When Carranza was ousted from power in 1920, Villa negotiated an amnesty with interim President Adolfo de la Huerta and was given a landed estate, on the condition he retire from politics.

In life, Villa helped fashion his own image as an internationally known revolutionary hero, starring as himself in Hollywood films and giving interviews to foreign journalists, most notably John Reed.

He quit school to help his mother after his father died, and worked as a sharecropper, muleskinner (arriero), butcher, bricklayer, and foreman for a U.S. railway company.

[24] Villa joined in the armed rebellion that Francisco Madero called for in 1910 to oust incumbent President Porfirio Díaz in the Plan de San Luis Potosí.

However, Madero signed the Treaty of Ciudad Juárez with the Díaz regime, under which the same power structure, including the recently defeated Federal Army, was retained.

"[citation needed] Orozco rebelled in March 1912, both for Madero's continuing failure to enact land reform and because he felt insufficiently rewarded for his role in bringing the new president to power.

With just seven men, some mules, and scant supplies, he returned into Mexico in April 1913 to fight Madero's usurper and his own would-be executioner, President Victoriano Huerta.

Through this time Villa focused on accessing funding from wealthy hacendados and raised money using methods such as forced assessments on hostile hacienda owners and train robberies.

[39] The well-known American journalist and fiction writer Ambrose Bierce, then in his seventies, accompanied Villa's army during this period and witnessed the Battle of Tierra Blanca.

[42] John Reed, who graduated from Harvard in 1910 and became a leftist journalist, wrote magazine articles that were highly important in shaping Villa's epic image for Americans.

President Woodrow Wilson knew some version of Villa's reputation, saying he was "a sort of Robin Hood [who] had spent an eventful life robbing the rich in order to give to the poor.

[14]: 263 [18]: 253  As Governor of Chihuahua, Villa recruited more experienced generals, including Toribio Ortega, Porfirio Talamantes, and Calixto Contreras, to his military staff and achieved more success than ever.

[47] The rebuilt railroad transported Villa's troops and artillery south,[48] where he defeated the Federal Army forces in a series of battles at Gómez Palacio, Torreón, and eventually at the heart of Huerta's regime in Zacatecas.

As Villa moved towards the capital his progress was halted due to a lack of coal to fuel the railroad engines, and critically, an embargo placed by the U.S. government on importation to Mexico.

Although nothing had changed for Villa historian Friedrich Katz writes that the exact motives of the U.S. government are hotly contested, it is likely that it was attempting to establish some type of control over Mexico by not allowing any one faction to become powerful enough to not need U.S.

The pact was ostensibly an updating of Carranza's narrow Plan of Guadalupe, adding radical language about land distribution and sanctions for the Roman Catholic Church for its support of Huerta.

After losing the Battle of Agua Prieta in Sonora, an overwhelming number of Villa's men in the Division del Norte were killed and 1,500 of the army's surviving members soon turned on him, accepting an amnesty offer from Carranza.

Villa was further enraged by Obregón's use of searchlights, powered by U.S. generated electricity, to help repel a Villista night attack on the border town of Agua Prieta, Sonora on 1 November 1915.

In January 1916, a group of Villistas attacked a train on the Mexico North Western Railway, near Santa Isabel, Chihuahua, and killed a number of U.S. nationals employed by the American Smelting and Refining Company.

[74] Many believed the raid was conducted because of the U.S. government's official recognition of the Carranza regime and for the loss of lives in battle due to defective cartridges purchased from the U.S.,[74] They attacked a detachment of the 13th Cavalry Regiment (United States), burned the town, and seized 100 horses and mules and other military supplies.

Villa was supplied arms from the U.S., employed international mercenaries and doctors including Americans, was portrayed as a hero in the U.S. media, made business arrangements with Hollywood, and did not object to the 1914 U.S. naval occupation of Veracruz.

Villa opposed the armed participation of the United States in Mexico, but he did not act against the Veracruz occupation in order to maintain the connections in the U.S. that were necessary to buy American cartridges and other supplies.

This was principally in the person of Felix A. Sommerfeld (noted in Katz's book), who allegedly funneled $340,000 of German money to the Western Cartridge Company in 1915, to purchase ammunition.

The last remaining 200 guerrillas and veterans of Villa's militia who were still loyal to him[91] would reside with him in his new hacienda as well,[91] and the Mexican government also granted them a pension that totalled 500,000 gold pesos.

[96][97] Villa sought Luz Corral as his wife, but her mother was opposed; however, the two were married by a priest "in a great ceremony, attended by his military chiefs and a representative of the governor.

On 20 July 1923, Villa was shot and killed in an ambush while visiting Parral, most likely on the orders of political enemies Plutarco Elías Calles and President Alvaro Obregón.

Assassinating Villa benefited the plans of Obregón, who chose someone who in no way matched his power and charisma, and Calles, who ardently wanted to be president of Mexico at any cost.

[115] Most historians attribute Villa's death to a well-planned conspiracy most likely initiated by Plutarco Elías Calles and his associate, General Joaquín Amaro with at least tacit approval of Obregón.

[116] According to local folklore, an American treasure hunter, Emil Holmdahl, beheaded him to sell his skull to an eccentric millionaire who collected the heads of historic figures.

Villa's purported death mask was hidden at the Radford School in El Paso, Texas until the 1980s, when it was sent to the Historical Museum of the Mexican Revolution in Chihuahua.