In 1976, the Mexican government finally buried one of its most polarizing national heroes with full military honors at the Monument to the Revolution in Mexico City. There were just two strange details. The tomb already housed the men who had murdered him. And the body they laid to rest was missing its head. This episode is a deep dive into the man in the headless tomb: Pancho Villa.

We trace the impossible arc, from illiterate sharecropper and bandit on the run to commander of the División del Norte, the most feared cavalry of the Mexican Revolution. We unpack the alliance that toppled dictator Victoriano Huerta, the ideological collapse with Venustiano Carranza (the wealthy constitutionalist who saw Villa as an uneducated warlord with too much military power), and the slide back into civil war once the common enemy was gone. We als ...