Woodrow Wilson ordered two U.S. military interventions into Mexico during the Mexican Revolution. In the first, at Veracruz in 1914, the president sought to influence the conflict by controlling the flow of foreign military supplies to Mexico through its chief port. In the second, the 1916 Punitive Expedition headed by Gen. John J. Pershing, Wilson tried to eliminate the “problem” of Francisco “Pancho” Villa and satisfy public outrage in the United States against a Villista raid on Columbus, New Mexico.

At Veracruz, despite serious reservations, Wilson yielded to pressures for intervention from U.S. business interests, cabinet members, newspapers, and representatives of the Southwest. In January 1914, the president and his cabinet agreed to prepare the U.S. armed forces for an invasion of the Mexican port. Wilson ordered Secretary of War Lindley Garrison and Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels to make the preparations, saying that it was “only a question of an opportune time and sufficient arrangements.”

The president ordered the invasion of Veracruz on 23 April 1914. His decision followed a minor episode at nearby Tampico that revealed a U.S. admiral's readiness to fight, if nothing else. The pretext for the invasion was a so‐called German ship, the Ypiranga, destined for Veracruz and carrying supplies for the Mexican armed forces. Actually the Ypiranga was at least one‐half American‐owned. It had received clearance for its cargo from Wilson himself well in advance of its departure for Mexico. If U.S. authorities had wanted to stop the ship, it could have been boarded at sea. When Veracruz was seized, the Ypiranga discharged its cargo at Puerto Mexico.

In reality, the president intended to depose the government of Gen. Victoriano Huerta by seizing and blockading Veracruz, the most important entrepôt for arms flowing to Mexico. By occupying the port city, Wilson could curtail the Mexican Army's access to military supplies and could dictate the flow of arms to the next government of Mexico. In Wilson's view, President Huerta had two major failings. First, the Mexican president could not maintain order and protect U.S. private and public interests—including the strategically important production of oil and rubber; and second, Huerta was a dictator who had imposed himself on the Mexican republic after murdering his democratically elected predecessor, Francisco Madero.

The U.S. attack on Veracruz turned into a tragedy when the Mexican civilian populace decided to resist. The recently upgraded guns of the U.S. warships took a terrible toll on the city. The Mexican casualty estimates vary so widely between the official U.S. figure and that of the cronista de la ciudad de Veracruz that accurate figures cannot be determined; but the U.S. forces lost nineteen dead and forty‐seven wounded. American troops stayed on after the fall of Huerta. During the summer of 1914, U.S. military officers worked with the constitutionalist faction among the Mexican revolutionary forces in Veracruz, establishing a joint administration of the customshouse and warehouse area. Between 19 and 23 November, as the first U.S. troops were leaving, U.S. officers supervised the unloading from five ships of military materials, which filled the warehouses and piers. In their last act the U.S. officers turned over the keys to the warehouses to the constitutionalist leaders two months later, the forces of Venustiano Carranza marched out of Veracruz to defeat the other revolutionary factions; they carried a wide array of U.S.‐supplied arms.

In 1916, President Wilson reacted to the attack of a defeated and embittered Mexican presidential Francisco Villa, on the hopeful border town of Columbus by launching a major punitive expedition to Mexico under the command of General Pershing. The U.S. president hoped to strengthen his position in acrimonious negotiations with Acting President Carranza and to eliminate the threat Villa's forces posed along the border. The Mexican government was increasingly nationalistic, and U.S. public and press opinion demanded security. The U.S. forces, 12,000 strong, brought a full complement of cavalry trucks and even observation aircraft with them. They marched as far as Parral, 419 miles inside Mexico, incurring serious resistance only a few times. The most notable battle was fought at El Carrizal between the U.S. detachment and Carranza's federal forces. The Mexicans surprised the U.S. commander by their resolve to fight and justified their claims of a tactical victory.

One of Pershing's contingency plans included the establishment of his headquarters at Parral just north of a line extending from Mazatlán to Tampico. That possibility must have occurred to the Mexican government because of the inordinate size of the U.S. force. At the onset of the U.S. invasion, Villa had lost popularity and could concentrate only slightly more than 500 combatants. Instead of being eliminated by the Punitive Expedition, Villa's forces grew until they reached 5,000, and Carranza found his government threatened by a loss of public support for its failure to halt the U.S. invasion. The Mexican public and government expressed deepening resentment toward the invading U.S. troops.

U.S. interventions affected the welfare of the approximately 50,000 North Americans living in Mexico even more than those at home. In the wake of the Veracruz invasion, anti–North American riots broke out in diverse parts of Mexico. The U.S. government set up stations at New Orleans, Texas City, and San Diego for the handling of North American refugees, many of whom lost virtually everything they owned in Mexico.

The U.S. government grew less belligerent toward Mexico as tensions with Germany deepened and the Carranza government, demonstrating increasing stability, prepared to promulgate a new constitution. On 27 January 1917, President Wilson ordered the U.S. troops withdrawn from Mexico. A new Mexican Constitution was proclaimed on 5 February 1917; Carranza was elected president on 11 March for a regular term, and the Wilson administration formally recognized the new Mexican government.

[See also Mexican War.]

Bibliography

• Friedrich Katz, The Secret War in Mexico: Europe, the United States and the Mexican Revolution, 1981.
• Alan Knight, The Mexican Revolution, 2 vols., 1986.
• John Mason Hart, Revolutionary Mexico: The Coming and Process of the Mexican Revolution, 1998.
• Friedrich Katz, The Life and Times of Pancho Villa, 1998

The Oxford Companion to American Military History. Copyright © 2000 by Oxford University Press, Inc. All rights reserved.