Mexican protesters borrowing tricks from bandit-revolutionary P

MEXICO CITY -- There's a Pancho Villa revival going on, but it's not the books, the new Antonio Banderas movie or the nostalgia wave that worries some Mexicans. It's the real-life reawakening of Villa's violence.

Rising social unrest swept to the pinnacles of power Dec. 10 when protesters on horseback broke down the ornate wooden doors of Congress and surged into the lower legislative chamber to demand subsidies for farmers and pay raises for teachers.

The protest was reminiscent of Villa's sweep across northern Mexico in the 1910-17 revolution, when he and his pistol-packing, horse-riding soldiers would burst through the gates of elegant haciendas to loot the rich landowners.

The invasion stunned lawmakers. The time for such violence is long past, all parties agreed -- even Mexico's leftist Democratic Revolution Party, which itself has flirted with violent demonstrations and rebellions.

"These violent pressure tactics are not the way to solve society's just demands," Democratic Revolution congressional leader Jesus Ortega said.

To some Mexicans, though, Villa remains a hero and his methods still appeal. Few embody Mexico's chaotic violence, devil-may-care attitude, sense of rough justice and spontaneous rebellion as much as the revolutionary leader.

His image has gone commercial, with restaurants from San Francisco to Moscow adopting Villa's name or grinning face as trademarks. New Mexico even has a state park named for Villa -- at the site of the 1916 raid where Villa's men crossed into the United States and killed 18 Americans.

The Antonio Banderas movie now in production in Mexico, "And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself," is expected to be a largely sympathetic view.

Recent writings like historian Freidrich Katz's 1998 two-volume biography, "The Life and Times of Pancho Villa," have cast the revolutionary as a social crusader who cut taxes and built schools during his brief time in power.

"Pancho Villa is synonymous with the fight against injustice," said Adolfo Lopez, a Mexico City assemblyman who in 1988 founded a rough-and-tumble slum group named the Francisco Villa Popular Front to fight for affordable housing.

The modern-day Villistas built a reputation by battling cops at stick-wielding demonstrations, hijacking buses, blocking traffic and leading squatters in illegal occupations of housing lots.

Lopez defends the group's tactics. "Given a choice between dying of hunger and dying with a rifle in your hand, a lot of people will choose the latter," he said.

But the group also copies some of Villa's less savory aspects. It uses iron-handed leadership to urge poorly educated troops into violence, with little explanation of what they are fighting for.

Pancho Villa's soldiers often shrugged when asked why they took up arms, and Lopez's followers at demonstrations often answer with a similar "We haven't been told yet."

In July, the Popular Front provided key support for a peasant uprising in Atenco, a town east of Mexico City threatened by a proposed airport. Villa would have been right at home: Machete-wielding farmers on horseback took hostages and hijacked gasoline tankers and threatened to blow them up.

The uprising succeeded in derailing the airport project, but it also deeply divided residents, lost the town all government funds, and installed a relatively undemocratic rebel council in power.

In southern Chiapas state, where small-scale farmers fear being overwhelmed by a looming free trade in farm produce, Zapatista rebels have taken to hanging Villa's portrait beside their own namesake, revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata.

The debate over Villa is still very much alive in Mexico, in part because the conditions he fought against are still here: a vast poor separated from a wealthy elite.

Critics say Mexico's conservative government may have brought fuller democracy to the country, but there has been little social change. That, for them, makes Villa the right man for the times.

But times have changed. Government leaders now choose negotiation over armed conflict, such as when they gave into Atenco residents' demands to stop the airport.

"You can't live in the past," said the Democratic Revolution Party's secretary-general, Carlos Navarrete. "We can't resolve present-day problems with rifles, bullets and machetes anymore. Now we have political parties, courts and legislatures to do that."