In April 1914, two months before Franz Ferdinand is shot and three months before the Great War begins, an incident in the port city of Tampico causes Woodrow Wilson to seriously consider “intervention” in Mexico. 

The Mexican Revolution had been underway since 1910, and the Wilson Administration has refused to recognize to its new leader - Victoriano Huerta. An American intervention could make Tampico safe for the Americans living and doing business in Mexico, and talk of war is all over the papers. 

Why is Tampico so important to the U.S.? Oil, of course. 

Music by Epidemic Sound.

Sources for today's episode:

• The Prize by Daniel Yergin
• The World Crisis by Winston Churchill
• Gangsters of Capitalism by Jonathan M. Katz
• Woodrow Wilson by John Milton Cooper Jr.
• Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn by Christopher Cox