The decade-long upheaval that began as a call for honest elections and exploded into a many-sided civil war of peasant armies and warlords — killing perhaps a million people, toppling the dictator Porfirio Díaz, betraying or murdering nearly every leader it raised up, and producing a landmark constitution before settling into a new one-party order that claimed the revolution's name.
The Mexican Revolution devoured almost everyone who led it. It began in 1910 as a polite demand for fair elections against an aging dictator, and within three years it had become a many-sided civil war that would kill perhaps a million people. Emiliano Zapata, who fought for the return of stolen village land, was lured into an ambush and shot. Pancho Villa, the warlord of the north, was gunned down in his car. Francisco Madero, who started it all, was murdered after General Victoriano Huerta betrayed him in a coup. By 1920 the fighting had given Mexico a radical new constitution and the promise of land reform, though the deepest redistribution came later. It had also handed power to the men who survived the killing, and who would build a single party that ruled in the revolution's name for seventy years.