The Secret War in El Paso

This lengthy, award-winning study details the critical role played by the city of El Paso, Texas, in the violent phase of the Mexican Revolution between 1910 and 1920. The monograph is thoroughly researched using local, state, and federal sources and rests primarily on US archival materials, especially the infrequently used Federal Bureau of Investigation records. The authors show little concern with why the Mexican Revolution occurred and the underlying ideological forces that drove it, claiming that such issues are “overemphasized” by scholars who have addressed them “ad infinitum.” Instead, Charles Harris and Louis Sadler focus on “the mechanics of rebellion” or the manner in which the revolution unfolded in the northern half of the country (p. xi). Their analytical approach, which emphasizes questions of “how” rather than “why,” is refreshing and logical since ideological commitment, factional loyalty, and concern for national interests were fragile. Actors on both sides of the border, including smugglers, intelligence agents, consular officials, soldiers, railroad operators, and leading businessmen, among many others, were driven often by their own financial self-interest. As the authors astutely point out, “only a handful of people were doing honest work,” and most simply took advantage of the opportunities presented by the revolution (p. 89). While this meant little in the United States — outside of the enrichment of arms manufacturers, merchants, and smugglers who sold their wares to opposing rebel factions — for Mexico it undermined the unity of the nation’s political exiles.Harris and Sadler rightly argue that the United States influenced the course of the Mexican Revolution through military intervention and the selective application of diplomatic recognition, arms embargoes, and the country’s neutrality laws against various revolutionaries and Mexico City governments. While scholars will find little that is new here vis-à-vis Washington’s policy toward its southern neighbor, the book admirably distinguishes itself from other studies through its close examination of US foreign policy at the local level and its detailing of the crucial role played by El Paso in shaping Mexico’s internal political and military affairs. According to the authors, no other US city was more important in Mexico’s revolution than El Paso, which then was the largest border city. For the country’s rebels, El Paso served as “a base of operations, a source of munitions, money, and volunteers, a refuge, an arena for propaganda, and a market for revolutionary loot” (p. ix). El Paso was also strategically located across the river from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico’s largest city and port of entry on the border. Of all the important parts played by El Paso, it was the city’s role as the leading source of munitions traffic into Mexico, both legal and contraband, that determined the rise and fall of different revolutionary armies, including those of Pascual Orozco and Pancho Villa.The book also is very good at showing the relationship between US government agencies, including diplomatic, military, intelligence, and law enforcement, and their Mexican counterparts. Sometimes US officials worked well together to combat smuggling and spying, while on other occasions they worked at “cross-purposes” as bureaucratic politics stymied their individual, departmental, and intra-agency efforts. The authors provide rich examples of unprecedented cross-border intelligence cooperation, especially during Francisco Madero’s brief presidency, and, during Venustiano Carranza’s administration, of binational intelligence conflicts. The lack of domestic and international cooperation, when combined with widespread corruption and the large number of local spies, meant that government plans and rebel conspiracies alike were frequently penetrated by rivals. As the authors ironically point out, nothing was secret in El Paso’s “secret war.”Despite the focus on El Paso, it would be wrong to characterize the book as urban history since we learn little about the city’s political, economic, social, and cultural development. When those larger subjects are covered, they are addressed only in terms of Mexico’s revolution, such as El Paso’s commercial role as a source of arms, or its political role as a place of plotting and refuge for exiled revolutionists. Consequently, readers will not find out in any great detail the manner in which El Paso was transformed dur ing the 1910s into an “army town” and what impact this had on various aspects of city life. Furthermore, the book’s intrigue, which stems from its focus on “revolutionists, refugees, secret agents, double agents, smugglers, gunrunners, criminals, counterfeiters, propagandists, adventurers, confidence men, prostitutes, and other exotic types,” trails off midway through the monograph as the “cast of characters” becomes rather lengthy and the decade-long story of arms and munitions trafficking between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez gets repetitive (pp. 378 – 79). This minor quibble aside, scholars of the Mexican Revolution, border region, Texas, and El Paso will profit greatly from this book

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