Ypiranga Incident - Background

Background

In February 1913, Victoriano Huerta launched a coup, known as the Ten Tragic Days, with the support of Félix Díaz, the nephew of deposed president Porfirio Díaz and American Ambassador Henry Lane Wilson, to overthrow the government of Francisco I. Madero. Mexico had been engaged in civil war for almost two years up to this point and Huerta was unable to enact his plans for pacification. Instead, he had to continue fighting the rebels for a time and his resources were spread thinly. President William Howard Taft concluded, based on the magnitude of the domestic violence, that no arms shipments were authorized to travel from the United States to Mexico by order of Congress. Huerta became dependent on European and Asian weapons for a short time until he created connections in the United States through his agents who coordinated arms sales to locations in Cuba that were then smuggled across the Gulf of Mexico. Huerta began working closely with Leon Raast, the Russian vice-consul in Mexico City. Raast traveled to New York to meet with the Huertista agent Abraham Ratner and Marquard and Company, Importers to purchase twenty machine guns to add to the stockpile already warehoused in the city. Raast then met with the president of Gans Steamship Line who would transport the contraband for him but could not legally consign the weapons to a port in Mexico, however, he would consign to a port in Odessa, Russia.