Editing Mexican Revolution (section)

===Heroes and villains===
[[File:Plaza de la Revolucion Chihuahua.jpg|thumb|upright|Equestrian bronze of Villa in Chihuahua, Chihuahua]]

The popular heroes of the Mexican Revolution are the two radicals who lost: Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa. As early as 1921, the Mexican government began appropriating the memory and legacy of Zapata for its own purposes.<ref>Brunk, Samuel, ''The Posthumous Career of Emiliano Zapata: Myth, Memory, and Mexico's Twentieth Century''</ref> Pancho Villa fought against those who won the Revolution and he was excluded from the revolutionary pantheon for a considerable time, but his memory and legend remained alive among the Mexican people. The government recognized his continued potency and had his remains reburied in the Monument of the Revolution after considerable controversy.{{sfn|Katz|1998}}

With the exception of Zapata who rebelled against him in 1911, Francisco Madero was revered as "the apostle of democracy". Madero's murder in the 1913 counterrevolutionary coup elevated him as a "martyr" of the Revolution, whose memory unified the Constitutionalist coalition against Huerta. Venustiano Carranza gained considerable legitimacy as a civilian leader of the Constitutionalists, having supported Madero in life and led the successful coalition that ousted Huerta. Then Carranza downplayed Madero's role in the revolution in order to substitute himself as the origin of the true revolution. Carranza owned "the bullets taken from the body of Francisco I. Madero after his murder. Carranza had kept them in his home, perhaps because they were a symbol of a fate and a passive denouement he had always hoped to avoid."<ref name=":7">Enrique Krauze, ''Mexico: Biography of Power''. New York: [[HarperCollins]], 1997, p. 373.</ref>

Huerta remains the enduring villain of the Mexican Revolution for his coup against Madero. Díaz is still popularly and officially reviled, although there was an attempt to rehabilitate his reputation in the 1990s by President [[Carlos Salinas de Gortari]], who was implementing the North American Free Trade Agreement and amending the constitution to eliminate further land reform. Pascual Orozco, who with Villa captured Ciudad Juárez in May 1911, continues to have an ambiguous status, since he led a major rebellion against Madero in 1912 and then threw his lot in with Huerta. Orozco much more than Madero was considered a manly man of action.