División del Norte (Division of the North)
Chair (Villa): Nathan Chan (nchan@uchicago.edu)
Crisis Director (Villa): Emma Olmstead-Rumsey (rumstead@uchicago.edu)
Chair (Zapata): Jay Sangani (jsangani@uchicago.edu)
Coordinated Crisis Director: Craig Johnson (craigjohnson@uchicago.edu)
The Mexican Revolution has been described as the world’s first social revolution, lasting for over a decade and ultimately involving almost every division or group in the nation. With goals as varied as achieving complete social change and lining their pockets, soldiers and ideologues took their force and message to the streets and countryside, first to overthrow the authoritarian rule of Porfirio Díaz and then to determine who would control the country after his departure. This committee will begin its simulation in 1912, approximately two years after the Revolution began, at a time when the major forces had consolidated into three more or less distinct forces – the División del Norte of Pancho Villa, the Ejército Libertador del Sur of Emiliano Zapata, and the Constitutionalists, a somewhat disorganized but large group lead by moneyed interests and former military officials.
Villa’s División del Norte is the largest and perhaps the most diverse of these forces, made up of peasants, former soldiers, muleteers, bandits, and a variety of other rural dissidents constituted into a formidable fighting force. Situated in the north of the country, Villa’s forces find themselves faced with opposition from the Constitutionalists, a currently beneficial but complex relationship with America, and agricultural, political, and social dilemmas. Zapata’s Ejército Libertador del Sur is a guerrilla army based in and intimately tied to the agriculturally prosperous state of Morelos (just south of the capital) where the vast majority of its peasant soldiers reside, farm their lands, and raise their families. This grassroots nature sets Zapata’s forces apart from Villa’s or the Constitutionalists’, making it eminently popular and focused on a radical agrarian reordering of Mexican society and government.