A week prior to the election of Warren G. Harding as the 29th President of the United States, the Mexican people elected revolutionary leader Alvaro Obregon to follow interim president Adolfo de la Huerta ... at least, that is what the Library of Congress would tell you.
The date of the actual election of Obregon was Sunday, September 5, 1920 - unless basically every other source of information on the 1920 Mexican general elections is incorrect (although Britannica will tell you it was December 1). However, I have decided to use this incorrect date as a time to note the situation between Mexico and the United States in 1920 as two new presidents with new visions were being elected within two months of one another.
The administration of Woodrow Wilson, the predecessor to Warren G. Harding, was one of the United States' most interventionist but also one of its most idealistic. President Wilson was a man adamant in his moral and political conclusions, and he proved unafraid to show favoritism to sides during the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920. On multiple occasions, his favoritism was displayed with gunfire and cavalry - a habit which was repeated across Latin America and tended to wildly bend the rules of the U.S. Constitution in terms of making war.
When Wilson entered office, a military coup had just occurred against the democratically-elected Mexican leader Francisco I. Madero. In what is known as the Decena Tragica - Ten Tragic Days - a general named Victoriano Huerta came to power in February of 1913. Huerta faced internal warring factions intent on liberalizing the nation and bringing down his dictatorship, but the addition of a highly hostile Wilson to the mix was disastrous for his regime and for Mexican-American relations in a broader sense. The Taft administration's ambassador to Mexico was a man named Henry L. Wilson, and he was in favor of recognizing the Huerta government. However, the idealistic Wilson and his similarly-minded Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan wanted a more democratic Mexico. They replaced Henry Wilson with John Lind, and they sent special emissaries such as William B. Hale. Hale and Lind played to Wilson's preconceptions as well as his racism. Hale called Huerta "ape-like ... [with some] Indian blood," while Lind was prone to anti-Catholicism and anti-Indian slurs (Meyer, 529). With Wilson all fired up with a sense of righteousness and a zeal for democratic values, it did not take much to break the dam and unleash the U.S. military on Huerta.
The Tampico Incident occurred when some United States sailors were arrested at a restricted area in the port of Tampico, Mexico. The commander of U.S. forces off Tampico's coast wanted an apology from the Mexican government in the form of raising Old Glory above the foreign city and giving a twenty-one gun salute to it. This spiraled out of control after the Mexicans tried to compromise and the U.S. government did not accept, fearing any action being seen as a soft recognition of Huerta's dictatorship.
Wilson had forced himself into having two options: 1) going back on all of his stances and having a humiliating withdrawal from the situation on Mexico's terms, or 2) some form of violent altercation. The oceans around Mexico were full of U.S. naval vessels due to Wilson's increase in posturing to the Mexican government of his power, and the Germans were known to be helping Huerta which did not sit well with the United States' geopolitical interests (Meyer, 532).
What followed was an occupation of the city of Veracruz by the U.S. military. The Mexican opposition, currently at war with Huerta on many fronts and made up of various factions, was actually quite mad at Wilson for the most part. A poorly-handled dispute had turned into a serious invasion of Mexico's borders by a state that it was supposedly not at war with. Most claimants to power in Mexico were furious at such a violation by their neighbors. Was this another time that America would take over half of their land in violent conflict? While a repeat of the Mexican-American War did not take place, it caused resentment among the Mexicans. There were various protests and acts of local violence by Mexicans against symbols of America or visiting American citizens. However, Huerta would decide to resign in July of 1914, and the United States backed out of Veracruz. Wilson had gotten most of what he'd wanted without a full scale war.
The other time that Wilson violated Mexican sovereignty without a declaration of war by the U.S. Congress was when he sent General John J. Pershing into northern Mexico to hunt down a guerrilla fighter named Pancho Villa. To be fair, this was a far more justified action than Veracruz because - similar to the U.S.' hunt for Osama Bin Laden following the September 11 attacks - Pershing was chasing down someone who had sent a group onto American soil that killed and wounded numerous American citizens in an act of terror. Columbus, New Mexico was looted and burned down by Villa's partisans on March 9, 1916; they killed 15 civilians, and when the army showed up to drive them out the ensuing battle killed an additional 9 American soldiers. The embarrassing thing about Wilson's second intervention in Mexico is that the troops never caught Villa, and they were often jeered and shouted out of town when they needed to stop in Mexican settlements. It had also cost the government $130,000,000 for practically nothing (Meyer, 541-542).
Alvaro Obregon was one of the pro-democracy resisters of the Huerta regime, and he was on the "constitutionalist" side of the ensuing split in the ranks of those formerly united against Huerta. Obregon had lost his arm fighting at the battle of Santa Rosa in 1915, and he had been quite successful with his own military efforts against the forces of Pancho Villa's Villistas. According to a peer-reviewed journal in The Americas: "both [Warren] Harding and Alvaro Obregon ... were on record as favoring a settlement of differences, [and] recognition of Mexico by the United States now appeared to be assured," since Harding's election was seen "as both a repudiation of President Woodrow Wilson's position on the Mexican question and a mandate to end the diplomatic impasse between their countries." Recognition would not be immediate, finally coming in 1923, but the Harding and Obregon elections in 1920 were both steps toward this eventuality because both were far more likely to come to an agreement than Wilson and Huerta had been in 1913 when they both came to power.
- Source: Meyer, Michael C. and Sherman, William L. "The Course of Mexican History, Fifth Edition," (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).