Revolutionary journalist attacks Mexico from Texas

On this day in 1891, Catarino Erasmo Garza led a group of twenty-six armed men across the Rio Grande at Mier, Tamaulipas, and proclaimed the "Plan Revolucionario." This beginning episode in the so-called Garza War adumbrated the impending Mexican Revolution. Garza, a sewing-machine salesman and newspaper publisher, had spent years in the United States, where he and his comrades started numerous Spanish-language newspapers that advocated the overthrow of the Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz. When Garza attacked Mexico in 1891, the Díaz regime so harshly suppressed the Garcistas in northern Mexico that a pro-Garza reaction occurred in Texas. Fearing war, however, the U.S. government and Texas authorities drove Garza from the state in 1892. He wandered from revolution to revolution in the Caribbean and South America and was reported killed in Colombia in 1895. Like many dead folk heroes, he continued to be sighted for some time.