Once A Terrorist, Pancho Villa Now Celebrated In Columbus, NM

In 1916 this was ground zero, target of a cross-border raid by Pancho Villa that killed 18 Americans, enraged the nation and almost started a war with Mexico.

Which is why today, standing on Villa Hill in Pancho Villa State Park, looking toward Pancho Villa Caf, Pancho Villa Lounge and Hacienda Villa Motel, and thinking about the coming “Raid Day” fiesta, the unimaginable suddenly seems imaginable:

Lower Manhattan in 2096, as tourists visit Osama bin Laden State Park, where they learn how the Muslim militant planned the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, how he eluded U.S. forces, and why he hated America.

It’s outrageous, far-fetched and much like Columbus today, says Richard Dean, whose great-grandfather was killed when 500 Villa soldiers hit this border town on March 9, 1916, during the Mexican Revolution. It was the worst foreign attack on the continental United States ? until Sept. 11, 2001.

That day, “I thought, ‘That’s what happened here!’ ” says Dean, president of the Columbus Historical Society. Except for the scale of destruction, he says, the parallels “are mind-boggling”: a sneak attack by a foreign insurgent who sought revenge for perceived injustices, and then vanished into forbidding terrain.

Read the full USA Today article here.