Emiliano Zapata

Zapata was born in Anenecuilco, Morelos, in 1879, when Porfirio Díaz's dictatorship handed peasant land and water to sugarcane haciendas. When the Revolution erupted in 1910 he formed the Liberation Army of the South and helped bring down Díaz with a victory at Cuautla in May 1911, but the new president Madero called him a bandit and sent the Army to burn Morelos village by village. Zapata answered in November 1911 with the Plan of Ayala, a manifesto demanding land redistribution, and spent the next eight years fighting every successor regime - Huerta, Carranza - that refused it. He broke with Pancho Villa, took Morelos, instituted the reforms himself, lost it to scorched-earth campaigns, retook it in 1917. In April 1919 Carranza's men lured him into an ambush and killed him, but the constitution drafted that fight into Article 27, and his generals helped finish Carranza the following year.