Chronicle on the Porfiriato

Chronicle on the Porfiriato

The Porfiriato, that long prelude to the Revolution

Everyone in late 19th century Mexico knew who the general was Porfirio Diaz. He was known by many as the "hero of April 2," since he had been in command of Mexican forces at the 1867 taking of Puebla. Others remembered him because he ran twice for the presidency of Mexico with the same Benito Juarez, and when he was defeated for the second time in the elections, he proclaimed the Plan de la Noria, opposing by arms the reelection of Juárez.

"Porfirio de la Noria", as they nicknamed him then, did not manage to seize power in that uprising either, but Juárez's death in 1872 provided him with the propitious terrain to abandon his arms and retire from life public. Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada assumed the interim presidency and no one would have suspected that that same Porfirio Díaz, later on, would govern the destinies of Mexico for 31 years.

Despite everything, Díaz was a military man who enjoyed sympathy among the population

, given his prominent role in defending the homeland against foreign intervention. His slogan of “Effective suffrage; no reelection ”spoke of a commitment to the democracy and the alternation of powers, so that no one was surprised when in the extraordinary elections of 1872 he ran again as a candidate, against Lerdo de Tejada. And surely no one was surprised that he was defeated at the polls again.

So Diaz had to settle for more modest aspirations: he was a federal deputy in 1874 and opposed many of the government's measures of his rival. But public representation was not exactly his strong suit: in front of the plenary session of the Chamber of Deputies, on the occasion of defending pensions assigned to war veterans, he made a mess and ended in tears, making him a laughingstock of Mexican politics in the US. moment.

The Porfirian movement, however, gained adherents in the town thanks to the growing unpopularity of Lerdo de Tejada. His government had raised taxes, expelled religious orders, and decreased trade with France and England. So in 1875, when he announced his desire to be reelected to the post in next year's elections, Porfirio Díaz sensed that his time had finally come.

The Tuxtepec Revolution

As he had done before against Benito Juárez, Díaz took up arms against the government and announced the Plan of Tuxtepec, to which numerous soldiers joined, and which had the approval of the Church Catholic Thus began the last Mexican civil war of the 19th century. And it did not start off on the right foot for Díaz's forces, who suffered their first defeat at Icamole, Nuevo León, on March 10, 1876. That beginning earned Díaz the nickname "the weeping man from Icamole" by his detractors.

Eventually, things looked so bad that Díaz had to flee to Cuba, at that time still in the hands of the Spanish, and there to recruit an army to try again. And this time he had much better luck. Thanks to the combination of his troops and those of Manuel González, on November 21, Díaz took the capital finally, erecting himself as provisional president of the Republic, after the flight into exile of Lerdo de Tejada.

His first term began, however, in 1877, after he was declared the winner of the extraordinary elections that were held on March 25. It would be a 4-year presidential term, culminating in 1880 and there would be no room for reelection, as Porfirio Díaz himself requested in his slogans. Ironically, this was the beginning of a long period of Mexican history that will be known as "the Porfiriato."

The beginnings of the Porfiriato

The initial government of Díaz had two great purposes: to pacify the country, which since its days of the War of Independence had not been able to enjoy lasting peace and business growth, and achieving full relations with the United States, through a debt settlement agreement external. His fundamental slogan was "order and progress", inherited from the positivism of Auguste Comte, under the so-called "Porfirian peace", obtained thanks to the extraordinary powers granted by Congress to combat and eliminate the chiefdom and the disunity.

In general, the Díaz government succeeded in its fundamental purposes, but could not be reelected in 1880, So a year before there were already different rumors about who the Party candidates would be. Liberal. In the midst of a climate of rebellion, as it was custom In the 19th century, the candidacy of Manuel González, Minister of War and comrade of Porfirio Díaz, was announced, while that the rebels were relentlessly repressed by the Díaz government under the slogan of "kill them hot and then you find out ”. An attitude that a good part of the Mexican people would not forgive.

The 1880 elections proceeded without major setbacks and Manuel González was elected to the presidency of Mexico. His was an irregular government, focused on economic and technological progress (for example, concessions were given for the creation of the first telegraph network and several banks were founded), but always in the shadow of numerous corruption scandals and public mismanagement. To top it off, at the end of 1881, the government issued the nickel coin, replacing the silver coin, which brought with it a economic crisis and almost threw the country headlong into a new civil war, had it not been for the fact that Díaz intervened to calm the environment.

The truth is that Díaz's own political forces promoted these accusations of corruption against González, with the purpose that his government would be ephemeral and return control to Díaz in 1884. There were personal attacks, rumors about his morality, all despite the fact that Díaz held the position of development minister in the González government and, after 1881, as governor of Oaxaca.

Thus, González's government came to an end and, contrary to what many would think, Díaz announced his candidacy, with the support of the church and the business sectors.

The long hand of the caudillo

From December 1, 1884 until the beginning of the Mexican Revolution In 1911, the political command of Mexico fell uninterruptedly into the hands of Porfirio Díaz. In fact, the only parenthesis that occurred in the 31 years of Porfiriato was that of the 4 years of González's government, in which Díaz, in any case, was always present.

Under Díaz, the Mexican Republic once again guided its efforts towards order, stability and progress. technological, despite having the continuous opposition of the leftist sectors, who advocated a fairer distribution of the capital gain. Another sector at odds with the government was that of the aboriginal peoples, such as the Yaquis in Sonora.

Although Díaz's initial cabinet was made up almost entirely of former combatants of the Tuxtepec Revolution, from his second government he became present a greater political breadth, which allowed the entry of many followers of Juárez and even lerdistas and imperialists (that is, officials of the now-defunct Second Empire Mexican). This almost full control of the country allowed the government to invest in culture and science impossible for many of his predecessors, which resulted in a flourishing of the arts, the literature and architecture.

In addition, the Díaz government invested heavily in the expansion of the railway network, hand in hand with Business Europe, especially the United Kingdom, and gave control of the network to private national companies towards the end of the century. Likewise, the exploitation of natural resources of Mexico was massive and in conjunction with international investment, and with them also came electricity and a relative increase in agricultural production. The economy Mexicana grew, although clearly oriented towards dependence on European markets, something that at the beginning of the 20th century ended up playing very against it.

Regarding education, a controversial issue since the years of Benito Juárez, the Díaz government achieved a certain degree of conciliation with the Catholic Church, through a mass, positivist model of public instruction, but which left a certain place for the humanism. This often required confronting local caciques and powerful landowners, but Díaz's dominance over the country was ironclad.

In fact, freedom of the press was almost non-existent, since the "Gag Law" had been in force since 1882, which empowered the government to apprehend journalists with impunity. This caused the number of newspapers, which in 1888 was around 130, to only 54 when the Porfiriato ended.

The same treatment was given to the Mexican intelligentsia, many of whom were "bought" by granting public office, while his political opponents were faced with violence and repression without barracks. This is how the peasant rebellions of 1886, the guerrilla wars of the Yaqui peoples, the Mayan wars in Yucatán or the indigenous rebellion of Tomochi of 1891 were controlled.

Finally, the permanence of Díaz in power since 1888 occurred through indefinite reelection, which was incorporated into the Constitution, betraying what Díaz professed during the decades prior to his government. Díaz was reelected in 1888, 1892, 1896, 1898, and 1904. In addition, in his government federal autonomy was annulled, and it was the caudillo himself who drew up the lists of candidates for the state governorships.

Sparks of the Revolution

Despite the political and economic stability that the Porfiriato brought with it, Mexico entered the 20th century in the midst of a social and economic crisis. On the one hand, the peasantry and the working class lived in miserable conditions, totally excluded from the bonanza that their own work made possible. On the other hand, the world experienced a great recession at the end of the 19th century and the demand for mining resources Mexicans collapsed, which led to the depreciation of the Mexican peso and a very unfavorable balance of payments.

Therefore, the first uprisings against the federal government took place, particularly among the worker and peasant sectors. There were numerous strikes and demands for better labor, in which the Díaz government tried to mediate between workers and employers: the Cananea Strike, in Sonora, of 1906; the Acayucan Rebellion, in Veracruz, in the same year, and the Río Blanco Strike, also in Veracruz, but in 1907. But the negotiations led nowhere and the government resorted to violence to quell them.

For Díaz, the country was not "ready" to resume democracy, but even so, he announced that he would not run in the 1910 elections. He had done it before: in 1900 and then 1904, just to instigate competition between possible successors of his and end up concluding that, given the things, it was better to continue a while longer in the can.

However, in 1910 that strategy did not have the expected result: Francisco I. Madero was the favorite candidate to replace him at the helm of Mexico, under an anti-reelection slogan very similar to the one Díaz himself had launched against Juárez decades ago. And the solution that Díaz gave to this problem was, simply, to have Madero arrested and held the elections while keeping him in jail.

Madero managed to escape and go into exile in the United States, a country with which Mexico's diplomatic relations had begun to sour in the 20th century, and with the Plan of San Luis he summoned the Mexican people to rise up in arms against the tyrant, whom he did not know as president legitimate. The spark of the Mexican Revolution had been lit and the Porfiriato was coming to an end.

The fall of the Porfiriato

The armed struggle between the revolutionary forces and the Díaz government began on 20 November 1910, after the leader and his vice president, Ramón Corral, were proclaimed in your charges. As early as 1911, numerous states had joined the insurgents, under the command of future revolutionary leaders, Pascual Orozco, Francisco “Pancho” Villa, and Emiliano Zapata. And the defeat of the Porfirian troops in Ciudad Juárez on May 10, 1911 showed that the government had its days numbered.

With more than eighty years, suffering from deafness and physical exhaustion, Porfirio Díaz began to draft his resignation, which he presented to the Chamber of Deputies at eleven o'clock in the morning of May 25, in the middle of a demonstration of more than a thousand people who demanded his resignation in the City of Mexico.

Francisco León de la Barra, his hitherto Minister of Foreign Relations, took his place in command of the Executive Power, while Díaz and his family went into exile to Paris, France. Suddenly, the solid Porfiriato had collapsed, and Mexico was preparing for a long and bloody civil war: the Mexican Revolution.

References:

• "Porfirio Díaz" in Wikipedia.
• "Porfiriato" in Wikipedia.
• "El Porfiriato" in the Government of Mexico.
• "Porfiriato (Mexican history)" in The Encyclopaedia Britannica.

What is a chronicle?

A chronicle it's a kind of narrative text in which real or fictional events are addressed from a chronological perspective. They are often narrated by eyewitnesses, through a personal language that uses literary resources. Usually considered as a hybrid genre between journalism, history and literature, the chronicle can encompass types of narration very different, such as the travel chronicle, the chronicle of events, the gastronomic chronicle, and so on.

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