"...Lascurain himself was surprised. The deal offered to Mexico by American negotiators was tangible and generous enough that Lascurain felt confident bringing it up in Cabinet. Louis Maximilian's agents on Lascurain's staff passed the information along to the heir, who quietly got together with the Spanish ambassador Santurce over cigars to verify, and the American State Department's preferred cutout was happy to inform the relieved prince that, yes, the offer was bonafide and that Spain was happy to broker the agreement if necessary, though obviously, due to American sentiments, not in Havana. This was the evening of October 16th.
On October 17th, Lascurain in a secret Cabinet meeting, presented the terms of the American offer to exit the war. The United States would accept an immediate and full peace with Mexico contingent upon the withdrawal of Mexican forces from the Confederate front lines and from Guatemala, where the Marines and Nicaraguan Army were starting to close in on Huerta's positions as much as the Mexican Army was. In return, Mexico would pay an indemnity of five hundred thousand dollars a year for the next five years, followed by a hundred thousand dollars a year for the next ten. This would end the indemnity by 1930 on a fairly advantageous schedule for Mexico, though the figures the United States was demanding was a hefty sum [1] that comprised a not insignificant amount of Mexico's annual budget. Crucially, these payments were due in gold, silver or mineral rights from oil, which was what the oil-thirsty industrial United States was really after. This was the second plank of the proposed treaty - Mexico's government would denationalize its economy after the 1913 shock, restore or repay seized American property, and re-allow American companies access to the band of oilfields stretching from north of Tampico to Veracruz, all while eliminating all tariffs on American imports for a period of thirty years.
This factor made the proposal hugely unpopular with the economic nationalists who had started the war, of course, even though many Cabinet officials - critically Reyes - were taken aback at how generous the offer was. The United States was demanding no territorial concessions, leaving Mexico's "holy soil" intact, apparently at the insistence of Lascurain, who had told American negotiators that there was no treaty Mexico could accept that saw it "leave the war with a grain of earth less than it entered." The United States had apparently been pressing aggressively for the cession of the whole of Baja California in order to better control the Pacific sea routes to Nicaragua from its West Coast, but Lascurain had talked them down to a 99-year concession of the Magdalena Bay, a strategic headache for the US Navy in the past, which they had finally begrudgingly agreed to. It seemed that the United States was willing to be magnanimous towards the Mexicans in late 1915 so that they could clear the battlefields of North America of an enemy they were unlikely to fully defeat on the ground and thus focus on the Confederacy and the Confederacy alone.
The Cabinet was still a grab-bag of figures, though, and the conservatives and nationalists demanded unanimity to agree to continue negotiations, which of course did not exist; Creel, once again, was the ringleader. Lascurain argued aggressively in favor of the treaty, with Reyes sitting in stern silence glaring at his compatriots, but when unanimity did not carry, Carbajal proposed instead a two-thirds majority to agree to an immediate ceasefire to fine-tune the treaty and introduce it; once again, defeated, by one vote, though no member of that meeting could exactly agree who made up the minority that defeated the motion. These motions were of course not binding, but with the Villistas and Zapatistas growing in force and war going sideways, Carbajal feared a major Cabinet rupture within ten months of the Red Battalions and the collapse of Leon de la Barra's administration. After another fruitless meeting, Cabinet agreed to table the matter for a day and return on the 20th to reconsider..."
- The Matriarch: Empress Margarita Clementina and the Emergence of a Modern Mexico
"...private force. The 2nd Reserve had, in the course of the war, only become more pro-Reyes, more indoctrinated in the idea that they and they alone stood between Mexico and anarchy, stationed in the major cities of the Altiplano where cries of Viva Villa and Viva Zapata could now be heard even amongst those in the working class who just last spring had rejected the siren song of syndicalism and the Red Battalions. Moreso even than his men, Reyes had long been convinced that he was the country's savior but that he needed to wait for the critical hour to make his move; in a letter to Louis Maximilian, the general acknowledged "what I do is a gun that can only be fired once."
Reyes' analysis of the strategic situation that faced Mexico was straightforward. So long as the United States remained at war with the Confederacy, central Mexico was in no real danger of invasion, but that did not allay his concerns. Slow as American movements through Centro had been, they had been accelerated greatly by the collapse of that state into utter anarchy and now Huerta in Guatemala City was almost about to fall; it stood to reason that there could be Marines, supported by amphibious landings, in Chiapas before long, or seizing Salinas Cruz and with it the Tehuantepec Railway. The United States held both Paso del Norte and Chihuahua City, having been handed the latter by Pancho Villa, and could reasonably strike east towards Monterrey, Salto or Matamoros at will, thus putting the entirety of the restive North under foreign control and reasonably auguring a split in Mexico that would rival the Revolt of the Caudillos thirty years earlier, a memory that still haunted Reyes as one of the last living commanders of the generation that had fought it. Villista and Zapatista rebels were scattered but held sway over much of northern and south-central Mexico and had made logistics and the functioning of the agricultural economy a living hell; as such, the harvest upon Mexico looked leaner than necessary, and stories of food riots and utter economic depression in Chile had spooked him.
Thus, the rejection by the same men who had gotten Mexico into this mess of a peace treaty that very lightly got Mexico out of it finally set Reyes off. He was a liberal rather than a nationalist on economics and generally agreed with the urban bourgeoisie that Mexico's future was one of trade and investment rather than retrenchment and paternalism, and while he held no special love in his heart for the United States, he had largely accepted after what in the Confederacy is known as "Black May" that the Americans were going to eventually win and it was best for Mexico that they not be at war with the United States anymore when that happened. The events of early autumn 1915 in Centro and northern Mexico simply persuaded him that Mexico was unable to sustain said war up until that point in time, and thus the moment had arrived to get out with the best deal in hand. That the nationalists of the "consensus cabinet" of his creature Carbajal could not see this, and that Carbajal was still too politically weak to stomach challenging them, suggested more radical solutions.
At daybreak on October 20th, the 2nd Reserve Army was thus called out of its barracks, having been consolidated the previous day in the capital under the auspices of soldiers going on leave and rotating in new reservists so several cadres could head to the front, and marched first to the Imperial Legislature, then to the National Palace on the Zocalo, which they occupied. Several printing presses of newspapers were seized; the editors were told to immediately print the terms of the American proposal for the public to read, and that the conservatives had rejected them. Reyes, meanwhile, made his way to the Chapultepec.
Maximilian had feared this day for decades, first with Miramon and now with Reyes. Upon the sight of soldiers on horseback riding up to the imperial residence, he ordered his guards stand aside and he quickly dressed in his full regalia, and had his private secretary ask them wait while he penned an abdication letter, which he stuck in his pocket just in case Reyes demanded it - that the Chief of the Imperial Staff and Minister of Defense preferred his son, possibly from a sense he'd be more pliable, was no secret.
As he came out in the drawing room where Reyes was waiting, however, Maximilian was surprised to hear how courteous the general was, and he would keep the fact that he had drafted his abdication a secret until his death seven years later. [2] Reyes puffed out his chest and announced to Maximilian that the Cabinet of Francisco Carbajal no longer retained the confidence of the Legislature or the public, and requested that he be given the opportunity to form a caretaker government that would negotiate Mexico's immediate exit from the war. They were alone in the room, but Reyes' men were outside with guns, and Maximilian had no idea that Reyes was announcing the contours of the treaty to the public as they spoke. He accepted Reyes proposal but asked he resign his commission in order to keep the administration in purely civilian hands, a point of pride for him, which Reyes agreed to do later that day. The Reyes Putsch had succeeded, entirely bloodlessly, and the uneasy, undemocratic cohabitation of Reyes' ambition and the Imperial family of the next seven years had officially begun..."
- Maximilian of Mexico
"...Reyes' seizure of power may have been bloodless on the day of October 20th, 1915, but it was not bloodless in its consolidation. Olegario Molina was assassinated by soldiers at his home in the Yucatan, and both Luis Terrazas and Enrique Creel were imprisoned on the 22nd, the latter beaten to death in his cell by guards within a month. Newspapers of both left and right opposed to the treaty that left Mexico's economy supine to American industry were shuttered and their editors forced into exile or jailed, ending the brief boomlet in Mexican liberal speech that had accompanied the Biennio Maderato for good. Reyes' Cabinet, formed on the afternoon of the 20th, was jam-packed with his cronies, with Carbajal rewarded with the Finance Ministry in return for his quiescent acceptance of the coup and immediate resignation; Mexican historians debate to this day the extent to which the outgoing Prime Minister was aware of Reyes' plans. The Legislature was dismissed, with Reyes requesting fresh elections to be held for the first time since 1911 after the completion of a peace treaty and the suspension of polls during the war, and with opposition parties more interested in fighting each other and themselves internally than the Bloc Independiente, it was a fait accompl how such elections, likely for February or March, would go.
But the crux of the matter in Mexico was that the public was generally done with the rationing, with the bodies returning home from the front, with the riots and rebellions across the North and South, and with the sense that Mexico had little to gain but everything to lose from following Confederate and Brazilian ambitions into the void. Of all the Bloc Sud members, Mexico had always been the most reluctant participant and thus the most eager to leave the war early following the deaths of more than two hundred thousand of her sons, a number many regard as an undercount. A concession of allowing the US Navy free use of a bay in a desert in the middle of nowhere seemed a small price for an end to the bloodshed not just on Mexican soil but in far-off lands such as Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia. The left had been gutted by the failures of the Red Battalions at the hands of Reyes working on behalf of the government, and now the right had been scattered to the wind by Reyes seizing the government. The broad, tired and relieved Mexican center stood behind him - most Mexicans, especially those outside of the capital, could not have cared less how Reyes staged his putsch and was appointed, under constitutional auspices, Prime Minister.
On the 22nd of October, Lascurain announced that the Americans had agreed to an immediate ceasefire lasting sixty days to allow for Mexico's negotiated exit of the war and acceptance of terms, carefully worded not to sound like a surrender, and ten days later Mexican negotiators led by the canny Foreign Minister had arrived in Chihuahua to be taken by train to San Diego, where they would hash out the final treaty. As far as Mexican historiography is concerned, the war ended with the Reyes Putsch. The postwar issues, of which there were many, were thus only just beginning..."
- The Other Mexico
[1] A hundred thousand dollars in 1915 is about 3 million today. So not going to bankrupt Mexico, but still a pretty steep sum, especially considering how much wealthier the US is than Mexico at this point in time.
[2] I've spoiled this before, I guess, but whatever, I'll do it again.
