News •
For 35 years, from 1876 until a political revolution unseated him in 1911, the personality of Porfirio Díaz dominated the history of his country. Like Juárez, Díaz was a poor Indian from Oaxaca, but he was of Mixtec rather than Zapotec heritage. Educated locally, he had chosen a military career and had become an outstanding general in the republican cause against the French intervention and empire. Although he vied for the presidency against Juárez in 1867 and again in 1871, their ideological differences were not great. When in 1875 Lerdo ran for reelection, Díaz led a successful revolt and assumed the presidency in November 1876.
Díaz took the blueprint for Mexico’s future that Juárez and Lerdo had elaborated and implemented it. After clearing out pockets of political resistance during his first term of office, he turned the presidency over to Manuel González, a companion in arms. Díaz won the election again in 1884 and was regularly returned to that office through 1910. During his long regime he scrupulously kept democratic and constitutional forms intact, partly in the conviction that it was the president’s duty to train the unready Mexican people to use them properly.
Around him Díaz gathered many intellectuals (the científicos). They were positivists who stressed the need for rational planning and development. The emphasis was on economic development to assure social progress. How such development was to be achieved was translated into one of Díaz’s political slogans, “Pan o palo” (“Bread or the stick”), meaning that acquiescence to official policies would ensure livelihood, even wealth, but failure to agree would bring sure reprisals—harassment, imprisonment, death. More significantly from a philosophical and practical point of view, liberty was dropped from the earlier positivist triad of liberty, order, and progress. It was the price the Mexican people were expected to pay for the benefits the científicos’ policies would provide.
Capital, though badly needed, could not be attracted until Mexico had tidied up its international and national fiscal affairs. Mexican finances were placed on a solid base, and a stable currency was established. With guarantees of political and social tranquillity, foreign investment was encouraged and obtained. European and U.S. funds built some 15,000 miles (24,000 km) of railways, provided electricity and streetcars for the cities, created industrial complexes, rehabilitated port facilities, and developed the mining of industrial metals. Early petroleum concessions to foreigners laid the groundwork for serious problems later, when world navies shifted from coal to oil and when automobiles were mass-produced.
A complex mechanism in which all major and most minor decisions rested in the hands of the president evolved during the first two decades of the Díaz regime, or Porfiriato. The success of the practice rested on self-interest; Díaz made it worthwhile for everyone to support the system. For the most part, the small body of intellectuals was absorbed into the expanding bureaucracy or the subsidized press. The army and the church were made handmaidens of the regime rather than its adversaries; generals were encouraged to become entrepreneurs. While retaining the laws of La Reforma on the books, Díaz was purposely conciliatory toward the church and allowed it to regain some of its former economic power without letting it develop significant political influence.
The regime also perfected instruments of repression and control, though for many years it used them sparingly. Wages remained embarrassingly low and working hours too long throughout the period, and urban workers enjoyed no rights that management was obliged to respect. The labourers on Mexico’s large estates fared no better as most were landless and subject to the arbitrary authority of resident bosses (mayordomos). Education remained a near monopoly of elites in the larger cities. Troublesome elements such as the Yaqui Indians were inducted en masse and shipped as cheap labour to the sisal plantations of Yucatán or the tobacco fields of Oaxaca. Although technically elected by the local citizenry, governors were in effect personal appointees of the president. Their actions were monitored by jefes políticos (“political chiefs”), who reported directly to the president and on his authorization intervened in municipal and state affairs. An elite constabulary, the Rurales, like the Texas Rangers and Canadian Mounted Police, created a myth of ubiquity that eliminated the brigandage and banditry characteristic of the earlier 19th-century Mexican countryside. While pacification was welcomed, it was accompanied by fear and intimidation in rural areas as the Rurales seldom respected due process or civil liberties.
In an era in which material success was highly regarded, Díaz’s accomplishments were praised, but his popularity began to decline before the turn of the century. Prosperity had been preempted by a relatively small group, many of whom were foreigners. The Mexican economic and social elite self-consciously aped European (especially French) modes of dress, education, and even language. Between the affluent and the growing urban and rural proletariat there was an expanding middle-class body. Meanwhile, a new generation, which could recall none of the chaos of the days before Porfirio Díaz took charge, began to question the system. As criticism increased, so did repression. This unique confluence of circumstances midwived the great Mexican Revolution of 1910.
Precursors of revolution
Mexicans began to question the country’s apathetic acceptance of the Porfirian peace. The earliest and most vocal critics were Mexican radical groups, perhaps the most important of which called itself Regeneration. Its members were anarchists who adapted their dogmas to the Mexican scene. While always small in number and often ineffective in action, this group had great influence. Many of the reforms and programs it advocated were embodied in the Mexican constitution of 1917.
The leader of the Regeneration group was Ricardo Flores Magón, who had been born in Oaxaca of a mestiza mother and an indigenous father and had been sent for further education to Mexico City, where he had turned to idealistic student activism. For leading a small demonstration against the reelection of Díaz in 1892, he was jailed for the first of many times. The group’s movement took form in 1900, when Camilo Arriaga, a well-to-do engineer in San Luis Potosí, organized first a club and then a small party to restore the liberalism of Juárez. Arriaga called a national meeting of liberal clubs in 1901, and a short time later most of the small band were jailed, and their newspaper, Regeneración, which Flores Magón edited, was suppressed. After they served their prison sentences, the young radicals fled north to the United States and Canada, settling for a while in St. Louis, Mo., where they formally organized the Mexican Liberal Party. It was anarcho-syndicalist in orientation, dedicated to the overthrow of the Mexican government and the total renovation of Mexican society.
In 1906 the Regeneration group published a comprehensive program in the form of a manifesto that had wide, if clandestine, circulation in Mexico. It advocated a one-term presidency, guarantees of civil liberties, breaking the hold of the Roman Catholic Church, vast expansion of free public education, and land reform. It asked that Mexican citizenship be a prerequisite to property ownership and that unused land be distributed to the landless. The manifesto proposed confiscation of the wealth that Díaz and the científicos had illegally acquired, the abolition of child labour, guaranteed minimum wages, and improved conditions for workers. In muted tones it criticized capitalism as a system of exploitation. The Regeneration group drew its main lines of thought from Mikhail Bakunin, a Russian revolutionary writer who believed that the power of any institution, including government, that exercised controls over individuals should be reduced.
Many charges by the Regeneration and similar groups were borne out when Díaz’s troops, in bloody fashion, broke strikes in the textile region of Veracruz and the copper-mining regions of the northwest state of Sonora. Several of these strikes had been fomented by Regeneration organizers at the same time that U.S. muckrakers were exposing the evils of corrupt government, big business, and other aspects of life in the United States and abroad. Possibly to refute their unfavourable reports, Díaz gave an interview in 1908 to an American reporter, James Creelman, that became a milestone in prerevolutionary history. To blunt charges of one-man rule, Díaz very carefully but clearly said that in his view the time had come for Mexico to advance toward democracy, that he would welcome an opposition party, that he would be most happy to sustain and guide the opposition party, and that to inaugurate a democratic government in Mexico he would forget himself. This fell like a bombshell in Mexico, where most readers failed to note that he had not specified a time. It was widely believed that this implied he would not run for the presidency in 1910. Mexican newspapers and independent publishers not only reprinted the interview but also began openly to speculate on the upcoming elections.
Two main opposition groups soon emerged. One backed General Bernardo Reyes as vice presidential candidate over Díaz’s handpicked candidate. Reyes forthrightly opposed científico theories and practices and, as governor of the progressive northern state of Nuevo León, had not only stimulated the modernization impulse but had also initiated a series of far-reaching reforms, including a workman’s compensation law.
The other opposition party, the Anti-Reelectionists, had been created largely through the efforts of Francisco I. Madero, then a political unknown, whose efforts would subsequently elevate him to the highest place in the revolutionary pantheon as the “Apostle of Democracy.” Born into one of the richest families in Mexico, whose agricultural enterprises spread over much of northern Mexico, Madero was educated in the United States and France. In his own right he became an enlightened entrepreneur and amassed a considerable personal fortune.
Madero concerned himself with Mexico’s position in a rapidly changing world. Mexican food prices were rising, and rural and urban standards of living were dropping. He attributed Mexico’s social inequities to the prolonged political dictatorship. He helped journalists to expose these matters and initially provided considerable early financial support to the Regeneration group, but he disassociated from them after about 1907 when it became clearer that they intended to destroy, not reform, the system.
Madero, setting about to organize a national party to compete in the 1910 elections, published La sucesión presidencial en 1910 (1908; “The Presidential Succession in 1910”) as a campaign document, two-thirds of which dealt with the history of Mexico and the corrupting influences of absolute power and the rest with his program to revive the democracy that had atrophied for so long. Despite harassment, Madero carried on a vigorous and wearying campaign in the summer of 1909. During an interview with Díaz, he was surprised by the dictator’s remoteness from current issues. On the other hand, Madero’s campaign speeches were well received and a source of encouragement to the Anti-Reelectionists.
On June 14 Madero was arrested and jailed and thus became the martyr and victim of the system he was trying peacefully to change. Since it was perfectly clear that Díaz was not going to permit free and honest elections, Madero and his followers decided that the only hope of improving Mexico was through armed revolt. On October 4, 1910, the Chamber of Deputies, which had assembled as the electoral college, declared that Díaz had been reelected. On October 5 Madero managed to escape from San Luis Potosí, where he had first been jailed and subsequently had been confined under house arrest. He arrived on October 7 in San Antonio, Texas, where with aides he prepared and issued, as of the day of his escape, the Plan of San Luis Potosí, which proclaimed the principles of “effective suffrage, no reelection.” Madero declared that Díaz was illegally president of Mexico. Designating Sunday, November 20, as the day when citizens should take up arms against the Díaz government, Madero promised that a successful revolution would institute political reforms.
But on November 20, the official birthday of the Mexican Revolution, no mass uprisings took place. Nevertheless, small bands of guerrillas, most of them in northern Mexico, kept the rebellion alive while Madero used his family fortune to supply them with arms from Texas. Under the leadership of Pascual Orozco and Pancho Villa, the northern rebels began to defeat Federalist forces, who held most of the strategic rail lines, especially those emanating from Ciudad Juárez, on the U.S. border, where the Federalist troops had consolidated. Until the revolutionists laid siege to that city, no more than 2,500 armed men were engaged in the Madero revolution.