Interview with Francisco Piñon Carvajal, adopted son of General Francisco Villa, conducted in Cd. Chihuahua, Mexico, on October 20, 1976, by Dr. Ruben Osorio:PAGE FOUR
Dr. Osorio: Do you think General Villa was a very greedy person?
Sr. Piñon: That is a very good question, because there are persons who believe that he was an insatiable treasure seeker who in dying left great accumulated riches. There is nothing farther from the truth, since he was not a man voracious in accumulating them. Fortunately, in the documentation contained in the financial records of the hacienda there is sufficient information which clarifies perfectly his financial activities at Canutillo. General Villa knew that money is necessary in modern life, but I believe that he looked on it with indifference, that it didn't matter to him really. During one of the talks we had, he told me the following: “Look Piñoncito, if the government fulfills what it has offered me, I am going to help pay off the public debt.”
Dr. Osorio: Why do you think he said that?
Sr. Piñon: Probably he told me that based on the hopes that he had in the La Fortuna mine and he claim he had filed and in some other mines called Hidalgo, El Murciélego, La Virgen and El Centauro which he was prospecting but for which he never filed claims. It is well known that riches did not matter to General Villa and that all of his life he was very removed from money concerns. During the Revolution he went through millions of pesos and over the most abundant veins of wealth in the country and he was never stained with greed in that he used all of this to sustain the expenses of his troops. But I can tell you that a short time before he was assassinated, he knew of the plot to kill him and he told me at the hacienda before setting out for Parral, with the object of taking certain precautions which ultimately turned out to be useless. So, he showed me a place where he had left buried $50,000 pesos in gold coins, destined for the education of his children and he was now concerned that they might receive a good education and he did not want to leave them unprotected. But, upon dying, his children did not receive this patrimony that their father had left them, since, in spite of thefact that with help of my mother, of a sister and of Colonel Ríos, Chief of the Guard, we dug up the money, the indiscretion of a servant woman who noticed this allowed that this money be collected by don Hipólito, the general’s brother, to be used to pay off a large debt that the general had with the Casa Hevia y García in Parral and for the expenses of the hacienda. Such it was, that even the wheat harvest came in that year had to be turned over to that business. Thus it was that the children of Villa lost even the money that was destined for their education, much less were they to have inherited millions so that they could become the parasites of society. All of them had to work in order to live respectably; Octavio, who died, was an officer in the army, Francisco is a doctor, Hipólito is a lawyer, Samuel works in the ISSSTE, Trinidad is a horse trainer and works as a stunt double for famous actors in dangerous scenes, Celia got married and went to live in the United States, Agustín became ill and was interned there in a sanitarium. Recently I went with you to Canutillo, and I was saddened to see the destruction that people who really are greedy and influenced by the myth of the fabulous treasures that were left there buried by Pancho Villa, had done at the hacienda. These persons should know by now that that in Canutillo there is no buried money for the simple reason that General Villa didn’t have any. But I can add if currently the official indifference makes the Agricultural Community of Canutillo be not even the shadow of what it was before, and that the shell of the hacienda is practically abandoned and used only as store houses that have no business there instead of being an agricultural school or a museum, at least they could do is stop going around digging holes all over the place.
Dr. Osorio: Could you tell me if General Villa a person of humble stature? Did he act like a country boy with an inferiority complex and timid before strangers?
Sr. Piñon: No, the general was not a timid, humble man. He was a very active man, free and easy, sure of himself and with the gift of command. Although he himself said that he lacked education, during his whole life as a revolutionary he treated with cultivated people with whom he had a very intense social bond; to cite a few of them, he treated with Abraham Gonzales, with Francisco I. Madero and his brothers Gustavo and Raúl, this last was an intimate friend; with licenciado Vasconcelos, with General Ángeles, he was a personal friend of General Scott, later chief executive officer of the Armed Forces of the United States and he had extensive relations with Mr. Patrick O’Hea, English vice-consul and charge d’affairs in La Laguna, of France, of Italy and Belgium. He mixed with the doctors Andres Villarreal and Luis de la Garza Cárdenas, the first graduate of John Hopkins University, and organizers of the Brigada Sanitaria de la División del Norte; he had inseparable friends and true intimates such as the Messrs. Sabas Lozoya and don Ángel de Caso, this last the last Spanish diplomat in the government of Sr. Madero and he got along well quite extensively with many other intellectuals, military officers, engineers, doctors, lawyers and educated people who belonged to his forces. Apart from that, when he was in the pinnacle of his fame and his name spread around the world he gave numerous interviews to the press, national as well as foreign, and he always expressed himself with them with ease of words, I wouldn’t say impressive but with much naturalness. For all of these reasons, I can assure you that he was not a timid individual suffering from some complex. Why should he have felt inhibited with any of those reporters - lowering his eyes and fiddling like a child with a knot in his shirt - such as it says in the text of Sr. Llergo Hernández? Just because they were reporters from Mexico City? This is simply ridiculous; General Villa had a very quick personality, he did not need any helpers in making decisions and he had much experience in his exchanges with reporters, he therefor had no reason to feel any complex before those young and trembling reporters whose shorts dropped on them and who were in a cold sweat just seeing him.
Dr. Osorio: When, is report, Sr. Hernández Llergo relates that he gave to General Villa a letter from General Escobar, he gave the impression that he couldn’t read and I can only ask you: did the general know how to read?
Sr. Piñon: In the report they tendentiously wished to make it look like the general was illiterate and this is untrue, it is not worth even discussing. You have noted perfectly, through the conversations that we have had and by way of reading the private correspondence contained in the Libro Copiador Número 2 de la Hacienda, that General Villa not only knew how to read and write perfectly but that he exchanged letters with a great many people from all different social classes, from humble campesinos to the President of the Republic. For the purpose of his correspondence, the general dictated his letters to Coronel Trillo, his secretary, who wrote them down in shorthand and without altering them typed them up on a typewriter exactly as the general had dictated them, since he did not want him to be unhappy with him if some change were made in them. Trillito, as the general called him, was a person who was very efficient in his work, he was very serious and a little timid, we were personal friends and he personally told me the preceding. For this reason I consider that the correspondence reflects with exactitude the language that the general used, his own words. The handwriting on the letters is, of course, that of Colonel Trillo. When he would go out on some journey, I would help the general with his correspondence.
Dr. Osorio: Much had been said and written about the uncultured nature of General Villa and in the report much emphasis is given over what he himself said about that. What can you tell me about that?
Sr. Piñon: If we understand by uncultured a person who did not have the opportunity to attend school for his instruction, then, yes, he was that and I repeat to you that he never denied it. He was born and raised during the porfirista regime in which access to education was closed to campesino children; he could not go to school because he had to live hand to mouth in that criminal regime for the poor classes [i.e. criminal in its treatment of them]. Also, being that he was the oldest of five children and orphaned by his father, he had to help in the sustenance of his family and he did not have the opportunity to go to school. But as I said to you earlier, during the course of the armed struggle the general acculturated himself greatly with a constant intercourse with educated persons; I should tell you that the general had an uncommon and surprising natural intelligence; he also had a gift, if I might express it as such, of being able to capture the thoughts of other persons and form an intuitive concept of them. With a glance he was able to capture all, this was innate in him, a peculiarity in his manner of being; I could call it a natural psychology that he possessed along with an extraordinary power of observation and a privileged memory. Nothing escaped General Villa and he forgot nothing. For these reasons it is impossible to think that a person such as he, endowed with those characteristics, would not have become cultured in the ten years of the war. Nevertheless, he knew his limitations, he told me on one occasion that he never aspired to the presidency of the republic because he did not have the necessary education to function in this post and he added: “If I had had an education I would have been a great man or I would have gone crazy.” These were his exact words.
Dr. Osorio: Nevertheless in the report he expressed himself using very uncouth language.
Sr. Piñon: Sr. Hernández Llergo wrote in large letters very coarse words and expressions like: “polkos, pararse, pa, caí yo aqui, es muy preciso, no tiene cuate” and others that the general never used, and he wanted to give the impression that he had a very uneducated and vulgar manner of expressing himself, and that is not true. He also put in his mouth the word “presses” to refer to the newspapers; I can declare untrue what this writer says, because I have copies of various letters that he sent to several persons, among these letters to General Obregón and in all of them he correctly used the words press or newspaper, I never heard him say “the presses”, that is false. This deformation of his language is very clear in the reproduction that El Universal did in their edition of March 22, 1923, of a letter that General Villa sent on the 17th of the same month, to its director Ing. Palavicini, complaining of the persecutions and attempt to assassinate him on the part of Sr. Jesús Herrera, of Torreon. In one of the paragraphs in his letter, General Villa said textually: “I, a man of war in other times, devoted now completely to work and the peace of the countryside, only lack guarantees about the slander [maledicencia] of Herrera.” El Universal published the following: “.... only lack guarantees about the “malidicencia” of Herrera”. General Villa spoke like a person with a modicum of education, but I am sure that these deformations of his language were placed intentionally in the report with the intention of ridiculing him before public opinion.
All rights reserved by Dr. Ruben Osorio Zuniga. Prior written permission to republish in part or in whole is required except for excerpts of one sentence or less.
Translation by E. Bryant Holman, Ojinaga, Chihuahua
To contact Dr. Osorio rubenosorio@ojinaga.com
