The horseman from the sugar country of Morelos who led a peasant army in the Mexican Revolution for one stubborn core demand — the return of village lands swallowed by the great estates — and a wider agrarian program built around it — issued the Plan of Ayala when its leaders moved too slowly, refused every compromise the revolution offered him, was lured to his death by a fake defector at Chinameca in 1919, and became in death a far larger symbol than his agrarian aims, the incorruptible conscience of the landless whose name and cry were revived by indigenous rebels in 1994.
Emiliano Zapata was the man who would not be bought. A village horseman from the sugar country of southern Mexico, he took up arms in 1910 for one demand so simple the powerful could never grant it: the return of the land stolen from his people. He fought every government that came to power, signed no lasting deal with any of them, and turned down the rewards that might have made him rich. In 1919 an officer who pretended to defect lured him to a meeting at a hacienda called Chinameca and had him gunned down in ambush. His base and imagination were rooted in Morelos, but the Plan of Ayala turned village land restitution into a broader revolutionary demand for land reform. The myth that rose after his death was vast. He became the pure symbol of the landless and of resistance to power, the conscience of a revolution whose victorious leaders often diluted its promises.