According to Asombroso, before Madero launched the Plan of San Luis, before the bells of Dolores tolled in memory, before the Revolution had an official date, a man in a remote village in Chihuahua took up a rifle and rose up against the dictatorship. He didn’t wait for orders. He didn’t wait for reinforcements. He didn’t wait for the perfect moment. He rose up because he could wait no longer. His name was Toribio Ortega.
He was the first revolutionary. The one who was ahead of schedule. The one who lit the fuse before the powder keg was ready. On November 14, 1910, six days before the date set by Madero, Ortega and his seventy men took Cuchillo Parado. The Mexican Revolution had begun. Not on November 20. On the 14th. And he fired the first shot.
In the history of the revolution, there is a before and after the events of November 20, 1910. Within this context of internal struggles and conflicts spanning more than thirty years, two men of unique origins stand out: General Saturnino Cedillo, the last to rise up in the revolution (in 1938), and the future Villista and Brigadier General Toribio Ortega Ramírez, the first to rise up. One closed the door. The other opened it. The Revolution, that thousand-headed monster, had its first cry in Cuchillo Parado, not in Dolores.
Ortega was born in the town of Coyame, in the district of Iturbide, in the arid state of Chihuahua, on a distant April 16, 1870. He was the son of Teodoro Ortega and Isidra Ramírez, who, when Toribio was young, moved to the town of Cuchillo Parado. There he grew up. There he learned to hate the landowners. There he learned that land isn’t asked for, it’s taken.
At fourteen, he worked in a store in Mexico City. He was young, poor, and ambitious. The capital dazzled him, but it didn’t corrupt him. He returned to his childhood village in 1896 to establish himself as a merchant.
From that time on, he began to emerge as one of the opponents of the state political bosses Creel and Terrazas, and the local boss Ezequiel Montes, as well as the unconstitutional actions of the region’s political leaders. He wasn’t an intellectual. He wasn’t a politician. He was a man who saw injustices and couldn’t remain silent.
In 1909, he became the leader of the anti-reelectionist club in Cuchillo Parado, supporting the presidential candidacy of Madero and Vázquez Gómez and declaring himself an enemy of the Porfirio Díaz regime. It wasn’t a secret. He said it out loud. In the town squares, in the cantinas, on the roads. Porfirio Díaz was a tyrant. And tyrants, sooner or later, fall.
This action, and those that followed in the call to arms, led to Toribio Ortega being watched by local leaders. An arrest warrant issued against him forced him to take up arms sooner than expected. On November 14, 1910, being the first of the leaders to rebel against the government, he seized his city at the head of seventy men. He didn’t wait for Madero. He didn’t wait for anyone. The arrest warrant arrived. Ortega refused to be captured. He grabbed a rifle and said, “Here I am.”
He allied himself with Abraham González, Madero’s trusted man in Chihuahua, and fought under Pascual Orozco in the battles of Ojinaga and Ciudad Juárez. He wasn’t a desk general. He was a guerrilla fighter. His men respected him because he shared their hardships. He slept on the floor, ate whatever was available, and fired his rifle.
When the Madero Revolution ended, he returned to his store with the rank of lieutenant colonel. He asked for nothing more. He asked for no land. He asked for no political positions. He went back to selling fabrics and seeds, as if the Revolution had never happened. But it had. And he had been the first.
Toribio Ortega didn’t die in an epic battle. He wasn’t executed by his enemies. He wasn’t betrayed by his friends. He died of old age, in his bed, surrounded by his family, in a year that history doesn’t record precisely. His name isn’t in the textbooks. His exploits aren’t commemorated in parades. But historians know the truth. The Mexican Revolution didn’t begin on November 20, 1910. It began on the 14th. In Cuchillo Parado. And Toribio Ortega fired the first shot.
© Content owned by Asombroso | Based on material from: Archives of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1911); biographies of Toribio Ortega; testimonies from the time; chronicles of Cuchillo Parado; research by the INEHRM; documents from the anti-reelectionist club of Chihuahua
Source: Asombroso
