Porfirio Díaz

gigatos | June 9, 2022

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Summary

José de la Cruz Porfirio Díaz Mori (July 2, 1915) was a Mexican politician, military man and dictator. The time he spent as president of Mexico was unprecedented, reaching thirty years and one hundred and five days, and this period in Mexican historiography is called Porfiriato.

Before assuming the presidency, he was an outstanding military man who stood out for his participation in the Second French Intervention in Mexico. He fought in the Battle of Puebla, the Siege of Puebla, the Battle of Miahuatlán and the Battle of La Carbonera. On October 15, 1863, President Benito Juarez appointed him Division General and on the 28th of the same month he was given the military command of 4 states: Veracruz, Puebla, Oaxaca and Tlaxcala. His military actions in the state of Oaxaca stood out, where he organized guerrillas against the French. On April 2, 1867, Diaz took Puebla, and on June 15 of that year he recovered Mexico City for the republican troops.

He took up arms against the federal government on two occasions: the first against Benito Juárez, with the Plan de La Noria, and later, against Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada, elaborating the Plan de Tuxtepec. After the triumph of the second plan, Diaz assumed the presidency of the country on an interim basis between November 28, 1876 and December 6, 1876, and for the second time from February 17, 1877 to May 5, 1877. He exercised the office in constitutional form from May 5, 1877 to November 30, 1880. Subsequently, he held the presidency of the country uninterruptedly from December 1, 1884 to May 25, 1911.

Convinced advocate of positivist progress. Among the main characteristics of his mandate were the expansion of the railroad in Mexico, the growth of foreign investment and the development of capitalism in the Mexican economy.

My father was poor when he married. Seeing that his wife did not like living in the Sierra de Ixtlán, he decided to make his fortune and moved to the Pacific coast of the state of Oaxaca… and set up a store in the valley of Xochistlahuaca.

Porfirio Díaz was born in Oaxaca, in the former province of Antequera, on the night of September 15, 1830 and was baptized by his godfather José Agustín Domínguez that same day. He was the sixth of seven children, conceived in the marriage of José Faustino Díaz Orozco and María Petrona Cecilia Mori Cortés, who married in 1808, when Díaz”s father managed the business of a mining and metals company in Cinco Señores, San José and El Socorro, in the district of Ixtlán. Shortly thereafter, José Faustino enlisted in Vicente Guerrero”s insurgent army, where he served as a veterinarian, and, after a time, was named colonel. In 1819, after eleven years of marriage, the couple conceived their first daughter, Desideria. Two years later, twins Cayetano and Pablo were born, who died in infancy; then came the birth of two more women, Manuela and Nicolasa. In 1830 Porfirio was born, and in 1833, the youngest brother, Felipe Díaz Mori.

In 1820, the Díaz family settled in downtown Oaxaca City, where they bought an inn in front of the temple of the Virgen de la Soledad, which housed travelers who came to the city to trade. During this time, José Faustino Díaz set up a business dedicated to blacksmithing, which produced profits that allowed his family to have a comfortable economic situation for some years.

In mid 1833, an epidemic of cholera morbus developed in the city of Oaxaca. In early August, José Faustino Díaz was infected, and on August 29 he dictated his will, leaving all his assets to his wife, Petrona Mori. Shortly thereafter, the inn was no longer profitable and the family acquired the Solar del Toronjo. This is how Porfirio Díaz describes in his Memoirs, the family situation after his father”s death: “Her good judgment and her motherly duties provided her with the means to prolong for a long time those scarce resources” The young Díaz girls: Manuela, Desideria and Nicolasa dedicated themselves to weaving, sewing, and making good desserts and food to sell and maintain an economic sustenance in the family; Petrona Mori, planted nopales for the production and sale of grana cochinilla. In one of the patios of the Solar del Toronjo, the family raised pigs.

In 1835, Porfirio entered the Amiga School, an educational institution controlled by the parish of Oaxaca, where he learned to read and write. He spent his days playing with friends and neighbors in the Solar del Toronjo. It is said that on one occasion, angry with his brother Felix for some trivial act, he put gunpowder in his nose while he was sleeping and set him on fire. Since then, Felix El Chato” Díaz has been called Felix El Chato” Díaz.

Porfirio”s godfather, José Agustín Domínguez y Díaz, who was a priest and would become Bishop of Antequera, recommended his mother to hasten her son”s entrance to the Tridentine Seminary of Oaxaca. In 1843, Porfirio entered the seminary, beginning with a bachelor of arts degree. For three years, until 1846, Porfirio studied physics, mathematics, logic, grammar, rhetoric and Latin. In this last subject he achieved high grades, so in order to earn money for his family, he began to give Latin classes to Guadalupe Pérez, son of Marcos Pérez.

When the U.S. Intervention in Mexico took place, the seminary of Oaxaca felt the need to fight against the invaders, an idea that was supported and encouraged by the priests and teachers. In October of that year, several students went to see the governor of the state and asked to join the national army. Porfirio Díaz was in that group, and the cadets were assigned to the San Clemente Battalion. However, soon after, the war ended and the students could not go to fight.

One night, after leaving the house of Don Marcos Perez, after teaching his son Don Guadalupe Perez, I was invited to the solemn ceremony for the distribution of awards that was to take place that same night at the state school. I accepted the invitation and at that moment I was introduced to the governor of the state, don Benito Juárez.

Porfirio Díaz was giving Latin classes to Guadalupe Pérez, son of the prominent Serrano lawyer Marcos Pérez, who had a strong and close relationship with Benito Juárez. One day at the end of one of his classes, Marcos Perez invited young Porfirio to attend an awards ceremony at the Liberal College. Porfirio Díaz accepted, and went to the event where he met the then governor of the state of Oaxaca, Benito Juárez. Upon observing the open and respectful treatment of Marcos Perez and Benito Juarez, and upon hearing speeches that spoke of young people as friends, and the rights of man, (something that did not happen and took into account in the seminary) Porfirio decided to leave the seminary and enter the Institute of Sciences and Arts of Oaxaca, then considered heretical. His godfather José Agustín, by then already named bishop of the diocese, withdrew his economic and moral support. Despite having been a regular student throughout his school career, Diaz managed to get ahead in his law studies, and by the end of 1850, he became a teacher in that same institute. Shortly after, and due to his family”s economic situation, Porfirio became a bolero, later he worked in an armory assembling and repairing rifles, and at the same time he got a job as a carpenter. In 1854, he replaced Rafael Urquiza as librarian of the Institute. When Manuel Iturribarría, professor of the chair of natural law, left the post due to illness, Díaz became an interim professor. This partly improved his economic situation and that of his family. Díaz studied Roman law, a subject he passed with the best grade of his generation, and his classmates at the institute were Matías Romero and José Justo Benítez. From 1852 to 1853 he was a student of Benito Juárez in civil law.

After the death of her father, her sister Desideria married a merchant from Michoacán, Antonio Tapia, with whom she had several children of whom only two survived. She lived in Michoacán until her death, and her sister Nicolasa married prematurely and was widowed (she left no descendants). Manuela, his other sister, had an extramarital affair with the physician Manuel Ortega Reyes, to whom her daughter Delfina Ortega Díaz was born, who would eventually become the wife of her uncle Porfirio, who describes her early years:

My special conditions were: good size, remarkable physical development, great agility and great inclination, aptitude and taste for athletic exercises. I got my hands on a gymnastics book, probably the first one in Oaxaca, and this allowed me to improvise a small gymnasium in my house where my brother and I exercised. I got to make fine shoes, good boots, and naturally, at a much lower cost than they had to buy them in the shoe store. Shortly after that my brother left to study at the Military College in Mexico City.

Military career

On March 1, 1854, in Ayutla de los Libres, in the current State of Guerrero, Florencio Villareal and Juan N. Álvarez proclaimed the Plan de Ayutla against President Antonio López de Santa Anna, who had been in power for the eleventh time since April 20, 1853, and with this proclamation, the Ayutla Revolution began. With this proclamation, the Ayutla Revolution began. In Oaxaca, Marcos Pérez and his friends began to plan a movement to support the Revolution, for which they established correspondence with the American city of New Orleans, where ex-governor Benito Juárez was exiled, as a consequence of a personal quarrel with Santa Anna. When members of the government”s secret police discovered the conspirators” letters, Marcos Pérez and his companions were imprisoned in the Santo Domingo convent. Porfirio Díaz tried to visit Pérez, but his family tried to discourage him saying: “The walls of Santo Domingo cannot be climbed”. Díaz managed to climb the towers of the convent, with the help of his brother, on the night of November 23, and was able to communicate via Latin with Marcos Pérez. A few weeks later, Governor Martínez Pinillos decreed amnesty for the prisoners, and Porfirio Díaz was the one who communicated it to them. In December, the same governor exiled Pérez in Tehuacán (Puebla), and ordered the capture of Díaz, for having publicly voted against Santa Anna and in favor of Álvarez, calling him “His Excellency General Don Juan Álvarez”, who immediately formed a small guerrilla, with which he confronted the federal forces in the confrontation of Teotongo, on February 7, 1855.

On August 9, 1855, Santa Anna resigned the presidency and embarked in the port of Veracruz to Cuba. Juan N. Álvarez, who had led the revolution, became provisional president. On August 27, Benito Juárez returned from his exile abroad and was appointed governor of Oaxaca. Celestino Macedonio, who was the Secretary of State Government, appointed Díaz as political chief of the District of Ixtlán. In this town, and in spite of the opposition of the state military chief, Díaz organized the first guard in the history of Ixtlán, with which he participated, at the end of 1856, in the first siege of Oaxaca, where he received a bullet wound, reason why Dr. Esteban Calderón performed an operation on him.

As a reward for his services to the liberal cause, President Ignacio Comonfort conferred Díaz the military command of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, at the head of Sto. Domingo Tehuantepec. Facing an imminent conservative rebellion, Diaz took Jamiltepec, in the district of Ixcapa, where he managed to stop the conservative advance. In Tehuantepec he met the Dominican of liberal tendencies Mauricio López, the postmaster Juan Calvo, the judge and merchant Juan A. Avendaño, and the French traveler Charles Etienne Brasseur. He also had contact with the Zapotec and Mixtec cultures, since he had maternal blood from the latter. He met the distinguished Tehuana Doña Juana C. Romero, descendant of an important political family, so he got in touch with her to, years later during the Porfiriato, promote the development of the Isthmus. In 1860, he left Oaxaca for the first time. It is then when Brasseur describes him as “Tall, well-built, of remarkable distinction, his face of great nobility, pleasantly tanned, seemed to me to reveal the most perfect traits of the old Mexican aristocracy…, it would be desirable that all the provinces of Mexico were administered by people of his character. Porfirio Diaz is, without a moment”s hesitation, the man of Oaxaca”.

At the outbreak of the Reform War, Díaz fought in several battles, such as the military action of Calpulalpan, under the orders of José María Díaz Ordaz and Ignacio Mejía. In three years he was conferred the positions of major, colonel and lieutenant general. After the liberal triumph, on January 11, 1861, Diaz was nominated for federal deputy, obtaining a seat for Oaxaca in the Congress of the Union. However, when Melchor Ocampo, Leandro Valle and Santos Degollado were executed by the conservative forces during the course of the year, Diaz requested permission to be absent and go to fight. The permission was granted and his substitute, Justo Benítez, took his place.

On October 31, a convention was held in London between the representatives of Spain, France and England, with the purpose of defining the policy to be followed with Mexico”s debts, since on July 24, Juarez suspended payments due to the bankruptcy of the national treasury. At the beginning of December, French, Spanish and English forces arrived in Veracruz, Córdoba and Orizaba, commanded by Dubois de Saligny, Juan Prim and John Russell. Thanks to the intervention of the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Mexican government, Manuel Doblado, Spain and England withdrew their troops, as established in point number four of the Treaties of La Soledad. However, France refused to abandon Mexican territory and in March 1862 advanced into the interior with a little more than 5,000 soldiers, under the command of Charles Ferdinand Latrille, Count of Lorencez. At the end of April of that same year, they fortified themselves in Las Flores, a small town in the State of Veracruz. Benito Juarez ordered Ignacio Zaragoza, Mexican general who participated on the liberal side in the Reform War, to confront the French forces in Puebla. On May 5, Díaz and other military men intervened in the Battle of Puebla, where they managed to defeat the French and make them retreat to Orizaba. Diaz defended the left wing of the city, and twice repulsed the French attack. Once they fled, González Ortega and Porfirio Díaz set themselves the task of pursuing them, until Zaragoza prevented them from doing so. That same day, Juarez received a letter from Zaragoza mentioning the details of the battle, and emphasizing “the determination and bizarreness of citizen general Don Porfirio Diaz”.

On September 8, Zaragoza died in Puebla. At the beginning of 1863, Emperor Napoleon III sent thirty thousand soldiers to Mexican soil, as his intention was to impose a French (and European) geopolitical presence once again in America. Federico Forey was the commander of the Gallic forces, who laid siege to Puebla on April 3, 1863. Jesús González Ortega was in charge of defending the plaza, with the help of other military men such as Miguel Negrete, Felipe Berriozábal and Díaz. After more than a month of failed military actions by both sides, the city fell into the hands of the French on the night of May 17. Diaz ordered the destruction of all the armament and ammunition of the Mexican army, so that they would not fall into the hands of the French. Once the invading troops entered the Mexican fortification, the Republican soldiers were taken prisoner.

Díaz, along with all the other soldiers, was captured and detained in the Convent of Santa Inés, in Puebla, the prisoners were taken to Veracruz, where they would be taken to Martinique. Two days before being embarked, Diaz and Berriozabal escaped to Mexico City. In this city, Juarez and his ministers were preparing to escape, since Juan Nepomuceno Almonte”s troops were going to take the capital with the help of French reinforcements. Díaz spoke with Juárez on the morning of May 31, when the president asked him what he was willing to do for the liberal cause. Díaz answered that he needed to organize an army to fight the conservative and French forces. Juárez, on the advice of Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada, assigned 30,000 to his military division, with which Díaz marched to Oaxaca as interim governor. Towards the middle of June, he managed to reach Oaxaca accompanied by his brother Felipe and Colonel Manuel González, who had escaped from the conservative forces in Celaya, when former President Comonfort was defeated and assassinated.

During the whole year of 1864, Diaz and Gonzalez developed a guerrilla war in Oaxaca, and the French were never able to penetrate the state. However, the triumphs of the conservatives increased and Juarez was forced to leave Monterrey for Paso del Norte (today known as Ciudad Juarez). A group of military and conservative clergymen went to Vienna, Austria, in October 1863 to offer the crown of the Mexican Empire to Archduke Maximilian of Habsburg and his wife Carlota of Belgium. After a small survey among the high political and social circles of the country, Maximilian accepted the proposal and became emperor on June 10, 1864, thus establishing the Second Mexican Empire. Towards the beginning of February 1865, Diaz began the fortification of Oaxaca, since the forces of Aquiles Bazaine were about to take the old Antequera. On February 19 Bazaine began the Siege of Oaxaca, and after several months of siege, Díaz surrendered on June 22. Bazaine ordered him to be shot, but the intervention of Justo Benítez saved his life. He was confined to life imprisonment in the Carmelite Convent, in Puebla, for the crime of sedition. However, in prison, he befriended the Hungarian Baron Louis de Salignac, who was in charge of the prison. On one occasion, when the military commander of the plaza left the city, Diaz tried to escape with a knife and a rope. The baron discovered him, but instead of denouncing him, he let him go. That same afternoon he organized a hundred men to go out to combat and wrote a letter to Juarez. It was September 20, 1865.

After more than a year recruiting men and supplies, Diaz returned to the south of the country, where he was supported by the old liberal cacique Juan Alvarez. He reorganized the Army of the East and with his troops triumphed on October 3, 1866 in the Battle of Miahuatlán and on October 18 in the Battle of La Carbonera. After more than two months of preparation and the taking of cities in Oaxaca, the Army of the East took the capital on the night of December 27. Diaz immediately set himself up as provisional governor, dismissed and executed the French authorities. The archbishop of Oaxaca, launched a sermon against the republican government, but Diaz had him hanged under the charge of rebellion. When Diaz left Oaxaca, in January 1867, he named Juan de Dios Borja as substitute governor.

On February 5, 1867, in Paris, Napoleon III sent a report to Bazaine ordering the withdrawal of French troops from Mexico, in view of the pressure exerted by the press, public opinion and the French parliament, and because of the tension with the Prussians that in the near future would lead to the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War. This measure meant the beginning of the fall of the Empire, since the conservative forces of the emperor barely totaled 500 soldiers. The liberal advance began, Maximilian, accompanied by the conservative military men Tomas Mejia and Miguel Miramon, left with his troops to Queretaro, where Mariano Escobedo laid siege to the city, which surrendered on May 15. Meanwhile, Carlota of Belgium marched to Vienna, Paris and Rome, where she met with Francis Joseph I, Napoleon III and his wife Eugenia de Montijo, and Pope Pius IX. In all three cases, she asked for support for her husband, which was denied. In Rome she went mad, and was confined for the rest of her life in a castle in Brussels, where she died on January 19, 1927 at the age of 87.

In March, the siege of Puebla began, commanded by Díaz. For more than three weeks he cut off the city”s communication and defeated the troops of Leonardo Márquez, who after being defeated by the liberals, fled to Toluca. After several days of meditations, on the morning of April 2, 1867, Díaz assaulted Puebla. Thus culminated the military action known as the Battle of April 2, in which Puebla fell, the only city in the south that was in the hands of the French. Only Quéretaro and the capital had yet to fall.

Márquez had managed to fortify seven hundred men in the plains near Toluca, the city before which Díaz and his men were heading. On the morning of April 16, he commissioned commander Gonzalo Montes de Oca to confront Márquez. The result was favorable to the Mexican troops, and Márquez fled to Cuba, where he died in 1913.

This event is known as the Battle of the Lomas de San Lorenzo and from there began the siege of Mexico City, which lasted until June 15, when the whole country was already in the hands of the Republicans. During the siege and at the time of entering the city, Diaz prohibited looting and robbery; two soldiers disobeyed him and were shot.

On May 15, Maximilian surrendered the plaza of Queretaro to Mariano Escobedo, and was taken prisoner along with Miramon and Mejia. After a summary trial for breaking international laws, national sovereignty and the Treaty of Soledad, they were shot on the morning of June 19, in spite of the fact that several characters tried to save the emperor”s life, such as Victor Hugo, French writer, wrote to Juarez asking for clemency for the emperor. The Countess of Salm Salm, who interceded for Maximilian before Diaz, did the same before Juarez, but the answer was the same. The population of Mexico was led to believe that Maximilian was still alive and would return triumphant to the capital, until Diaz circulated a pamphlet dismissing this theory.

Juarez made public his recognition of Diaz in a letter to Guillermo Prieto, which stated:

He is a good boy, our Porfirio. He never dates his cards until he takes a capital.

In his final speech on July 15, the day he entered the capital, Juarez publicly recognized Diaz, who was rewarded with a division and a hacienda in Oaxaca, known as Hacienda de La Noria, where years later the Plan de La Noria would be proclaimed. His brother Felipe was elected governor of Oaxaca, by popular vote, a position he would hold until 1871. After that, Diaz retired to Oaxaca to live.

During the wars in which he was involved, Diaz was romantically involved with several women. The first and best known of his love affairs was with Juana Catalina Romero, during the years of the Reform War. Legend has it that during the Battle of Miahuatlán, Díaz hid under Juana Catalina”s petticoat. This relationship lasted beyond the war, when Diaz was already president and therefore favored the area of Tehuantepec. A popular story tells that the train from the city passed through Juana Catalina”s hacienda, and that the president would jump out of the carriage to visit her.

Another affair that Díaz had was with the soldier Rafaela Quiñones, during the war of intervention. In early 1867, the daughter of the relationship between Diaz and Quiñones was born, named Amada Diaz, who lived with her father until 1879 and stayed in Mexico after the fall of the Porfirian government. She finally died in 1962.

On April 15, 1867, Díaz married by proxy his niece Delfina Ortega de Díaz, after mediating with President Juárez the provision to dispense carnal kinship. In 1869 their first son, Porfirio Germán, was born and died that same year. Two years later the couple conceived twins, who met the same fate as their first son. After several years, in 1873 the first of the children to reach adulthood, Porfirio Díaz Ortega, was born. On May 5, 1875, the couple”s last daughter was born, Luz Victoria, named in honor of the republican victory of May 5, 1862 in Puebla.

Election of 1867 and subsequent years

Once the war of French intervention was over, Juarez, who had taken refuge in Article 128 of the Constitution of 1857 to remain in power indefinitely, called for presidential elections, which were held on Sunday, August 25, 1867. The final results were:

Therefore, the Congress, through the president of said body, Manuel Romero Rubio, declared Benito Juarez as the winner of the presidential elections and constitutional president for the period from December 1, 1867 to November 30, 1871. The official proclamation was published in the streets of Mexico City on September 23.

Porfirio Diaz felt defeated and dejected by the triumph of Juarez in the elections. He decided to retire to La Noria, where on February 2, 1868, he was announced the cessation of the Army of the East, which in July of the previous year had been reduced to only 4000 soldiers. At the same time, Juarez, through Matias Romero, Minister of the Interior, offered him to head the Mexican legation in Washington D. C., United States of America. Diaz, however, rejected the proposal.

During 1869 and 1870, Diaz lived in La Noria with his wife Delfina. It was at this time that the children who would die in infancy were procreated. Delfina thought it was a religious matter, as they had married as blood relatives and the necessary dispensation was not obtained until 1880. In La Noria, Diaz developed the foundry of cannons, gunpowder and ammunition, in addition to agriculture.

Meanwhile, his brother Félix Díaz Mori was elected governor of Oaxaca. During his period at the head of the state government, he had a confrontation with the inhabitants of Juchitán over the lumber tax. On February 17, 1870, the governor and a regiment of more than five hundred soldiers, entered the city and killed several people, among them women and children, all this in order to quell the uprising that had occurred. Before leaving, he entered with his soldiers to loot the town church. He made lower the statue of the patron saint of Juchitán, San Vicente Ferrer, and dragged it for the whole town, in an act considered on his part as Jacobin. Months later he returned the image in a wooden box in pieces. The Juchitecos captured him in March 1872, castrated him and executed him in revenge for the Juchitán incident.

La Noria Revolution

Porfirio Díaz decided to run for the presidential elections of 1871. For this election, Juarez was nominated for the third time, the previous ones being in 1861 and 1867. There was also a new candidate, the president of the Supreme Court of Justice, Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada. The elections were held on August 27 of that year. The final results were revealed to the country on October 7 and were as follows:

Díaz and Lerdo were not satisfied with the result announced by Congress, and initiated a series of challenges to the election. Lerdo decided to withdraw from the electoral trials and returned to his position as president of the Supreme Court of Justice. Diaz, however, began to gain followers in the south of the country, among the landowners of Oaxaca and the military of that state, where Felipe Diaz was governor. On November 8 he launched the Plan de la Noria, calling all the country”s military to fight against Juarez. Thus began the Revolution of La Noria.

In the Congress, a majority of the independent deputies has made ineffective the noble efforts of the independent deputies and turned the National Representation into a courtly chamber, obsequious and determined to always follow the impulses of the Executive.

Immediately the states of Oaxaca, Guerrero and Chiapas joined Diaz, who advanced triumphantly to Toluca, where the defeats began. Sóstenes Rocha and Ignacio Mejía prevented the rebels from taking the capital. Although they managed to gain followers among the lower classes of Mexican society, the rebels of La Noria had a long process of defeats. When they tried to cross Puerto Angel, Oaxaca, in January 1872 on their way to Panama, the Juchitecos captured Félix Díaz and assassinated him. That same night, Manuel González, Díaz”s best friend and compadre as well as one of the leaders of the uprising, received a letter from Porfirio”s brother, who had been executed. The letter read as follows:

We are going to lose, Juarez is going to crush us, but I want to give my brother this last proof of affection, because what the Indian is, he fries us.

On the night of July 18, Juarez died in Mexico City. Together with González, Díaz was in Nayarit, visiting the local cacique Manuel Lozada, called the “Tiger of Álica”, in order to get his support. Hearing cannon shots, Diaz asked what was going on, and was immediately informed of Juarez”s death. Lerdo de Tejada was already the interim president, and therefore, the movement of La Noria became meaningless, since Juarez was dead and there was no reason to fight. After Lozada refused to support Diaz, the revolutionaries declined to take up arms. Shortly thereafter, in October, elections for president of the Mexican Republic were called. Porfirio Díaz and Lerdo de Tejada ran as candidates. In the Extraordinary Elections of Mexico in 1872, the latter defeated Diaz. Once the Congress confirmed Lerdo as constitutional president for the period from December 1, 1872 to November 30, 1876, the Minister of War and Navy, Mariano Escobedo decreed amnesty for all the revolutionaries of La Noria, but with the condition that they would be discharged from the Mexican Army.

Once defeated and in a public scandal before the press, Diaz returned to Oaxaca, where he found the news of his daughter”s death. The economic crisis he was going through forced him to sell the Hacienda de La Noria and become a partner in a sugar plantation located in the town of Tlacotalpan, Veracruz. There, in the Veracruz climate, Porfirio Díaz”s family managed to achieve relative economic stability, since in addition to sugar cultivation, he dedicated himself to carpentry, and even invented an integrated rocking chair with an automatic fan.

However, Porfirio retained his old political ambitions. In October 1874 he was nominated as candidate for federal deputy and won the election. Once the Chamber of Deputies was installed, one of the first rulings of the new legislature was to approve a proposal of the Finance Commission to reduce the pension of military personnel retired from national service, as well as to significantly reduce the salary of active soldiers in the Army. Diaz, together with other deputies of military background, opposed the Treasury proposal. Justo Benítez, who by then had become Díaz”s political intermediary, suggested the military man to make a speech in the tribune of the Legislative Palace. After much consideration, Diaz agreed to speak in public. Even though he himself knew his lack of skill as an orator, he tried to elaborate a speech. After several attempts, Diaz gave up, and in an act unheard of until that moment in Mexico”s legislative history, he began to cry in public. This incident made him the laughing stock of the Mexican political class for a few days. This is how one of Diaz”s biographers, Jose Lopez Portillo y Rojas, describes that moment.

And Porfirio spoke in effect, maintaining that it was a great injustice that the good servants of the Nation, those who had shed their blood to defend it, should be condemned to misery in order to make an insignificant saving; But he expressed those ideas with so many hesitations, in such a disheveled and incoherent style, and with such an incoherent voice, that the audience was filled with pity, not for the soldiers whom he wanted to reduce to bread and water, but for the preopinant, who could be seen suffering unspeakable tortures in the terrible pillory of the tribune. Porfirio, finally, overwhelmed by grief and entangled between his own ideas and words, could not manage to get out of the way, did not know how to conclude the sentence, and burst into tears like a child. Thus he descended from the rostrum with his face congested and covered with tears, while the audience, surprised, did not know what to do, whether to cry also or burst into laughter.

Although this incident deteriorated Díaz”s image in the national political opinion, a series of radical policies carried out by Lerdo made the Porfirista movement gain more and more supporters, mainly in the upper class, which was affected because Lerdo expelled the religious orders and raised taxes, both actions in 1874. Foreign governments did not look favorably on Lerdo”s government either, due to a decrease in the sale of products to countries such as France and the United Kingdom. All this political scenario, both internal and external, propitiated the arrival of Diaz to power. Aware of this, Lerdo”s political circle kept the Oaxacan under surveillance for several months. Manuel Romero Rubio, Lerdo”s political intermediary, offered Díaz the presidency of the Supreme Court of Justice in Oaxaca, but he refused.

Also read, biographies – Kurt Schwitters

The Tuxtepec Revolution

At the end of 1875, Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada made public his interest in running for the 1876 elections. Although the press only took it as an informal declaration, Lerdo announced his candidacy on the night of December 23rd and this fact provoked different reactions in the national political class. Porfirio Díaz, who by then was also running for the presidential candidacy, began a series of public demonstrations against Lerdo, but they were quickly put down by orders of President Lerdo himself. The repressive actions carried out by the secret police against the supporters of Porfirio Diaz caused even more discontent towards Lerdoism. On January 10, 1876, with the support of several military men from different parts of the country and with the backing of the Catholic Church, which had been affected by Lerdo”s measures, Porfirio Diaz launched the Plan of Tuxtepec in the town of Tuxtepec. Thus began the Tuxtepec Revolution, the last war of the 19th century in Mexico.

That the Mexican Republic is governed by a government that has made abuse a political system, despising and violating morality and the laws, vitiating society, despising the institutions, and making it impossible to remedy so many evils by peaceful means; that public suffrage has become a farce, since the President and his friends by all reprobate means bring to public office those whom they call their “Official Candidates,” rejecting every independent citizen; that in this way, and by governing even without ministers, the most cruel mockery is made of democracy, which is founded on the independence of powers; that the sovereignty of the States is repeatedly violated; that the President and his favorites dismiss the Governors at will, handing over the States to their friends, as happened in Coahuila, Oaxaca, Yucatan and Nuevo Leon, having tried to do the same with Jalisco; that this State was segregated to weaken it, the important canton of Tepic, which has been governed militarily to date, to the detriment of the federal pact and the law of Nations; That without consideration for the privileges of humanity, the petty subsidy that served to defend them from the barbarous Indians was withdrawn from the border states; that the public treasury is squandered in pleasure expenses, without the government having presented to the Congress of the Union an account of the funds it manages. …

The defeats that Díaz and his supporters began to suffer were not long in coming, since most of the army remained loyal to Lerdo. On March 10, 1876, Mariano Escobedo defeated Diaz in Icamole, Nuevo Leon. It is said that Porfirio Diaz cried when he saw himself defeated and dejected. For this reason he was known, during the rest of the War, as “El Llorón de Icamole”. After the defeat of Icamole, the Lerdistas were sure of their victory over the Tuxtepec revolutionaries and decreased military activity in the country. However, Donato Guerra, Justo Benítez and Manuel González continued a guerrilla war in the interior of Mexico. Diaz, meanwhile, embarked to Cuba in a ship that left from Tampico, Tamaulipas, posing as the Spanish doctor Gustavo Romero. Once he arrived in Havana, he managed to get weapons and several followers among the slaves in Cuba, since the island was still in Spanish hands. When he returned to Mexico, he took the area corresponding to Veracruz and San Luis Potosí, while Manuel González and Benítez had captured the State of Guerrero. At the beginning of November, the attack towards Puebla began. By then, Alatorre was removed from his post as Minister of War and Mejía was appointed in his place. Escobedo, accompanied by several Lerdista contingents, among them Alatorre”s, fortified himself in Tecoac, a town in Tlaxcala. On November 16, Diaz and Escobedo faced each other in that place. At first, the battle was going to be won by the Lerdista troops, but the intervention of Manuel González and his reinforcements, managed to defeat the federal troops. It is said that at the end of the battle, when the Lerdistas fled, Díaz spoke to González, wounded in the battle (hence his nickname “El Manco de Tecoac”), and told him: “Compadre, thanks to you we have won, and for that reason, you will be my Minister of War”.

Once the civil war was over, Diaz arrived in Mexico City on November 21, and that same day he became provisional president of the Mexican Republic. However, José María Iglesias, president of the Supreme Court of Justice, argued that since he was Lerdo”s constitutional substitute, and Lerdo had fled the country, Iglesias should become president on December 1. Therefore, his supporters became known as decembristas. By that time, three groups were disputing the presidency: Decembrists, Lerdistas and Porfiristas. The decembrists had barracked in Guanajuato and the military arm of the political party was Felipe Berriozábal. Diaz left Juan N. Mendez in the presidency and on December 22 he left the capital with a division composed of 5000 soldiers towards the State of Guanajuato, where he managed to defeat the Decembrist forces in March 1877. Thanks to the mediation of Justo Benítez, Iglesias and Díaz reached an agreement, in which the former would recognize Díaz as virtual president, and in exchange, the latter would cede him the governorship of his native state, Michoacán. After all the political preparations carried out by Benítez and González, Porfirio Díaz became president on the morning of May 5, 1877, the day he took office before the Congress of the Union, after the extraordinary elections of 1877.

First presidential term

Within the Porfirian framework, this period of Mexican history was marked by the influence of positivism, a French political theory created by Auguste Comte. From then on, the order established by Díaz during the last half of the 19th century in Mexico would be based on order and the so-called “Porfirian peace”. They would be: order and progress. The fulfillment of them, according to Justo Sierra, a Porfirian minister, took Mexico to the pinnacle of progress.

Diaz”s main objective in his first term was to gain the confidence of the United States of America, which was going through a serious political problem. Thus, Diaz had to make a series of political maneuvers to gain U.S. recognition. Ambassador John W. Foster”s refusal to negotiate with Mexico made the situation even more difficult. Through the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ignacio Mariscal and the Minister of Finance, Matías Romero, Díaz achieved the payment of the foreign debt to the United States, by means of short amounts paid in a term of fifteen years. In his message to the Nation on April 1, 1893, the payment of the Mexican debt was finalized.

Another priority for Díaz was the pacification of the country. Since the end of Mexico”s War of Independence, several bands of thieves were stationed on the roadsides to rob wagons loaded with goods that were taken to the capital and other important cities in the country, such as Puebla or Veracruz. Commerce, which did not grow much during the first half of the nineteenth century in Mexico and was also shaken by the economic crises caused by the wars, was even more threatened by the gangs of bandits that attacked the roads. Another point that accentuated the insecurity of the country was that there were armed groups settled only in one part of the country and whose purpose was to control the whole country through caciques.

Díaz agreed with Congress on extraordinary powers to remedy the situation. He ordered the displacement of the most consolidated armies, as a measure taken to avoid the proliferation of cacicazgos. Another serious problem in the political panorama was the ambitions and alliances of governors and military chiefs. In order to evade this problem, Diaz personally appointed several military men he trusted as governors and military chiefs.

In 1878, the government had almost completely pacified the country, so the president commissioned José Yves Limantour, economist of the Secretariat of Finance, to travel to the United States to lead a Mexican promotion campaign. This program to promote Mexican culture succeeded in getting President Rutherford B. Hayes to send an entourage of U.S. businessmen to Mexico. However, Ambassador Foster wrote to the State Department, warning of the dangers of Mexico, but despite his efforts to prevent the trip, the businessmen arrived in Mexico on March 2, and after a series of trips throughout the country, Hayes granted Mexico official recognition on the afternoon of April 9, 1878.

Towards the beginning of 1879, rumors began to arise about who would be the official candidate for the presidency of the Republic, since elections would be held in 1880. The names of the Minister of War and Navy, Manuel González, and the president”s personal advisor, Justo Benítez, were mentioned. The press spread the name of Protasio Tagle, Minister of the Interior, as the third candidate. As was natural in the presidential successions of the 19th century, revolts supporting a specific candidate began. These rebellions were led by Trinidad García de la Cadena, in Zacatecas; Domingo Nava, in Sinaloa; Ramírez Terán in Mazatlán and the riots of Mixtec Indians in the valleys of Tamazunchale.

One of the most notorious rebellions that had the greatest impact on public opinion in the country was the political incident that took place in Veracruz at the end of June 1879. A group of armed Lerdistas had arrived from abroad after more than three years preparing their revolt. On board the ship “Libertad”, five hundred soldiers disembarked in the port in the early morning of June 14 and began the attack on the city. However, the governor of the state, Luis Mier y Terán, commissioned a brigade that was able to quickly stop the uprising and apprehend the rebels. Mier y Terán communicated the situation to Díaz, in his duty as governor and since Porfirio, eldest son of the president and godson of the governor, was in Veracruz. Diaz sent a coded message that when read revealed the President”s order: “Kill them in the heat of the moment and then find out”. Mier y Terán immediately carried out the presidential order, which caused unrest among the population and a small military uprising that was also put down. Years later, during the course of the Mexican Revolution, this issue was one of the main reasons for the fall of the Porfiriato.

Finally, Manuel “El Manco” González was named presidential candidate for the Liberal Party. After a smooth electoral campaign, with the support of the national political and economic circles and with the approval of foreign powers, such as the United States, United Kingdom and Spain, Manuel González was elected president, and as such, he began to exercise his position as Constitutional President, on December 1, 1880.

At the end of 1879, Porfirio Díaz”s wife, Delfina, became pregnant for the sixth time. After a relatively stable pregnancy, the birth was scheduled for the early morning of April 5, 1880. However, in the early morning of April 2, the birth had to be brought forward, and with it Victoria was born, the couple”s last daughter, named after the battle fought in Puebla thirteen years earlier, which Diaz had won. Despite this, both mother and daughter began to suffer from postpartum illnesses, so that Victoria, the daughter, died 48 hours after birth. Delfina became seriously ill with pneumonia and the doctors gave her no hope, so she decided to marry in church.

Porfirio Díaz asked the Archbishop of Mexico Pelagio Antonio de Labastida y Dávalos to celebrate the Catholic Marriage. The archbishop asked Diaz for his abjuration of having publicly proclaimed the liberal Constitution. Diaz wrote his retraction, which was read by the archbishop. Shortly after, one of Labastida”s envoys officiated the marriage on the night of April 7, and Delfina died on the morning of April 8.

Also read, biographies – Ali Mughayat Syah

Chairmanship of Manuel Gonzalez

Manuel González was a military man born in 1833, in Tamaulipas. He participated in the American Intervention in Mexico, as a lieutenant and later fought in the Reform War, on the side of the Conservative Party. However, during the Second French Intervention in Mexico, he decided to abandon the conservative ranks and join the liberal army, due to a memory he had of the American intervention, in which his father was killed by American troops. This incident made him change sides before the new foreign invasion. During the war against the French, González fought alongside Díaz and became lieutenant general of the Army of the East, thus participating in many of the battles fought against the French army. When Díaz was imprisoned in Puebla, during 1865, González was the one who maintained the guerrilla in Oaxaca. During the battle of April 2, González received a bullet wound in his right arm, at the level of the elbow, which destroyed it and was amputated that same day. During the revolt caused by the Plan de la Noria, González supported Díaz despite the defeat of the rebel army. Again, during the Tuxtepec Revolution, González was loyal to Díaz”s army, which he saved from the final defeat on November 16, 1876, in the Battle of Tecoac. Wounded in this last confrontation, Diaz named him Minister of War as a reward for his services in the war. At the end of 1879 he was named presidential candidate and a year later he assumed the presidency.

During his administration, Manuel González promoted the creation of railroads, granted concessions for the creation of the first telegraph network in the country and the foundation of two banks: the Banco Nacional Mexicano, with capital from the Banco Franco Egipcio and the Banco Mercantil Mexicano, founded by Spanish and Mexican merchants residing in Mexico. Both banks, merged, gave rise to the Banco Nacional de México (Banamex) in 1884. However, these advances in the country”s economy were tarnished due to frequent corruption and mismanagement scandals in the González government. In November 1881, the issuance of the nickel coin, which substituted the silver circulating currency, provoked an economic crisis. An uprising against the republican authorities was about to break out, but Díaz”s intervention saved González”s government from suffering a civil war.

The main charge against González during his government was corruption, sponsored by Díaz and Manuel Romero Rubio. According to the studies of Francisco Bulnes, the objective of Díaz and Romero Rubio was, “to prevent González from taking a liking to the presidential chair, and thus make him give it back to Díaz in 1884”. Salvador Quevedo y Zubieta, an intellectual sympathetic to Diaz, began a smear campaign directed at Gonzalez, alleging that as a result of losing his right arm, the president had developed a great sexual appetite, and that he had sent for a woman to stay at his Chapingo hacienda from Circasia, Russia. Although this rumor was never proven, President Gonzalez did achieve the reform of the Civil Code to be able to inherit his second family, the one formed with Juana Horn.

Porfirio Díaz was appointed by Manuel González as Minister of Development, and from that position he coordinated the campaign against González. After becoming a widower, General Díaz began to participate in the social gatherings of the Mexican political class. In May 1881 he met Carmen Romero Rubio at a party organized by Ambassador Foster. Under the pretext of taking English language classes, Díaz frequented Romero Rubio”s house and began to court Carmen. After several months of an informal relationship, the couple married on November 5, 1881.

In February 1881, following the advice of Carlos Pacheco Villalobos, one of his main advisors, President González ordered the nomination of Díaz as governor of Oaxaca. After a stable election, Porfirio Díaz took office on December 1 and according to the local Constitution he was to remain governor until 1885. A few months later, Diaz asked the local Congress for a license to be absent from office for an indefinite period of time, and from there he returned to the Ministry of Development. A few months later he commanded a delegation that visited the main cities of the United States of America, such as Chicago and New York. In the latter, Carmen tried to visit her godfather, Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada, who refused to receive her, arguing that her father had “betrayed” her by allying himself with Díaz. The couple was received by the President of the United States, Chester Alan Arthur and the inventor Thomas Alva Edison. Upon his arrival in Mexico, Diaz was launched as a presidential candidate, and after a campaign supported by the Church and business sectors, he became President for the second time on December 1, 1884.

Thirty-five years of Porfiriato

Porfiriato refers to the period of history between 1876 and 1911, characterized by the governments of Porfirio Díaz, which was only interrupted between 1880 and 1884 with the presidential term of Manuel González. From December 1, 1884 Díaz personally governed uninterruptedly. The philosophy on which the Porfiriato was based was positivism, which preached order and peace, pillars of the Porfirian government, despite having detractors, mainly in the political left. Thanks to the extraction of surplus value from workers and peasants through the use of capitalism, the finance ministers of the Porfirian government, Manuel Dublán and José Yves Limantour, were able to achieve an important advance in the economy of the dominant social class.

Another characteristic of the Porfiriato was that the diverse political groups of the country converged in Porfirio Díaz”s Cabinet. During his first term, the cabinet was made up entirely of former combatants of the Tuxtepec Revolution. However, in his second presidential term, there were Juaristas such as Matías Romero and Ignacio Mariscal; Lerdistas such as Romero Rubio and Joaquín Baranda, and an imperialist, Manuel Dublán. Díaz tried to maintain close relations with the governors, especially in matters related to the elections of legislatures and local courts of justice, the construction of railroads, the fight against the Yaquis, who had been attacking Sonora for more than fifty years, and also in other minor matters.

The peace that was imposed during the government of Porfirio Díaz allowed the development of culture and science in Mexico, given that since the end of the 18th century, the continuous political, social and economic instability had prevented a favorable climate for science and culture. However, during the Porfiriato, literature, painting, music and sculpture flourished. Scientific activities were promoted by the government, since it was considered that scientific progress in the country could lead to positive changes in the economic structure. It was then that institutes, libraries, scientific societies and cultural associations were founded. In the same way, popular art sought in Mexico”s culture an element to shape its compositions and express itself, and thus samples of Mexican art were exhibited all over the world. Positivism was able to bring about a renaissance in the study of national history in Mexico, as an element that strengthened Díaz in power and contributed to national unity. Guillermo Prieto and Vicente Riva Palacio excelled in the study of this branch.

Mexican historian José López Portillo y Rojas, in his work The Rise and Fall of Porfirio Díaz, mentions that national progress during the Porfiriato also changed the physiognomy of the president. In November 1881, three years before the beginning of his second presidential term, the Oaxacan general married Carmen Romero Rubio, who came from the families with the highest pedigree and lineage in Mexican high society. Until that year, according to the accounts of the time, Diaz had all the traits of a military man trained in the battlefields: rough in his way of dealing with people, brusque, with a vocabulary suited to assert himself over his soldiers, accustomed to spitting and without much respect for social forms. However, as Díaz himself recounted years later in his Memoirs, his wife Carmen dedicated herself to educating him within Mexican society. She taught him the English language, and notions of the French language, the manners of high society, the way to move and express himself, the way to eat, the appropriate vocabulary for each situation. His physiognomy, as López Portillo y Rojas affirmed, had indeed changed. From the brown color of his skin, he took on a more tanned tone. As several testimonies of historians of the time affirm, when he returned to the presidency in 1884, Diaz was no longer Porfirio but rather “Don Porfirio”. This opinion was expressed by Oaxacan Bishop Eulogio Gillow to a Catholic newspaper in 1887:

“Carmelita Romero Rubio was the surprising soul of General Diaz”s evolution toward a refined existence and a policy of conciliation of such profound consequences in national life.”

The construction of railroads was one of the most important aspects of the Mexican economy during the Porfiriato. Previously, there was already a railroad that ran from Mexico City to Veracruz, the main port on the Gulf of Mexico, whose construction began in 1852 and was inaugurated by Lerdo de Tejada on February 3, 1873. Once Díaz consolidated his power, he began the construction of railroads directed to the northern border and on a large scale. From 1880 to 1885 the concessions were ceded to foreigners, firstly North American investors. However, between 1886 and 1895, businessmen from the United Kingdom monopolized all the railroad concessions, but from 1896 to 1905 the Americans began a counter-offensive to regain control of the Mexican railroads. Finally, in 1909 the railroads were nationalized and remained so for 82 years until 1991, when Carlos Salinas de Gortari privatized them. Likewise, on June 1, 1880 and December 16, 1881, the Congress of the Union legislated on railroad matters, subjecting to the jurisdiction of the federal government the concessions to investors, as well as contracts, modifications, track laying and others, thus guaranteeing the government”s interference in the economy. Likewise, the development of the railroad companies was stimulated by granting adjacent land and establishing subsidies for each kilometer built. One of the projects of the North American companies was to build a line between Mexico and the United States. By 1911 the country had more than 20,000 kilometers of railroads, when in 1876 there were barely 800. When interviewed by journalist James Creelman in 1908, Díaz affirmed:

Railroads have played an important role in the preservation of peace in Mexico. When I first took office in 1876, there were only two small lines connecting the capital with Veracruz and Queretaro. Today we have more than 19,000 miles of railroads.

Another factor that allowed the development of Porfirian Mexico was foreign investment, since businessmen from other countries wanted to take advantage of Mexico”s natural resources, which could not be exploited by Mexicans during the 19th century due to civil wars and foreign interventions. This occurred during the global framework of economic competition, in which economic powers struggled to achieve world primacy. During this period in Mexico, industry grew in its extractive branch, agriculture of tropical products aimed at exportation, in addition to all branches of the economy, which were always oriented to Mexico”s development abroad. Diaz and his advisors granted all the necessary facilities to foreign investors, so that they could develop their activity and, with the support of the government, they soon dominated the country”s economy. This situation, of course, was not well seen by all those who defended the idea that the country”s economic development should depend on Mexican labor and financing and not foreigners.

With the arrival of capital to Mexico, it was necessary to create a transportation infrastructure that would allow the development of industry, and thus generate communication between the various regions of the country, since many of them had been far from the rest of the country for many years, as in the case of the northern states of Sinaloa, Chihuahua and Coahuila. Telegraph and telephone networks were built, and communications between ports were improved. Between 1877 and 1911, between 7,136 and 23,654 kilometers of telegraphic routes were built, and thus the Morse code was one more factor in the development of communications in Mexico. The postal system, which throughout the 19th century was attacked by bandits, achieved a relative growth with the Porfirian peace, since more than 1,200 post offices were established. In 1876 Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, which arrived in Mexico on March 13, 1878, when the town of Tlalpan in Mexico City received the first telephone call. Thirteen years later, in 1891, the first Mexican telephone company had more than 1,000 subscribers and that same year the first telephone directory in the history of the country was published. That same year the German engineer Alfred Westrup installed telephone lines for the capital”s police, and by 1893 the first private lines existed. In 1897, telephone service was extended to all the cities in the country, such as Monterrey, Puebla and Guadalajara, among others.

A project that emerged from German corporations reached its conclusion by bringing electricity to Mexico, which was generated by means of turbines that, driven by the force of gravity stored in subway water reservoirs, produced the electricity. Engineering also made it possible to take advantage of Mexico”s orography to stimulate the creation of hydroelectric plants, thus increasing Mexico”s economic production. Oil reserves were discovered in Veracruz in 1879, and in early 1887, the first refineries in the country were created by Adolph Autrey, an American businessman who became a Mexican citizen.

Industry was one of the branches that received the most attention and budget during the Porfiriato. In mining, Mexico occupied the first place in silver production during the Porfiriato period and has remained in this position ever since. The production of metals and fuels was increased for the sole purpose of exporting them to other countries. Foreign investment increased starting in 1895, and with it came the beginning of the transformation industry, which began to manufacture textiles, stationery, footwear, food, wine, beer, cigars, chemicals, china, glass and cement. Likewise, at the beginning of the 20th century, the first iron and steel industry plant was created in Mexico, which at the time was the first in Latin America.

Trade was strengthened due to the expansion of the railroad system and the government”s decision to abolish the alcabalas, a tax imposed by the states of the Republic that slowed down the commercial process. The government proposed the need to create products for export, so the country began to depend economically on foreign capital. Foreign trade was oriented to satisfy agricultural and industrial needs, so products such as gold, silver, henequen, rubber, ixtle, chickpeas, chili peppers, furs, wood -both fine and for construction-, draft animals, coffee, beans, vanilla and sugar were generated. Although production was not as large as in other countries, it did register a relative increase with respect to the Mexican economy during the first fifty years of independent life. In the field of imports, materials such as iron, cement and lime were purchased from abroad, as well as materials for the construction and establishment of companies, technology for railroads, telegraphs and telephones, materials to build animal traction machines, textiles and other luxury items such as mirrors, porcelain, clocks and furniture. Towards the end of the Porfiriato, exports decreased in relation to imports, so the balance of trade was unfavorable to Mexico”s economy.

Literature was the cultural field that made the most progress during the Porfiriato. In 1849, Francisco Zarco founded the Miguel Hidalgo High School, which trained poets and writers during the rest of the 19th century in Mexico. Graduates of this institution were influenced by Romanticism. When the republic was restored, in 1867 the writer Ignacio Manuel Altamirano founded the so-called “Veladas Literarias”, groups of Mexican writers with the same literary vision. Among this group were Guillermo Prieto, Manuel Payno, Ignacio Ramírez, the Nigromante, Vicente Riva Palacio, Luis G. Urbina, Juan de Dios Peza and Justo Sierra. Towards the end of 1869 the members of the Literary Evenings founded the magazine “El Renacimiento”, which published literary texts from different groups of the country, with different political ideology. It dealt with topics related to doctrines and cultural contributions, the different tendencies of national culture in terms of literary, artistic, historical and archeological aspects.

Ignacio Manuel Altamirano, a writer from Guerrero, created study groups related to the research of Mexican History, the Languages of Mexico, but he was also a promoter of the study of universal culture. He was also a diplomat, since he was fluent in French, and in these positions he worked to promote the country culturally in foreign powers. He was consul of Mexico in Barcelona and Marseilles and at the end of 1892 he was commissioned as ambassador to Italy. He died on February 13, 1893 in San Remo, Italy. Altamirano”s influence was evidenced in nationalism, whose main expression was the novels of country style. Writers of this school were Manuel M. Flores, José Cuéllar and José López Portillo y Rojas.

Shortly thereafter, modernism emerged in Mexico, abandoning nationalist pride to receive French influence. This theory was founded by the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío and proposed a reaction against the established literary customs, and declared the freedom of the artist on the basis of certain rules, thus leaning towards sentimentalism. The modernist current changed certain rules in verse and narrative, making use of metaphors. Mexico”s modernist writers were Luis G. Urbina and Amado Nervo.

As a consequence of the positivist philosophy in Mexico, great importance was given to the study of history. Diaz”s government needed to achieve national unity, since there were still conservative groups in Mexican society. Therefore, the Ministry of Public Instruction, directed by Justo Sierra, used national history as a means to achieve national unity. Special importance was given to the Second French Intervention in Mexico, while abandoning the anti-Hispanism present in Mexico since Independence.

In 1887, Díaz inaugurated the exhibition of pre-Hispanic monoliths in the National Museum, where a replica of the Sun Stone or Aztec Calendar was also shown to the public. In 1908 the museum was divided into two sections: Museum of Natural History and Museum of Archeology. At the beginning of 1901, Justo Sierra created the departments of ethnography and archeology. Three years later, in 1904, during the Universal Exposition of San Luis -1904- the Mexican School of Archeology, History and Ethnography was presented to the world with the main samples of the pre-Hispanic culture.

José María Velasco was a Mexican landscape painter who was born in 1840, and graduated as a painter in 1861, from the Academia de Bellas Artes de San Carlos. He also studied zoology, botany, physics and anatomy. His main works consisted of portraits of the Valley of Mexico and he also painted characters of Mexican society, haciendas, volcanoes, and crops. A number of his works were dedicated to depicting the provincial landscapes of Oaxaca, such as the cathedral and pre-Hispanic temples, like Monte Alban and Mitla. Other paintings by Velasco were dedicated to Teotihuacan and the Villa de Guadalupe.

The advancement of public education was favored by positivism and its Mexican representative Gabino Barreda. During the Porfiriato, the foundations of public education were laid, which was always supported by liberal intellectuals. In 1868, still during the Juarez administration, the Law of Public Instruction was enacted, which was not accepted by the Catholic Church. Joaquín Baranda, Minister of Public Instruction, developed a campaign of conciliation with the Church, and applied the positivist aspect to education, without leaving aside humanism. He sought to ensure that all students had access to basic education, but for this he had to confront caciques and landowners, in addition to the lack of communication routes in rural areas. Higher primary education was established in 1889 and its purpose was to create a link between elementary education and high school.

In 1891, the Regulatory Law of Education was enacted, which established education as secular, free and compulsory. Likewise, the so-called Comités de Vigilancia (Oversight Committees) were instituted. In order for parents and guardians to comply with the constitutional obligation to send their children or wards to school. Baranda founded more than two hundred schools for teachers, who once graduated went to teach in the cities of the country. However, in rural areas, the lack of social development caused an educational backwardness.

During the celebrations of the Centennial of Mexico”s Independence, Justo Sierra presented before the Congress of the Union, an initiative to create the National University of Mexico, as a dependency attached to the Ministry of Public Instruction and Fine Arts. The law was enacted on May 26, and the first university rector was Joaquín Eguía Lis, during the years from 1910 to 1913. The schools of Medicine, Engineering and Jurisprudence had functioned separately for more than forty years, but with this law they were all reunited, together with the National Preparatory School, in the National University of Mexico. A few years after the culmination of Independence, the Royal and Pontifical University of Mexico was suppressed, since it had been considered a symbol of the Viceroyalty of New Spain, as a sign of contempt for Spanish culture. Years later, an attempt was made to restore the institution, reversing a retrograde measure that would set back high education in Mexico, but civil wars and political confrontations prevented it.

Porfirio Díaz and his wife Carmen Romero Rubio lived in a house of baroque novo-Hispanic style, located on La Cadena Street, in the historic center of Mexico City, which dated from the 18th century, when it was ordered to be built by Viceroy Carlos Francisco de Croix. Díaz used to work together with his cabinet in the National Palace, and during the summers he resided and exercised his office from Chapultepec Castle. Among his hobbies was the practice of calisthenics, playing cards, billiards and bowling, which he had ordered to be installed in the Castle. He also took the opportunity to exercise physically by swimming, walking and running in the Chapultepec Forest, often accompanied by his son Porfirio, whom the president called “Firio”. Together with his private secretary Rafael Chousal, he played cards and bowling, and went on mountain excursions to archeological sites such as Teotihuacán or Monte Albán. On one occasion, during the visit of Aragonese investors to Mexico, they were taken in a retinue led by the president to Teotihuacan, where Porfirio Diaz was able to climb the Pyramid of the Sun with only the help of a rope, at more than seventy years of age.

Porfirio and Carmen never had children, due to the sterility of the first lady. However, since 1884, the year of their marriage, the children of the general and his deceased first wife, Delfina Ortega, lived with the new couple. Together with Carmen”s sisters, Luisa and Sofia, and the parents of Diaz”s wife, the “royal family”, as Porfirio Diaz”s closest circle was known, used to appear at Mexican society ceremonies. Porfirio Díaz Ortega, the president”s only son and first-born son, graduated as a cadet at the Military College, located in the capital. He married María Luisa Raygosa in 1901, daughter of landowners from Aguascalientes, who lived in Molino de las Rosas, their ranch in Mixcoac, which in 1912 was sacked by the revolutionary troops of Pascual Orozco. Luz Victoria -so named in memory of the liberal triumph in the Battle of Puebla in 1862- married industrial engineer Francisco Rincón Gallardo, who owned a hacienda called “Santa María de Gallardo” in Aguascalientes where President Díaz used to spend time with his daughter.

Amada, the daughter that Díaz procreated during the years of the war against France with the soldier Rafaela Quiñones, began to live with the president in 1879. In 1885 she married the Morelos landowner Ignacio de la Torre y Mier, with whom she never had children and used to argue frequently with him, due in part to the fact that a rumor about his homosexuality always weighed on De la Torre. On November 18, 1901, the police raided what would become known as the “baile de los cuarenta y uno”, a party of homosexual men in which half of them were transvestite. A rumor spread that in reality there had been 42 people arrested, being precisely number forty-two Ignacio de la Torre, who would have been saved from going to prison because he was the presidential son-in-law.

In total, Porfirio Díaz had sixteen grandchildren, seven from Porfirio and nine from Luz. His grandchildren Porfirio, Piro, Lila, Genaro, Amada, Francisco, Nacho and Virginia lived in the Chapultepec Castle since 1905. In the Arbeu Theater in Mexico City, plays were performed, which Diaz and his wife, accompanied by the ministers Justo Sierra and Justino Fernandez, used to attend. At the Hacienda de San Nicolás Peralta, owned by his son-in-law Ignacio de la Torre, Díaz practiced hunting, which he also practiced in the fields of Michoacán and Jalisco.

The families of Mexican high society, most of whom were supporters of the government, began to form a circle around General Díaz. The presidential couple was in charge of presiding over the parties, dances and other social events of the country”s political and economic community. Among their entertainments were trips to Popo-Park -the first zoo in Mexico-, and to Mixcoac, where Porfirio Díaz would lead the dances at his eldest son”s hacienda. In 1881 an entertainment establishment known as the Jockey Club was founded in the former Casa del Conde de Orizaba, more popularly known as “La Casa de los Azulejos” (The House of Tiles). The Jockey Club used to be frequented by Díaz and his closest collaborators. According to the notes written by Justo Sierra, the Jockey Club was a social club originally designed for the men of the high political class, which did not prevent the visit of women, many times who were wives of the Club members. In this place, topics of politics, economy or any other topic related to the situation in Mexico at that time were discussed. It was common to play cards or baccarat, and the use of alcoholic beverages, such as tequila or cognac.

There was a group of mature men, the cream of the Mexican intelligentsia, for whom the dictatorship for life meant the renunciation of all hope of directing national politics, and this group resolved to organize themselves to share power with Díaz and to channel the government into some program.

During his first presidential term, Diaz surrounded himself with the former combatants of Tuxtepec. Díaz”s main advisor was Justo Benítez, who was also a friend and personal companion of the president, and did have political experience. Benítez taught Díaz the management of politics, lessons that years later the president would apply in his government. By 1879, when the race for the presidential succession began, two candidates were emerging, Justo Benítez and Manuel González. Although several political groups suggested Díaz to run again as a candidate, the general declined the offer since it contradicted the principles of the Plan of Tuxtepec, with which he had reached the presidency. Manuel González defeated Benítez and won the candidacy. On December 1, 1880, after a smooth election, González became President of Mexico. Díaz continued to play roles in the national public administration, such as Minister of Development. President González made several mistakes, which together with the administration and corruption scandals, discredited his figure. Porfirio Díaz returned to the presidency in 1884, with the support of all political sectors of the country.

One of the main objectives of the second Porfirian administration was the pacification of the country. This policy was based on two aspects, the first consisted of incorporating adversaries and opponents to his government into the regime, through the granting of ministerial positions. In his first cabinet, there were only former revolutionaries from Tuxtepec. In his second administration, Lerdistas, iglesistas, gonzalistas and even members of the Conservative Party were incorporated. Manuel Romero Rubio, the president”s father-in-law occupied the Interior Ministry for eleven years, and it was even said that he had presidential aspirations. Diaz, however, was in charge of disqualifying Romero Rubio, since the president”s intention was to perpetuate himself in power.

Another point that Díaz tried to carry out during his mandate was the conciliation with the Catholic Church, with whom the liberal government had had disagreements since the promulgation of the Constitution of 1857. The first rapprochement between the Church and the Porfirian State took place in 1880, when Delfina Ortega de Díaz died and the Archbishop of Mexico, Pelagio Antonio de Labastida y Dávalos, officiated the Catholic marriage ceremony and days later the funeral of Díaz”s wife. Already in his second administration, Diaz met, through the Romero Rubio family, the Oaxacan priest Eulogio Gillow, who was the son of landowners from Puebla and educated in England. Gillow, as time went by, became a close friend of Díaz and helped to improve the relations between the Church and the State. In November 1881, Gillow married Díaz to Carmen Romero Rubio and in 1887 he was invested as the first archbishop of Oaxaca. Díaz presented Gillow with an emerald surrounded by diamonds, and the new archbishop sent the president a jewel brought from France, which recalled the Napoleonic Wars and a bust of Napoleon Bonaparte. During the Porfiriato, the clergy increased their properties, in addition to an increase in the dioceses and archdioceses. The Jesuits returned and more religious orders were instituted. Diaz, in private, declared himself “Catholic, apostolic and Roman”, although Protestantism grew during his government. Gillow asked Díaz to sign a concordat with the Holy See, and the president refused, thus breaking the promise made by Leo XIII to Gillow to make him a cardinal in exchange for achieving a concordat with Mexico.

Mexico”s foreign relations were no longer limited to trade with the United States of America. The payment of the foreign debt to Great Britain in 1884, the stability and public security and the reestablishment of Mexico”s credit before the world, made several countries of the international community recognize Díaz. Of the countries that signed the London Convention in 1861, France was the last to recognize the Mexican government, as Spain and the United Kingdom did so in 1878. The economic, political and commercial rapprochement with Europe balanced Mexico”s situation before the United States. President Diaz declared in an interview to a Spanish newspaper: “Poor Mexico. So far from God, so close to the United States”.

An incident in 1877 was about to unleash a war between Mexico and the United States, since U.S. President Rutherford Birchard Hayes and his ministers William M. Evarts and John Sherman intended to impose conditions to recognize Díaz. These conditions consisted of allowing the U.S. Army to pass through the border of the Rio Bravo, territorial concessions and the creation of free zones. Supported by his ministers José María Mata, Manuel María de Zamacona and Ignacio Luis Vallarta, Díaz achieved U.S. recognition in 1878 without having to yield to the conditions imposed by Hayes and his cabinet.

Rufino Barrios, president of Guatemala, wanted Mexico to relinquish its rights to the Soconusco territory in Chiapas. Barrios sought at all costs to try to resolve the territorial conflict between the two countries through the mediation of a third party, which in this case would be the United States. Porfirio Díaz, then president of Mexico, responded to the Guatemalan government that before accepting the resignation of Soconusco he would prefer war, however, this conflict was solved by means of peace with the Herrera-Mariscal Treaty in 1882. Barrios, after failing in several attempts to annex territories, tried to reestablish a Central American union through diplomatic negotiations and in view of its imminent failure, decided to undertake the reestablishment of Central American unity through military force.

On February 28, 1885, Barrios issued a decree proclaiming the Central American union and warning that failing that the union would be carried out by force if necessary. On March 22, 1885, Costa Rica, El Salvador and Nicaragua signed in the Salvadoran city of Santa Ana a military alliance agreement to oppose Barrios” plans. The countries subscribing the Treaty of Santa Ana jointly accredited Ricardo Jiménez Oreamuno as Minister Plenipotentiary in Mexico City, who began negotiations to arrange an alliance between those three countries and Mexico. The three presidents sought the support of Mexico, which at that time was governed by Porfirio Díaz and who did not hesitate to reject Barrios” plan. Diaz mobilized 30,000 men on the border with Guatemala to begin a general invasion that would quickly put an end to the conflict, but on April 2, 1885, Guatemalan and Salvadoran troops had already begun the conflict and clashed during the Battle of Chalchuapa, in which Justo Rufino Barrios perished. The news of the death of the Guatemalan president caused immense discouragement in Guatemala, and the following day the Assembly repealed the decree of Central American union. Honduras, Guatemala”s ally, expressed intentions of peace, just when its troops were going to confront those of the allies and Mexico did not need to invade Guatemala.

The pacification of the press in Mexico was another of the political objectives of the political administration. At the end of 1887, Guillermo Prieto wrote: “The press, our fourth power, is the only surviving bastion of pure and original liberalism”. Manuel González published in 1882 a decree known as the Gag Law, which established that any journalist could be apprehended, taken to prison and put on trial for denunciations by any other citizen. Examples of journalists who were tried under this law were Enrique Chávarri, known under the pseudonym “Juvenal”, or the son of Ignacio Ramírez, Ricardo Ramírez. By 1888 there were 130 newspapers, but by the end of 1911 there were only 54 left, since the other part was closed during the rest of the Porfirian government. The case of the Zacatecan newspaper El Monitor Republicano was well known, which published the following newspaper article in 1895:

It is impossible to debase a people in order to make them rich and happy. Democracy will be a fiction and freedom a hoax, but without them so is national prosperity.

This text motivated many workers to take to the streets in demonstrations to demand better wages and working conditions. The governor of the state wrote to Díaz asking for help to solve the situation. From Chapultepec Castle in Mexico City, the president wrote to the governor, in his own handwriting, the following letter:

…-…- my opinion, which I am kindly giving you, is that it would give better results if some of the aggrieved persons were to accuse him, and even if they were to be sentenced to two or three months in prison, as these writers cannot keep quiet during their imprisonment, they can continue to be accused and sentences can be added until they are sentenced to two or three years. The task is annoying and will tire you, but it is also certain that it will not be before the defendant.

With the Mexican intelligentsia, Diaz followed the same policy as with the press. As part of the policy of conciliation and concession carried out from 1884 onwards, Porfirianism managed to bring many intellectuals into its ranks, through its operator in that field, Minister Justo Sierra. Several of the writers and poets occupied positions as local or federal deputies, and some even reached the Senate of the Republic. Díaz would comment to his friends when he heard an intellectual complain, “Ese gallo quiere maís” (That rooster wants more), referring to the fact that they aspired to the Senate. referring to the fact that they aspired to public office in exchange for their silence. The intellectuals who joined the regime were Francisco G. Cosmes, Telésforo García, Francisco Bulnes, Salvador Díaz Mirón, Federico Gamboa, Victoriano Salado Álvarez, among others.

Contrary to the policy of concessions and conciliation, many times the Porfirian administration used violence and repression against its adversaries, and in this way pacified the political groups that did not accept conciliation, at the same time the Mexican Army put down by force of arms many of the rebellions that arose during the Porfiriato, as in the case of the peasant uprising of Tomóchic, Chihuahua, which took place in October 1886. The rebellion of the Lerdistas in 1879 was violently put down by the telegram sent by Díaz to Veracruz, where he gave orders to Governor Luis Mier y Terán to: “Kill them in the heat of the moment” and “then you will find out” This phrase represented the repression of all types of opposition in the Porfiriato. At that time the Rural Corps was created, a division of police undercover as civilians whose main function was to detect opponents to the regime and execute them by firing squad. Another characteristic of the rural corps was the use of the escape law, which consisted of letting the prisoner escape and then executing him under the pretext of preventing his escape. The rurales were professional police officers better paid and trained than the army, an elite corps and were the tool on which Diaz relied to pacify the country.

In 1886, the peasant Heraclio Bernal took up arms in Mazatlán, Sinaloa, disowning Díaz as president and appointing Trinidad García de la Cadena, a former Porfirian military officer and former presidential candidate in 1880, as his provisional substitute. The rebellion managed to advance to Los Mochis, where a rural corps sent from Aguascalientes managed to stop the rebels. In the confrontation García de la Cadena perished, Bernal managed to escape to Chihuahua, where he was betrayed and handed over to the rural forces, who immediately executed him. Towards 1889, General Ramón Corona, a former liberal combatant and then Governor of Jalisco, tried to run as a presidential candidate. However, upon leaving a theater, he was assassinated by one of the rural forces on June 5, 1889, on Porfirio Díaz” orders, and Corona”s assassin was never brought to trial.

The rural forces were also in charge of quelling peasant rebellions, most of which occurred due to discontent for having been dispossessed of their lands. Another of the rural tasks was to execute bandits and robbers of federal roads and haciendas. One of the repressions that had the greatest national and international repercussions was the one carried out against the Yaqui Indians, from the north of the country, on the border with the United States of America. The Yaqui had settled in the states of Sonora and Chihuahua since the end of the 18th century and had remained there undisturbed for more than a hundred years. However, during Díaz”s second term in office, protests, demonstrations and rebellions began, protesting the condition of servitude and labor exploitation in which the Yaquis were kept. Protests intensified in the face of the repressive measures taken by the government against demonstrations of nonconformity. In 1885, several of these groups were dispossessed of their lands, and developed a guerrilla war against the government, and were always supported by the Apaches, natives of North America. Pedro Ogazón, Minister of War and Navy, traveled to the north of the country to try to convince the Yaquis to lay down their arms, but he failed in his attempt. The military domination was unsuccessful due to the multiple defeats suffered by the federal forces. After more than ten years of struggle, at the beginning of 1896 the government opted for a campaign to exterminate the Yaquis by sending them as slaves to Yucatan, and in the course of the 20th century this ethnic group was practically exterminated.

In the State of Yucatan, the Mayan people had been waging a war for more than fifty years against the federal forces and advocated the independence of Yucatan from Mexico and the creation and official recognition by the international community of the Republic of Yucatan. The Caste War, which began in 1847, gathered the demands of the Maya against the condition of servitude in which they had lived since the time of the Viceroyalty of New Spain. In 1901, the troops of the federal army, commanded by Victoriano Huerta, entered Yucatecan territory and began the campaign to exterminate the rebel troops. After more than two years at war, the Federals managed to penetrate the main Mayan camp in Mérida, on March 23, 1902. The captured guerrillas were executed and those who managed to escape were arrested some time later and suffered the same fate as their former comrades. The Caste War was considered to have ended in the presidential report that Díaz presented to Congress on April 1, 1904.

Tomochi, Chihuahua, was the scene of an indigenous rebellion in November 1891, when its inhabitants, mostly indigenous, protested to the mayor about the poor sanitation in the copper mines. The demonstration looted one of the town”s main stores, and those responsible were taken prisoner. The government, through indigenous intermediaries, tried to negotiate with the rebels, who, in spite of the offers made by the local administration, refused to make a pact. The town council, faced with the refusal of the people, ordered the rural corps to enter the indigenous communities and repress the uprising. The people remained firm in their struggle, and after many hours of combat, the federal forces surrendered, having lost more than 1200 soldiers.

The country”s peasants lived in conditions similar to those of the indigenous people in the north of the country, as they worked more than fourteen hours a day in the face of the government”s demand to increase agricultural production, and landowners began to take harsher measures to obtain higher profits and a more productive yield.

Peons, in theory, were salaried workers paid by the hacienda owners, and as such their wages should be paid in Mexican pesos, according to the labor laws in force at the time. Moreover, in practice, their wages were paid in kind, through the system of tiendas de raya, establishments on the hacienda itself, where laborers could exchange the vouchers with which they were paid for products and foodstuffs of basic necessity, which were considered their wages. However, the economic weight of the vouchers was much lower than the cost of the products in the tienda de raya, so the peons were indebted to their employer. Likewise, the hacienda worker had to serve his owner in exchange for housing inside the building.

Among the main political objectives of Díaz”s first term in office was the elevation to constitutional rank of the principle of non-immediate reelection, which had served as a banner in the Tuxtepec Revolution. At the beginning of January 1878, the constitutional reform procedures began in the Chamber of Deputies, directed by Díaz”s political advisor, Justo Benítez. On June 19, 1879, non-reelection was integrated to the Federal Constitution, but reelection was open after one presidential term had elapsed. By 1884, Diaz returned to power and declared to the press: “Today I am president again and I will not be able to be again”. However, towards the end of 1887, the Congress of the Union approved a constitutional reform that allowed immediate and indefinite reelection. Although at first several state legislatures refused to approve the precept, in May 1888 it was included in the Constitution.

The economic and social growth during the second Porfirian administration caused the Mexican government to gain recognition from foreign powers, who in turn began to increase their economic investments in the country. In part, the economic recovery was due to the pacification carried out by the Mexican Army, which was able to impose a political and social order that was beneficial for foreign investment. The increase of material progress in Mexico was, from 1888 onwards, the main argument to sustain Diaz in power. Although the majority of Mexicans viewed Diaz”s mandate favorably, this did not prevent rebellions against his government, which at the time disturbed public peace, such as the Yaqui rebellion in Sonora. Much of the economic and commercial recovery was due to the Secretary of Finance between 1892 and 1911, José Yves Limantour, who was also the leader of a group known as “Los Científicos” (The Scientists). Limantour”s economic policy consisted of opening the market to foreign powers, which resulted in a growth of the balance of trade, and his strategies in the treasury allowed Díaz to vindicate himself before Mexican society and even before the opposition of the government.

Porfirism had a characteristic that was highlighted years later by the revolutionaries: the nullification of the federal autonomy guaranteed in the Constitution. Diaz maintained such constitutional requirement in appearance, however he himself drew up the lists of official candidates for state governors, who were allowed to obtain wealth and power in exchange for total submission to the centralist government. This was due, in part, to the conciliation policy used by the president to attract his political rivals, since many of them were regional caciques with great influence, which could destabilize national unity. The great majority of regional chiefs embraced the policies of Díaz, who cultivated their regional power gradually, while seeking strategies to diminish their importance at the national level. Those who were reluctant to the Porfirian programs suffered the same fate as other opponents of the regime; they were executed.

Caciquismo in Mexico existed since the dawn of Mesoamerica, was maintained during the Viceroyalty of New Spain and later during the first years of Independent Mexico. The Spanish colonists, in an attitude of pacification, allowed the indigenous caciques to possess a large amount of agricultural territory in the north and south of the country, thus maintaining and even increasing their influence over the population. At the end of the Mexican War of Independence, and the country achieved its independence from the Spanish Crown, the caciques gained even more power due to the continuous political instability experienced in the country. Many caciques gained influence at the national level because, on certain occasions, they disagreed with the decisions of the federal government and organized mutinies that further contributed to the instability of the Mexican nation. When Díaz took power, his political advisors made him aware of the importance of the power of the local cacicazgos, so the president allowed them to keep their influence in exchange for achieving stability for economic development and avoiding revolts.

Shortly before the end of the nineteenth century, a worldwide economic recession caused a fall in the price of silver, Mexico”s main commercial product. Due to the importance that the export of such product had in the national economic activity, the crisis produced an imbalance in the prices of exports, causing a shortage in the products sold within the country, since many of the powers with whom Mexico traded silver and even minted its coins, suspended their purchases, which in turn made it difficult for Mexico to import its products. In addition, there was a destabilization of the balance of payments, which caused the value of the Mexican peso to fall against other currencies in the international market.

Several factors that aggravated the economic crisis in February 1908 and caused many of the country”s inhabitants to rise up in mutinies against the federal government were:

All of the above, added to some incidents that arose during those years, caused a serious popular discontent against Díaz and his close associates, whom the people saw as guilty of the country”s economic catastrophe. The working class, which suffered the most from the economic debacle, began to mobilize its members to demand improved labor rights. Inspired by the labor movement that had emerged in the United States, Mexican workers wanted to recover their decent working conditions and took to the streets in demonstrations never seen before. The Cananea Strike in Sonora in June 1906, the Rio Blanco Strike in Veracruz on January 7, 1907 and the Acayucan Rebellion in Veracruz in 1906 were the main labor strikes of the Porfirian era. All these demonstrations were aimed at improving economic conditions and achieving equality between Mexican and foreign workers. Diaz tried to mediate in the three conflicts, but the situation worsened because the plaintiffs came to think that the president favored the employers, and the mediation did not achieve its objective. Federal and state authorities concluded that the only alternative was the use of force to quell the riots. The managers of the businesses in question allowed the army to enter their facilities to put an end to the strike. The Mexican press sponsored a smear campaign against Diaz as a result of the strikes, which was embraced by many liberal sectors in Mexico. The Mexican Liberal Party, founded in 1906 by Ricardo Flores Magón, a radical anarchist, took up many of the demands of the people and became the main opponent of the Diaz government.

After being reelected in 1884, 1888, 1892 and 1896, rumors spread that Díaz would abandon the presidency in 1900. Shortly before the end of 1898, the political class began to shuffle names from which the next president of the country could come from, since, due to his advanced age and health problems, Diaz could not continue in power. Mention was made of José Yves Limantour, Minister of Finance, and Bernardo Reyes, former Governor of Nuevo León and one of the military men closest to the President, who enjoyed prestige and authority in national politics, since during his mandate as Governor of Nuevo León -1887-1895- he managed to accelerate the socioeconomic development of the state, and turned Monterrey into a key commercial center for the rest of the country. However, President Díaz was not willing to leave office, so he took advantage of the division between Limantour and Reyes to continue his political campaign. According to José López Portillo y Rojas in Elevación y caída de Porfirio Díaz, Reyes accepted Limantour”s presidential candidacy, since the latter offered him the Ministry of War in case he was elected. But Díaz, alluding to the constitutional requirement by which only the sons of Mexicans by birth could be president, disqualified the Minister of Finance from the election, since he was the son of Frenchmen. Thus, General Porfirio Díaz ran again in the 1900 elections, and was elected for a period that would last until 1904.

In 1904, Diaz used the same stratagem he had used four years earlier in relation to the presidential succession and the competition between Limantour and Reyes. On this occasion, there was no longer any pact between the candidates as had happened before. A competition was unleashed between both politicians that caused a great political agitation, due to the popularity that Reyes had achieved among the sectors of society. Once again, Díaz launched his presidential candidacy, but in a gesture that was interpreted as support for Limantour and “Los Científicos”, he created the Vice Presidency, which was granted to Ramón Corral, appointed by the group in power and a man of Limantour”s trust. Once Díaz obtained his seventh reelection, Limantour”s group made modifications to the government program, with which “Los Científicos” hoped to establish their own system of government, since they predicted that Díaz would not conclude his term of office, which he had extended to six years, because of his advanced age, he would die. And then, Ramón Corral would become president, which would begin the mandate of the group in power.

The popular discontent made the president declare to the North American journalist James Creelman an interview granted to “The Pearson”s Magazine”, in which he made an analysis of the political situation of the country and ended his intervention by affirming that he would allow the opposition to form political parties and compete for the different positions of popular election in the election day of 1910. As a result of Diaz”s declarations, a great popular euphoria was formed throughout the country in view of the elections -although, apparently, for those close to the caudillo it was clear that it was a declaration for the exterior-, political action committees were created and the liberals presented candidates for popularly elected positions. However, Diaz accepted to be reelected again with Ramon Corral in the vice presidency, which unleashed a political crisis that was the antecedent of the revolution. The political parties took advantage of the declaration and the landowner Francisco I. Madero launched his Plan de San Luis. Once in government, he consolidated the figure of the vice-president as it worked in the United States. The factions of Emiliano Zapata and Francisco Villa did not see their interests represented in Madero, and faced with the lack of recognition as the head of the revolution, a new agent appeared in the north.

It is a mistake to suppose that the future of democracy in Mexico has been endangered by the prolonged stay in power of a single president,” he said quietly. I can honestly say that service has not corrupted my political ideals and that I believe that democracy is the only just principle of government, even if it is only possible in practice for highly developed peoples.

The Mexican middle class in the Porfiriato era was composed, for the most part, of two main groups. The first division was of employees, teachers, bureaucrats and other government workers, whose members increased due to the growth of public services and the government apparatus. The second group was industrialists, merchants and landowners, who had taken over land granted by the government. Their incomes were higher than those of bureaucrats and public employees because entrepreneurs combined primary economic activities -agriculture and livestock- with secondary activities -trade and industry-. At the same time, there was a middle ground between the two societies: that of the landed oligarchy, made up of landowners, agricultural workers, miners and ranchers. In addition to their strong socioeconomic influence, the bourgeoisie -as the middle class was known- played an important role in the political revolution. Many of them, mainly those of the first society, had access to education in other countries, which allowed them to develop a strong sense of nationalism contrary to the government policy of extolling other foreign cultures. In addition, the bourgeois laid the ideological foundations that would later shape the social struggles of the revolution.

The other group of the middle class, landowners and hacienda owners, without having the same radical ideology as the professionals, also opposed Porfirianism, especially against the privileges enjoyed by foreign businessmen. Their main target of attack was “Los Científicos”, the political group closest to Díaz and whom the liberals accused of turning the country into a financial oligarchy to maintain their political and economic interests. The nonconformity of this group was a crucial factor in the outbreak of the political revolution of 1910. The peasants were inspired by liberal ideas, and together with the workers, they protested against the dispossession of agricultural land and the lowering of wages, and began to organize themselves into groups to defend their interests. The most important of the political associations then formed was the Ponciano Arriaga Liberal Club, created in San Luis Potosí and named after the 19th century constitutional deputy, Ponciano Arriaga. The group was presided over by the brothers Ricardo and Jesús Flores Magón and among its members were Camilo Arriaga, Juan Sarabia, Librado Rivera and Antonio Díaz Soto y Gama, who were influenced by the ideas of anarcho-syndicalism that had been formed in Europe and later moved to the United States of America. They soon became the main political rivals of the Diaz government, due to their support to opposition parties, such as the Mexican Liberal Party, whose political program, printed in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1906, was later disseminated among the Mexican population. The Porfirian government arrested and exiled many of the opposition journalists, who continued their work in exile, such as Ricardo Flores Magón. Others, such as Soto y Gama, joined the revolutionary struggle after returning to the country.

Francisco I. Madero was born on October 30, 1873 in Parras, Coahuila, son of one of the richest families of landowners in the region. Educated in a Jesuit school in Saltillo, in 1886 he traveled to Holland, Spain, France, United Kingdom, Belgium and the United States, where he studied medicine and homeopathy, and also came into contact with a spiritualist society. When he returned to Mexico, he practiced his profession until 1904 when he ran for mayor of San Pedro de las Colonias, where he lived, but was defeated. The following year, he supported the campaign of Frumencio Fuentes for governor of Coahuila. In the elections, the liberal candidate lost to the governor in office, Miguel Cárdenas, who was reelected. After several protests accusing him of fraud, Madero decided to abandon politics for a while, until 1907, when he came into contact with the Flores Magón brothers, who explained his political ideology. That year Madero began to write his book La sucesión presidencial en 1910, where he made an analysis of the country”s situation and at the same time made known his political, economic and social proposals, among which were:

Díaz met with Madero at the National Palace on April 4, 1909, and at the end of this meeting Madero concluded that “President Díaz and his attitudes have shown me that in practice he is not very much in agreement with the practice of democracy, so it will be good to travel around the country to spread democracy”. Then, Madero began the first political campaign in the country, where he toured the most important cities of Mexico and managed to win several followers among the population. His campaign was divided into five stages, namely:

In your letter of April 27 last year, you told me: in the law, both authorities and citizens will find the safe way to exercise their rights and that the Constitution did not authorize you to interfere in matters that belong to the sovereignty of the federal entities.

For the presidential elections, the National Anti-Reelectionist Party nominated the Madero-Francisco Vázquez Gómez formula. In turn, the Reelectionist Party and the National Party launched the presidential candidacy of Diaz, but different candidates for the vice-presidency. Ramón Corral competed for the members of the Scientific Party and Teodoro Dehesa for the National Party. The strong rejection to Corral”s candidacy, together with the instability caused by Madero”s capture, created a tense atmosphere on July 10, election day. On August 21, Diaz and Corral were proclaimed president and vice-president, respectively, until November 30, 1916. Madero managed to escape from prison and fled to the United States on October 5, and then launched the Plan of San Luis, where he rejected Diaz as president and called on Mexicans to take up arms on November 20.

The announcement of the outbreak of a civil war did not prevent the celebration of the Centennial of Mexico”s Independence, between September 1 and October 6. Since the end of the 19th century Diaz and an organizing committee prepared the festivities. From all over the world special ambassadors came to the country with gifts brought from their nations. Spain gave the military uniform of José María Morelos, in the person of the Marquis of Polavieja. The French delegation gave the keys to Mexico City, captured in the 1863 intervention. Díaz presided over banquets, celebrations, parades, ceremonies, dances, inaugurations, all with patriotic motifs. The inauguration of the Castañeda Hospital and several educational institutions -such as the National School of Engineering, direct antecedent of the National Polytechnic Institute- took place. On the night of September 15, the same day the president turned eighty years old, Diaz presided over the “Grito” ceremony in Mexico City”s Zocalo, in front of more than one hundred thousand people. The following day, the monument known as the Angel of Independence, whose construction dates back to 1902, was inaugurated.

Once the Centennial celebrations were over, a climate of political uncertainty was once again felt in the country. William Howard Taft, President of the United States, decided to meet with Díaz in order to reach agreements to protect the interests of American businessmen living in Mexico. On October 16 he met with the Mexican president in Ciudad Juarez, and the first official visit of a North American president to Mexican soil was interpreted by the Maderistas as a sign of an alliance between the United States and Diaz, so the president”s unpopularity grew even more. Meanwhile, in the state of Morelos, sugar cane hacienda workers rose up in arms demanding the same demands as the workers, and were also violently put down. Among their leaders was a peasant who years later would become the main agrarian leader of the Revolution, Emiliano Zapata.

The Plan of San Luis was the inspiring document of the Maderista revolution, in which the results of the June 26th and July 10th elections were rejected, the Revolution was proclaimed for six o”clock in the afternoon of November 20th, Madero was appointed as the provisional head of the executive power and would be in charge of calling for elections. In addition, all laws passed during Diaz”s government would be subject to revision. The slogan adopted by the movement was “Effective suffrage, no reelection”, the same used by Diaz against Juarez and Lerdo. Unlike other plans in Mexico”s history, the Plan de San Luis did not contain any economic or social reform, but rather it was a political manifesto.

Thanks to the maneuvers of the Secretary of the Interior, Manuel González de Cosío, Maderista cells were discovered throughout the country, which intended to attack the town of Casas Grandes, Chihuahua, and even the cities of Toluca and Ciudad Juárez. In Puebla, liberal activist Aquiles Serdán and his family were discovered with Maderista propaganda, their house was attacked and destroyed on the morning of November 18, and Aquiles was murdered. The Serdán family is considered the first martyrs of the Mexican Revolution, since their assassination was the incident that sparked the rebellion against Díaz.

The first acts of the Maderista revolution were marked by the uncertainty caused by the death of the Serdán family, and by the apparent military superiority of the Porfirian army. Madero was still residing in New Orleans, Florida, from where he received news that the revolutionary uprisings against Diaz had been successful, and from that same city he sent letters to the rebel chiefs to direct the struggle. Among the main leaders were Abraham González, Pascual Orozco and Francisco Villa. On November 20, uprisings took place in the states of Chihuahua, San Luis Potosí, Veracruz and Durango. At the end of the month they extended to three more states, with Chihuahua having the greatest amount of military activity. At the beginning of March 1911, Emiliano Zapata raised troops in the states of Morelos, Guerrero, Puebla and Michoacán, which further fueled the general insurrection. Generals González Cosío and Victoriano Huerta were quickly defeated, their reinforcements killed and many of their soldiers, most of them recruited by leva, deserted the army. In April most of the country -18 states- already had revolutionary groups raised in their territory. On May 10, Pascual Orozco”s revolutionaries took the military plaza of Ciudad Juárez, which was the final blow to the government, and in that same month, the revolutionaries entered various parts of the country, while the army opted to withdraw to the capital and surrounding areas.

In Mexico City, Porfirio Díaz was convalescing from a gum disease, suffering from deafness and physical exhaustion -he was more than eighty years old as of May 1911-, and before the defeat of his forces in Ciudad Juárez he began to think about resigning, as he expressed to the archbishop of Mexico, his wife and his son Porfirio on the night of May 17. On the 22nd, the cabinet, with the exception of Limantour, resigned and the president had to appoint new ministers of revolutionary ideology. After the signing of the peace treaties in Ciudad Juarez, it was agreed that Diaz should resign the presidency and in his place would be the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Francisco Leon de la Barra. On the night of May 23, Diaz began to draft his resignation, which was supervised by his secretary, Rafael Chousal. Finally, at eleven o”clock in the morning of May 25, the Chamber of Deputies, in the midst of a demonstration of more than a thousand people demanding Diaz”s resignation, unanimously approved the resignation of President Porfirio Diaz, while appointing Leon de la Barra as the new head of the Executive Power. Thus ended the Porfiriato, a period in which Diaz ruled the country for more than 30 years.

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Exile and death

After resigning, Diaz and his family began to pack their belongings to retire to exile in Paris, France. After bidding farewell to their former servants by paying them in gold coins, the Díaz family left for the Santa Clara train station, south of the capital. Major General Victoriano Huerta was in charge of escorting the caravan to Veracruz, from where they would take a steamship to La Coruña. On May 26, Porfirio and Carmen Romero Rubio, accompanied by the general”s children -except for Amada- and Carmen”s sisters, left for the Port of Veracruz. On the way, on the morning of May 27, shortly before reaching the city of Orizaba, the train was attacked by bandits, who however were repelled by Huerta”s federal forces, and managed to capture more than half of the assailants. Upon arriving in Veracruz, on the night of that same day, and contrary to what happened in other parts of the country, the Diaz family was received with banquets, dinners, dances and parties in their honor. Finally, on the morning of May 31, aboard the German ship “Ypiranga”, Porfirio Diaz and his family left the country.

During the trip, there was an incident of rejection of Diaz in La Coruña, Spain, when a group of demonstrators shouted at him, accusing him of murder and genocide. Due to the mouth infection that had afflicted him since he was president of Mexico, Porfirio Diaz decided to go to a clinic in Interlaken, Switzerland, from where he was cured in the last days of June 1911. In July, Diaz and his family visited Paris. Upon arriving at Les Invalides, on July 20, the former president talked with retired French soldiers who had fought in the war of intervention fifty years earlier. General Gustave Léon Niox, in charge of the building, escorted Díaz to the tomb of Napoleon Bonaparte, whom the Mexican general admired. Niox suddenly pulled out the sword that Bonaparte used in 1805 during the Battle of Austerlitz, and placed it in the hands of Diaz, who made public his emotion for having the sword and that he did not deserve to have it in his hands, to which Niox replied, “It has never been in better hands”.

Diaz moved into an apartment at number 26 Foch Avenue, near the Bois de Boulogne and the Arc de Triomphe. After the trip to France, Porfirio Diaz began touring Europe and its main capitals accompanied by his wife. In April 1912, he was received at the Zarzuela Palace, Madrid, by King Alfonso XIII of Spain, who invited him to reside in the Iberian Peninsula and presented him with a sword as a gift. Later they toured San Sebastian and Zaragoza. Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany sent him tickets to Zaragoza to attend the military maneuvers of his army in Munich, where they arrived on the eve of the First World War. After taking up residence in Paris, the Diazes used to go to Biarritz and San Juan de Luz, on the French coast, during the winter. At the beginning of 1913, they began a trip to North Africa and their journey took them to Cairo, Keneth, the Sphinx and the Great Pyramid of Giza. In the latter, Diaz was portrayed in a photograph owned by the General Archive of the Nation. During their return to Europe, they visited Naples and Rome.

Meanwhile, in Mexico, the political situation was not remedied with the resignation of Diaz. Madero was elected president and took office on November 6, and on November 25 Emiliano Zapata proclaimed the Plan de Ayala demanding the restoration of agrarian rights and disowning Madero as president. In March 1912, Pascual Orozco signed the Plan de la Empacadora, with the same pretensions as Madero. Félix Díaz, Porfirio”s nephew, rose up in arms but was captured in Veracruz and was about to be executed, but Madero, disregarding his collaborators who advised executing him, pardoned him. Orozco was defeated by Huerta and was forced to flee to the United States. In February 1913, a plot headed by Manuel Mondragón, Gregorio Ruiz and Félix Díaz, freed Bernardo Reyes from the Tlatelolco Prison, proclaimed him leader of their movement and even attacked the National Palace, but the troops in charge of the plaza, Lauro Villar, managed to stop the invaders and assassinated Reyes. Mondragón and Díaz took refuge in an artillery factory known as La Ciudadela. Madero went out that same day -February 9- to harangue the people to remain loyal to the government, and in view of Villar”s wound, Madero appointed Huerta as the new military chief. Henry Lane Wilson, North American ambassador in Mexico, worried about the interests of his country”s companies in Mexico and Madero”s policy, decided to make a pact with Díaz and Mondragón, which started the Decena Trágica. On February 17, Huerta subscribed an armistice with Díaz, Lane Wilson and Mondragón, by which they agreed to place Huerta in the presidency in exchange for his later handing it over to Díaz. On February 18, a group of businessmen from the capital -among them Ignacio de la Torre, Díaz”s son-in-law- declared their loyalty to Huerta. That same day, Gustavo A. Madero, brother and advisor to the president, was arrested and tortured to death. On February 19, Madero and José María Pino Suárez, vice-president, resigned from their posts. Pedro Lascuráin took over the executive power for 45 minutes and his only act of government was to appoint Huerta as Secretary of Foreign Affairs. He then resigned and Victoriano Huerta entered the presidency. Madero and Pino Suárez were taken to the Lecumberri Palace prison where they were not admitted; instead, after the simulation of an attack during the trip, they were assassinated on February 22nd.

In Paris, Diaz began to learn about the rebellions that had taken place in Mexico, thanks to the fact that several of his old friends used to visit him. At the end of 1913, Porfirio received the visit of his daughters Amada and Luz, who stayed with their father for a few months and together they toured Switzerland and the Alps. During the last months of 1914 and the first months of 1915, his health began to deteriorate seriously and later, in June 1915, his doctor ordered absolute rest, so he had to give up his daily morning walks in the forest of Bologna. According to Carmen Romero Rubio”s accounts, her husband suffered from hallucinations. It is said that in his last days of life, the already old man Porfirio Diaz repeatedly pronounced the name of his sister Nicolasa. On July 2, finally, he had lost his speech and his sense of time. His family doctor was called at noon, and at six o”clock in the afternoon and thirty-two minutes -French time- José de la Cruz Porfirio Díaz Mori died at the age of eighty-four.

He was buried in the church of Saint Honoré l”Eylau, and on December 27, 1921 his remains were transferred to the Montparnasse cemetery in Paris. When Carmen Romero Rubio returned to the country in 1934 she left his remains in France. Since 1989 there have been expressed intentions to return Diaz”s remains to Mexico, without any results.

Throughout his life, Porfirio Díaz received numerous decorations, both national and foreign, being considered to date as the most decorated man in Mexico.

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