Madero, a wealthy landowner turned reformist, had called for an uprising to begin at 6pm on November 20 after fleeing to Texas following a rigged election and brief imprisonment. Though the initial uprising was disorganized, it catalyzed regional revolts led by figures like Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata that toppled Díaz's 34-year dictatorship within months. The ensuing decade of civil war reshaped Mexican land ownership, labor rights, and political structure, producing the 1917 constitution still in force today.
Porfirio Díaz had ruled Mexico for 34 years, modernizing railways and finance while concentrating land in the hands of a small elite and crushing dissent. Francisco Madero, an unlikely revolutionary, a slight, mild-mannered spiritualist from a wealthy landowning family, ran against him in a sham 1910 election, was jailed, then fled to San Antonio, Texas, where he issued the Plan of San Luis Potosí, calling Mexicans to rise up at 6 p.m. on November 20.
The initial uprising fizzled in most places, but the spark caught in the north and south simultaneously. Pascual Orozco and Pancho Villa raised forces in Chihuahua; within the year, Emiliano Zapata's peasant army was fighting under the banner 'Tierra y Libertad,' land and liberty, in Morelos. Díaz resigned by May 1911 and sailed for European exile, reportedly remarking that Madero had 'unleashed a tiger,' only to discover he himself could not control it.
The revolution consumed an estimated one to two million lives over the following decade through battle, disease, and famine, and devoured Madero himself, assassinated in 1913. It produced the progressive 1917 constitution, still Mexico's governing charter, enshrining land reform, labor rights, and limits on church and foreign corporate power.