably the Holland House" at Fifth Avenue and 30th Street) were observed by Secret Servicemen, and von Rintelen's telephone conversations were routinely intercepted and recorded.
Huerta traveled from New York by train to Newman, New Mexico (25 miles from the border), where he was to be met by General Pascual Orozco and some well-armed Mexican supporters. However,a U.S. Army colonel with 25 soldiers and two deputy U.S. marshals intervened and arrested him as he left the train on a charge of sedition. The German-initiated plan for Huerta to regain the Mexican presidency through a coup d'état was foiled. After some time in a U.S. Army prison at Fort Bliss, he was released on bail but remained under house arrest due to risk of flight to Mexico. A day after he attended a dinner at Fort Bliss; Later he was returned to jail, and while so confined, died, perhaps of cirrhosis of the liver. While the main symptom was yellow jaundice, poisoning by the U.S. was widely suspected.
In popular culture
In the novel The Friends of Pancho Villa (1996), by James Carlos Blake, Huerta is a major character.
- There is dispute about the date of birth and the maternal surname of Victoriano Huerta. Many sources, including Gobernantes de México by Fernando Orozco Linares give a birthdate of 23 March 1854 and a maternal surname of Ortega. However, the parrish register of Colotlán, Jalisco as filmed by the Genealogical Society of Utah on film 0443681 v. 24 p. 237 shows a baptism date of 23 December 1850, a birth date of 22 December 1850 and his mother's name as María Lázara del Refugio Márquez. The marriage record dated 21 November 1880 at Santa Veracruz parrish in Mexico City as filmed by the Genealogical Society of Utah on film 0035853 confirms his mother's name as: Del Refugio Márquez.
- Laton McCartney, "The Teapot Dome Scandal: how big oil bought the Harding White House and tried to steal the country", Random House, Inc., 2008, p. 1901, 
- Coerver, Don M. (2004). Mexico: An Encyclopedia of Contemporary Culture and History. ABC-CLIO. ISBN 1-57607-132-4.
- Genealogical Society of Utah, Film 0035853
- El Paso Times obituary
- McLynn, Frank (2002). Villa and Zapata. Carroll & Graf. ISBN 0-7867-1088-8.
- Michael D. Richards, "Revolutions in world history", Routledge, 2004, p. 26, 
- "Huerta's Final Message to the Mexican Congress". The Independent. July 27, 1914. Retrieved 24 July 2012.
- Thomas Herbert Russell, "America's War for Humanity", BiblioBazaar, LLC, 2009, p. 500, 
- Tuchman, Barbara W. The Zimmermann Telegram (New York: NEL Mentor, 1967), pp. 73-4.
- Tuchman, p.73.
- Blum, Howard, Dark Invasion: 1915 - Germany's Secret War, Harper, 2014, p. 228.
- Lee Stacy, "Mexico and the United States", Marshall Cavendish, 2002, p. 405, 
|Wikisource has the text of a 1922 Encyclopædia Britannica article about Victoriano Huerta.|
- Colotlán official website biography of Victoriano Huerta
- Mexico para niños biography of Victoriano Huerta
- Genealogy and descendancy of Victoriano Huerta
- NNDB entry for Victoriano Huerta
|President of Mexico
19 February 1913 - 15 July 1914
Francisco S. Carvajal