After General Huerta saw General Porfirio Diaz off to Europe at Vera Cruz, he returned to the capital and placed himself at the disposition of Don Francisco L. de la Barra, Mexico’s new President ad interim.  President de la Barra dispatched him with a column of soldiers to Cuernavaca to restore peace.

Huerta placed himself at Senor Madero’s complete disposition when the latter was elected and inaugurated as President at Mexico.  Madero, for reasons that are self-evident, was anxious to propitiate the military element, and to secure the cooperation of the more experienced officers in the regular army for the better pacification of the country.  Accordingly, when Zapata and his bandit hordes gave signs of returning to their old ways, refusing to “stay bought,” President Madero sent General Huerta back into Morelos, at the head of a strong force of cavalry, mountain artillery, and machine guns, numbering altogether 3,500 men, with orders to put down Zapata’s new rebellion “at any cost.”  At the same time President Madero induced his former fellow rebel, Ambrosio Figueroa, now Commander-in-Chief of Mexico’s rural guards, to cooperate with General Huerta by bringing a mounted force of three thousand rurales from Guerrero into Morelos from the south so as to hem in the Zapatistas between himself and Huerta at Cuernavaca.  Figueroa’s men, though they had to cover three times the distance, struck the main body of the rebels first and got badly mussed up in the battle that followed.  General Huerta’s column did not get away from Cuernavaca until the second day of the fight, and did not reach the battlefield in the extinct crater of Mount Herradura until Figueroa’s rurales had been all but routed.  In the battle that followed, General Huerta succeeded in driving the rebels out of their strong position, but the losses of the federals, owing to their belated arrival and hastily taken positions, were disproportionately heavy.

This affair caused much ill-feeling between the rurales and regulars, and Figueroa sent word to Madero that he could not afford to sacrifice his men by trying to cooperate with such a poor general as Huerta.  The much-heralded joint campaign accordingly fell to the ground.

President Madero thereupon recalled General Huerta, and sent General Robles, of the regular army, to replace him in command.  This furnished Huerta with another grievance against Madero.

Some time afterward I heard General Huerta explain in private conversation to some of his old army comrades that he had been recalled from Morelos because of his sharp military measures against the Zapatistas, owing to President Madero’s sentimental preference for dealing leniently with his old Zapatista friends.  At the time when General Huerta made this private complaint, however, it was a notorious fact that his successor in Morelos, General Robles, had received public instructions from Madero to deal more severely with the Morelos rebels.  General Robles did, as a matter of fact, handle the Morelos rebels far more ruthlessly than Huerta, leading to his own subsequent recall on charges of excessive cruelty.