Enrique Gorostieta Velarde (Monterrey, 1889 – Atotonilco el Alto, June 2, 1929) was a Mexican soldier best known for his leadership as a general during the Cristero War. Life Born in Monterrey into a prominent Mexican-Basque family, Enrique Gorostieta Velarde had a typically secular education. His early life is not well documented, but it is known that his father, an attorney and businessman, had personal ties with Victoriano Huerta, and that Enrique was encouraged by his mother to take up a military career, and he enrolled at the Heroic Military College of Chapultepec in 1906. Upon graduation in May 1911, the same month Porfirio Díaz stepped down from the Presidency, Gorostieta — as a protege of Victoriano Huerta — served on campaigns against Emiliano Zapata in September 1911 and against Pascual Orozco in April–May 1912. During Huerta's short dictatorship of 1913-14, Gorostieta's father was Secretary of the Treasury (Secretario de Hacienda). During the Mexican Revolution he served in the Federal Army of counterrevolutionary dictator Victoriano Huerta, being Huerta's youngest general, and after Huerta's fall fought with Juan Andreu Almazán, but soon fled Mexico for Cuba and later the United States. Upon his return to Mexico, he worked as a soap manufacturer, but found the work boring, and sought a return to military activity. In 1927 the National League for the Defense of Religious Liberty chose him to lead the Cristeros, an army of Catholic rebels fighting against the government forces of president Plutarco Elías Calles. Gorostieta has been called a Mason and lifelong anti-clerical, but recent letters of his have led historians to believe he was neither. Gorostieta's motivation for taking command of the rebels was not only the high salary he was offered (about 3000 pesos per month, or twice the salary of a regular Army General), but also his political ambition. Although Gorostieta's 1928 "Plan de Los Altos" called for changes to the 1917 Constitution's Article 27 (which the Cristeros saw as restricting the rights of Catholics) and — more important to Gorostieta — install a Gorostieta regime on the country. Philosophically, he believed in a return to the Juarez-inspired 1857 Constitution's view of non-interference and toleration for religion, rather than the Calles' administration's reading of the 1917 Constitution as demanding subordination of religious organizations to the state. Although openly contemptuous of his subordinates' religious faith (several of his officers were priests), he respected the military acumen of