Villa's soldiers took Luis Terrazas's son from the British consulate for ransom, and Mexico bought the family's estates for 13.6 million pesos in 1922

Luis Terrazas bought large tracts in Chihuahua at low prices during the Apache wars and built them into one of Mexico's largest estates in the 1870s and 1880s. He added flour mills, meatpacking, a smelter, a brewery and the Banco Minero. By 1907 more than 13,000 people worked for the Terrazas family. In December 1913 Pancho Villa decreed the confiscation of the property of Terrazas and of Enrique and Juan Creel. The historian Pedro Salmerón notes the decree spared estates owned by Americans and Britons. On 13 December 1913 the US Secretary of War reported that Villa's men had forced their way into the British consulate in Chihuahua and taken Luis Terrazas Jr., to whom the consul had given asylum. He was held in the penitentiary for a ransom of 250,000 pesos. On 29 March 1922 President Obregón declared the Terrazas estates a public utility. The federal government bought them for 13,600,000 gold pesos, partly in cash and partly in "Terrazas Bonds." About 76,948 hectares of the former El Carmen and San Lorenzo haciendas became farm colonies and ejidos. In July 1922 Mexico's finance minister cited the Terrazas purchase to US officials as proof that expropriated land was paid above its constitutional value. Luis Terrazas died in Chihuahua on 18 June 1923, aged 93.