The Life and Times of Pancho Villa

After Villa's troops withdrew from Columbus, he seemed to have become a pariah, isolated from and shunned by the outside world. The same heterogeneous forces in the United States that had supported him in 1913-14 now turned against him. The U. S. media, which had praised him before, now savaged him. American radicals saw him as a provocateur in the pay of U. S. business interests, while American conservatives accused President Wilson of having supported a bandit. The Wilson administration dispatched the Punitive Expedition against him, and U. S. business withdrew from Mexico. The few supporters Villa still had in the United States were so intimidated that none of them dared to speak out in his favor. Moreover, his access to supplies and arms from the United States seemed to have entirely disappeared.

And yet within a year after the Punitive Expedition left Mexico, Villa's relationship to the outside world changed once again; important forces both in and outside the United States once again attempted to play the Villa card, and his supporters again made their voices heard.