Biography of Porfirio Díaz

Biography of Porfirio Díaz

José de la Cruz Porfirio Díaz Mori (1830-1915), better known as Porfirio Díaz, was a Mexican military and politician, protagonist in numerous conflicts in the nineteenth century and politician in charge of the nation for more than 30 years, a period known as "the Porfiriato ”.

Is about a controversial figure in Mexican political history, to which important military victories are attributed, but he is also accused of having imposed a dictatorship that caused the first great civil war of the 20th century: the Mexican Revolution (1910-1917 or 1940, depending on the sources consulted).

Díaz was a staunch defender of positivist thoughtThat is, he understood progress inseparably from industrialization and technological advance, and the expansion of the Mexican railway network was the main symbol of him during his tenure.

He was also a decorated soldier, both nationally and internationally, who held the honorary title of Grand Officer of the French Academy since 1888.

Birth and youth of Porfirio Díaz

José de la Cruz Porfirio Díaz Mori he was born on September 15, 1830 in the Mexican city of Oaxaca. He was the sixth child of the seven that José Faustino Díaz and Petrona Mori had, whom he himself Díaz describes in his memoirs as "of the Creole race" and "half-blood Indian of the Mixtec race." respectively.

In 1835, the young Porfirio entered the Friendly School of the Oaxaca parish and later the Tridentino Seminary, where he studied until 1846, when the American intervention in Mexico, and many of the seminary students enlisted in the army to fight the enemy, including Porfirio himself Diaz. But although they were assigned to the San Clemente Battalion, they never saw the battle front.

Later, Díaz left the seminary and enrolled in the Oaxaca Institute of Sciences and Arts, where he studied law and in 1850 he entered the institute itself as a teacher. There he was a student of Benito Juárez himself (1806-1872), with whom he later shared political destinies.

Although he was not part of the Ayutla Revolution of 1854, against then-president Antonio López de Santa Anna (1794-1876), many of his companions were, and Díaz himself ended up involved and stopped.

After the resignation of Santa Anna and the return to Oaxaca of Benito Juárez, Díaz was appointed as political head of the Ixtlán district, which was his debut in Mexican politics. There he formed the first military guard, with which he took part in the siege of Oaxaca in 1856, where he was shot in the heart and subsequently operated on. In reward for his commitment to the Liberals, he was assigned as the military leader of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.

Political and military career of Porfirio Díaz

Díaz's military career began in the War of the Reform (1858-1861) that pitted liberals and conservatives for dominance over the country's politics. The first side defended the interim presidency of Benito Juárez, after the resignation of Ignacio Comonfort (1812-1863), while the second proclaimed Félix María Zuloaga (1813-1898).

Díaz fought on the side of the Liberals, in which he reached the ranks of major, colonel and lieutenant general.. After the liberal triumph in 1861 he held the position of federal deputy for Oaxaca in the Congress of the Union, a position from which he left to resume combat when the forces Conservatives executed the liberals Melchor Ocampo, Leandro Valle and Santos Degollado, just before the Second French Intervention in Mexico took place (1862-1867).

The suspension of payments on the debt acquired with Europe by the Conservatives during the Civil War, by the President Benito Juárez, was the trigger for the foreign invasion, and French, English and Spanish troops occupied the port from Veracruz.

Although the English and the Spanish agreed to a negotiation, the French chose to take control of Mexico, as Napoleon III Bonaparte (1808-1873) wanted a Mexican empire supervised by France. Allied with the Mexican conservatives, the French defeated the liberal government and proclaimed in 1864 the Second Mexican Empire, at the head of which was the Austrian Maximilian of Habsburg (1832-1867).

Along with other Mexican military, Díaz was captured in Puebla in 1863 and taken to Veracruz to begin his exile in Martinique.. But he managed to escape and go to Mexico City, where he contacted Benito Juárez and received 30,000 men to start a guerrilla war in the state of Oaxaca, of which he was appointed governor interim.

Despite his military superiority, the French could never fully control the state. However, in 1865 the city of Oaxaca was besieged by imperial forces and Díaz was forced to surrender. He was miraculously saved from execution and he was sentenced to life imprisonment, but managed to escape and organize a new resistance of 100 men, with whom he returned to the south and reorganized together with Juan Álvarez (1790-1867) the Army of East.

With this new army, Díaz took advantage of the change in current that occurred after 1867, when the French troops undertook the return to Europe in the face of the imminent war with Prussia. The end of the American Civil War (1861-1865) once again allowed Juárez the military support of its northern allies.

In April of that same year, Díaz besieged the last imperial forces in Puebla and in May the emperor Maximiliano was arrested in Querétaro, tried by a military court and executed together with his generals Miramón and Mejía. The Mexican republic once again had control of the territory.

Díaz was decorated by Juárez himself and awarded with a farm called La Noria, where he retired after losing the presidential elections of 1867 called by Juárez (2344 votes against 785).

He married his niece Delfina Ortega de Díaz, with whom he had three children who did not reach adults and two who did: Porfirio Díaz Ortega and Luz Victoria Díaz Ortega.

The Ferris Wheel Revolution

In 1871 there were again presidential elections, and Juárez and Díaz faced each other again. This time the defeat of Díaz had a narrower margin (5,837 votes against 3,555 and 2,874 votes for Lerdo de Tejada, president of the Supreme Court of Justice).

Díaz decided to challenge the election, sought support from Oaxaca's landowners and military, and announced on November 8 his Plan de la Noria, a call to rebel militarily against Juárez. The uprising of the states of Oaxaca, Guerrero and Chiapas under the command of Díaz was known as the La Noria Revolution.

The uprising was unsuccessful. They failed to take the capital and Díaz's own brother was executed in early 1872. However, in July of that year, Benito Juárez died of a heart attack in the National Palace, a situation that left Lerdo de la Tejada as interim president.

The Noria Revolution had lost its meaning and Díaz plunged into an economic crisis that cost him his property and forced him to emigrate to Veracruz. There he ran and was elected as a federal deputy in 1874.

That same year, he opposed, along with other politicians from the military establishment, a reduction in the pension. of the retired military and, despite the fact that he was a lousy speaker, he was convinced to speak in public. His performance was embarrassingly poor and, in frustration, he ended the speech by crying in public. He immediately became the laughingstock of the Mexican political class.

The Tuxtepec Revolution

New elections to the Mexican presidency they took place in 1876 and the then president Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada (1823-1889) announced his desire to continue in office. Díaz also announced his candidacy but his followers also undertook a series of protests against the current president who, being repressed by the government, caused further unrest and lit the fuse of the last Mexican war of the nineteenth century: the Revolution of Tuxtepec.

Diazhe took up arms and he had the backing of many military personnel, who viewed Lerdo's Spanish ancestry with a bad light. Under the promise of respecting the Constitution of 1857 and the motto of “effective suffrage; no reelection ”, the revolution spread from the north to Oaxaca.

Initially it had numerous setbacks, since the army remained loyal to Lerdo, but new forces recruited by Díaz in Havana allowed him to defeat Lerdo at the Battle of Tecoac, forcing the hitherto president to flee abroad.

In 1876 Díaz triumphantly entered Mexico City and was established in 1977 as interim president of the republic. The Porfiriato was about to begin.

The Porfiriato

It is known as "Porfiriato" the long historical period in which Mexico was subjected to the designs of Porfirio Díaz. This period lasted from 1877 to 1910, with a brief intermediate interruption: the four-year period of Manuel González (1880-1884), a government that was in any case under the indirect control of Díaz. This period is usually divided into two stages:

Crisis and overthrow of Porfirio Díaz

The Porfiriato came to an end in the midst of an economic crisis caused by the collapse of the prices of silver, the main Mexican export product. The currency devalued and a financial panic ensued, which was compounded by a drought that reduced the agricultural production and precarious working conditions of the working class, freely squeezed by the Business foreign.

A) Yes, Antiporfirista sentiment grew and led to numerous strikes, fueled by popular attrition after the re-elections of 1884, 1888, 1892 and 1896, in which there were numerous suspicions of electoral irregularity and political tricks. When word spread in 1900 that Díaz would run for president again, the first voices were raised against him.

This did not prevent Díaz from returning to command in 1904, but he did so in a very different political climate, which forced him to promise in a interview with an American journalist who would allow opposition parties to organize for political relief... but in 1910.

This News He lit the fuse of anti-reelectionism, which curiously used the same slogans that Díaz had used against Benito Juárez at the time. And under the leadership of Francisco I. Madero (1873-1913), the Porfiriato faced the first major uprisings against him, without realizing that it was the point of a revolutionary iceberg that would shake Mexico at the beginning of the 20th century.

Exile and death of Porfirio Díaz

Forced to resign from his position, Porfirio Díaz left Mexico on a ship bound for Paris, France, where he lived the rest of his days. He passed away in 1915, at the age of eighty-four, and his body was buried in the Saint Honoré l ’Eylau church, and then transferred to the Montparnasse cemetery.

Since 1989 there have been different initiatives to repatriate his remains, but there is still no consensus on this.

References:

• "Porfirio Díaz" in Wikipedia.
• "Porfirio Díaz Mori" by Verónica Uribe Rosales in the Autonomous University of the State of Hidalgo (Mexico).
• "Why 100 years later the remains of Porfirio Díaz cause controversy again in Mexico" by Alberto Nájar in BBC World.
• "Porfirio Díaz (president of Mexico)" in The Encyclopaedia Britannica.

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