This is just a simplified guide. The questions are not central to the discussion in this class, but rather basic starting points.
Prof. Jorge Majfud
- Who was Porfirio Díaz?
- Did Porfirio Diaz allow unions and strikes?
- Who were the major supporters of Porfirio Diaz?
- What were the causes that triggered the Mexican Revolution?
- What percentage of Mexican peasants was landless by 1910?
- Who were the most relevant revolutionary leaders in the Mexican Revolution?
Some references link to external sites due to Blackboard’s limited memory capacity.
*Some references link to external sites due to Blackboard’s limited memory capacity.
Barbarous Mexico (1909) by John Kenneth Turner:
https://archive.org/details/barbarousmexico00turnuoft/mode/2up
Agave, henequen (México 20th Century)
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Notice: The following pages are not mandatory readings. They provide a historical background drawn from «The Wild Frontier: 200 Years of Anglo-Saxon Fanaticism in Latin America» that may be considered for this topic.
Puebla, Mexico. May 5, 1862—The Mexican army defeats the powerful imperial army of France in the Battle of Puebla. After two generations of humiliating defeats, the Mexicans have an encyclopedic reason to feel proud. Mexico has not been lucky, nor will it be for a long time: its territory and wealth have been coveted by many world powers in the same measure that its people have been despised for their appearance or culture, despite the beauty of their appearance and the richness of their culture.
Spain and France helped the United States with its Revolution of 1776. Mexico will help it with its Civil War in 1862. No one will help Mexico, not now, not ever. Two years after it was stripped of Texas to reinstate slavery, civilized France had taken advantage of its fallen state. On November 27, 1838, following some robberies against French citizens in Mexico, Paris had ordered the blockade of all Mexican ports. The trigger: a French baker named Remontel had been robbed by Mexican soldiers who were clearly drunk, which France found intolerable and immediately demanded compensation. In the absence of gold or silver, France informed, the compensation could be a portion of land. Mexico did not understand the European country’s demands, and France launched the “Pastry War.” On Tuesday the 27th, its warships bombarded Veracruz, and once again, Mexico had to resist for several days, paying a high price in lives and destruction. In the resistance, Antonio López de Santa Anna lost a leg, and many others lost their lives.
Though the Battle of Puebla is now a provisional victory (Mexico will be defeated by that same army a year later, in 1863, and will fall into French hands), May 5th will, by far, be much more important for the fate of the United States than for Mexico. Shortly before, France and Great Britain had sided with the Confederacy, not because they were in favor of legal slavery but because they wanted to divide the emerging superpower in two, the main goal of the Southern states of the United States. With this aim, England had proposed a peace plan between the North and the South, hoping it would be rejected by the North, thus allowing recognition of the South as an independent country, even though in London, Karl Marx and the English working class supported the North and Lincoln’s decision to abolish slavery.[1]
The Battle of Puebla prevented Napoleon III from supplying weapons and naval aid to the Confederates for a year, and thus, Lincoln’s army was able to crush them at Gettysburg on July 31, 1863, the biggest and most important battle of the entire Civil War, a year before Mexico fell defeated by France and should submit to the kind dictatorship of the Austrian Maximilian.
In 1865, Abraham Lincoln’s North and Ulysses Grant will finally defeat the Confederates, preventing the country’s division into two. The economy will begin to grow again. It will take Mexico two more years to defeat Maximilian’s forces. When this happens, banks in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia will demand payment for the loans used to purchase weapons. Once again, bankrupted by so many conflicts, Mexico will default. The Mexican liberals will go further and refuse to recognize the land concessions to foreigners granted by the deposed emperor, and creditors will pressure Washington to turn the old Mexico into a protectorate.
Washington will discover an easier and more elegant way: Mexico will be forced to hand over its economy to American investors, who will quickly take control of its agricultural production, railroads, and oil. Without delay and with consequences that will lead to the violent Mexican Revolution of 1910, supported by the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, an economic relationship will be imposed that is not new and has a bright future in the region: the southern country will sell oil and all its raw materials to the United States while having to buy all the industrialized products it needs.
The Mexico that remains exists by pure miracle or because (as congressmen in Washington and the press in the northern country have always repeated) it is inhabited by too many millions of beings belonging to an “inferior race,” a product of promiscuous mixtures that have left “an intellectually imbecilic race,” people the Anglo-Americans never wanted to incorporate into their sacred Union. These same despicable beings who, without knowing it, will save the proud northern nation, chosen by God and blessed with a superior race, from disintegration.
[1] For at least a decade, Marx barely survived in London thanks to the articles he wrote for pennies for the New York Tribune and that Engels and others translated into English.
Mexico DF. November 24, 1876—To save the country from the reelection that President Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada has just won, General Porfirio Díaz assumes power in the capital and, four days later, names himself president of the republic by promoting the signing of the Plan of Tuxtepec, which strictly prohibits presidential reelection in Mexico. General Porfirio Díaz will be reelected in successive elections in which the math will always fail. Four years earlier, Lerdo de Tejada had pardoned General Díaz for his attempted coup against Benito Juárez and now must go into exile. The list of generals who betray democracy and their own promoters will be tragic and extensive for many generations to come across the continent.
The new dictatorship to the south does not concern the north. On the contrary, it is well received. In the United States they insist they do not want to annex more lands to avoid increasing the stock of Black citizens or hybrids who later become uncontrolled and irresponsible voters. They already have enough problems justifying the exclusion of New Mexico and Arizona because English and Anglo-Saxon blood are still not as dominant as they should be. Establishing protectorates in Latin America to secure resources and good business, whether through some liberal regime or a friendly dictatorship, is more than enough.
General Ulysses Grant, one of the supporting actors in the war that reduced Mexico to its current dimensions, visits the country as a former president of the United States and, at a dinner in his honor attended by Porfirio Díaz, is introduced as Mexico’s best friend. Veterans of previous governments and frequent ambassadors to Washington, such as Matías Romero and Manuel Zamacona, almost all married to decent and beautiful American women, formulate the new economic doctrine that the dictator will implement to develop the country: allow American capital to invade Mexico, a plan they label as “a peaceful invasion,” allowing annexation without the inconveniences of annexation. As Stephen Austin did in the 1920s to promote Anglo-Saxon immigration in Texas Coahuila, now Matías Romero, in the name of good business, sells Mexico in the American press. There are not many families from that country eager to start a new adventure in the lands of the south, but there is capital, always thirsty to take risks and everything else.
Porfirio Díaz not only attempts to continue the rare political stability inherited from the previous government but also extends the law that his predecessor’s brother, Miguel Lerdo de Tejada, had promoted to encourage the privatization of land. In principle, the idea was noble. As in Spain, Mexico suffered from the accumulation of land in “dead hands.” According to tradition, these lands inherited from the faithful and deceased celibates could not be worked because they belonged to God. Or they were worked with little care. Responding to the progressive poverty of Mexican farmers, the accumulation of land by the Catholic Church, and the resistance of conservatives, the Disentailment Law of Estates, better known as the Lerdo Law, was approved in 1856. With this law, Mexican liberals aimed to copy the successful U.S. model. Public and communal lands were privatized in the hope that the self-interest of each individual would be able to build a strong and prosperous country and society, both in business and in war. Its inspirer, Lerdo de Tejada, had assured that the law would favor the most humble. To this day, experts and landowners agree that the privatization of land is not only an initiative of modernization, a formula for success according to all successful countries, but also represents an act of generous donation to the poor who do not even speak Spanish.
Once again, the idea of modernizing a country from the wild Frontier by copying Anglo-Saxon success will not work for most of its inhabitants. For centuries, indigenous people and even many Mexican farmers have understood that land is the property of a community; communities cooperate in production and distribute the benefits among their members. Part of the economic success of the Jesuit missions, from South America to California, had stemmed from having understood this reality. The sacred Western idea that nature is not sacred, that it has nothing to do with the realm of life and spirit, but is instead dead and ready to be conquered, violated, and exploited to the fullest extent, has not been fully assimilated by the natives of the new continent, despite three centuries of teachings. For the indigenous people, who number in the millions in the fields of the beleaguered republic, the idea and practice of private property are difficult to grasp.
Once again, the tragedy of the natives in Latin America resembles the tragedy of the indigenous peoples north of the Río Bravo. The Federal Indian Office, tasked with the cultural assimilation of the Indians in the United States, opposes the existence of communal lands and the collective production of subsistence goods, mainly because it prevents civilized men from acquiring more land. In 1885, Senator Henry Dawes of Massachusetts, recognized as an expert on indigenous issues, would report that among the Cherokees “there was not a single family in the entire nation that did not have a home of their own. There were no poor people, and the nation did not owe a dollar to anyone. The Cherokees built their own capital, schools, and hospitals. However, the flaw of the system is evident. They have gone as far as they can, because they own their communal lands… Among them, there is no selfishness, which is the foundation of civilization. Until this people decides to accept that their lands must be divided among their citizens so that each can own the land they cultivate, they will not make much progress…” Naturally, the opinions of the administrators of others’ success prevailed, and the Cherokee lands were divided and generously offered to their inhabitants as private property.
Further south, the economy of Mexico will grow almost as much as its poverty for similar reasons. By the time the Mexican Revolution breaks out in 1910, eight out of ten peasants will have lost their land to the aggressive privatization by proto-liberals in the government. Accustomed to communal production on communal lands (which for centuries was more prosperous than the farms of the conquerors), the native Mexicans will become easy prey for speculation and the expansion of landlords.
The exploitation of the poor will spiral out of control, leading to the reinstatement of slavery, sometimes in its traditional form and other times disguised as servitude. The mercantilist system will take hold over indigenous peoples, now indebted and landless. From 1875 to 1900, exports of henequen agave (green gold) to the United States will grow from six million to 81 million kilograms, displacing other crops along the way. During the three decades of Porfirio Diaz’s dictatorship, Yucatán will transform from one of the poorest states in the country to one of the richest.
The majority will lament this prosperity. Just as the invention of spinning machines in England expanded slavery in the southern United States and later pushed its boundaries into Texas when that state still belonged to Mexico, the new McCormick henequen processor now multiplies the demand for Agave fibers and revives the slavery of Indians and peons in Yucatán. As described by American journalist John Kenneth Turner in American Magazine, the Diaz dictatorship will reverse the progress made under Benito Juárez’s administration. The new peonage system will closely resemble the old slave system. Peasants will become lifelong indebted workers simply for marrying, falling ill, or begging for shelter and food after being expelled from ejidos and communal lands, working from 4 a.m. until late afternoon while their debts continue to grow. In the far northwest of the country, the fiercely independent Yaqui people will finally be cornered, sold, and forcibly relocated from their state, Sonora, to the other end of the country, Yucatán, where they will be used like animals on henequen plantations. Though known as healthy and strong individuals, most of the 15,000 abducted will die within their first year of slavery in exile.[1]
Criticism of the Mexican dictator and the system will also be discredited by Mexican landowners and American landowners who hold vast tracts of Mexican soil. Meanwhile, the expansion of the powerful will continue into the depths of the earth. In 1883 and 1884, during the puppet government of General Manuel González Flores, as in other subcontinental republics, General Porfirio Díaz will push through laws guaranteeing foreign investors rights to mineral subsoil. To placate his political opponents, Díaz will invite them to join his prosperous enterprises, which will be protected and benefited by laws passed by the government and the supposed opposition, while a few will become shareholders in major foreign companies. To quell striking workers and miners, he will sometimes send the national army and other times call upon the Rangers of Arizona to deal with the unproductive troublemakers who don’t understand the concept of order and progress.
The outcome will be unmistakable. In a few years, the most powerful ranchers, who know how things are done, will end up buying almost everything for next to nothing. When the Mexican Revolution erupts in 1910, more than seventy percent of peasants, Indians, and others will have lost their lands and face beggary and humiliation. Porfirio Díaz is a precursor, a prototype of future Latin American dictators overseen by Washington, serving transnational companies and Creole elites. Before Brazil would think to put it on their national flag, the motto of dictator Porfirio Díaz will be “Order and Progress.” Two ambiguous words, if ever there were, that will seduce the dictatorships to come.
The deposed president, Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada, will die in exile in New York in 1889. Porfirio Díaz will repatriate his remains and give him a state burial in an emotional ceremony.
[1] When John Turner’s articles appear in 1909, various American publications will come to the defense of the Mexican dictator, including the powerful William Randolph Hearst, one of the instigators of the war in Cuba through fake news. Due to this harassment, Turner will have to stop publishing his articles until the socialist weekly Appeal to Reason resumes its publication.
1914. Yes, we have been offended again
Tipton, Indiana. November 3, 1914—The Tipton Daily Tribune reports that someone from Texas has sent their newsroom a copy of El Progreso, published in Laredo: “The newspaper is written in the Mexican language, so we could not understand a single word.” The Tribune editor can barely interpret the photographs and, lacking news, publishes his own perplexity at the mysterious event.
El progreso of Laredo no longer exists. Jovita Idár had published an editorial in that newspaper with strong criticism of the Woodrow Wilson administration for sending US troops to the border and for its intervention in the Mexican Revolution. Idár’s opinion (who, in addition to being an editor and journalist, was a teacher and volunteer nurse) offended some army officers of her country, the United States. The next day, the Texas Rangers showed up at the El Progreso offices, but they were met by a slender, dark-skinned woman at the entrance who blocked their way. The officers, accustomed to beating and killing Mexicans or US citizens who looked Mexican according to their criteria, could not break the fierce resistance of the small woman and, so as not to dishonor their “macho“ honor, they retreated. The next day, taking advantage of the fact that the little woman was not on guard, they entered the newspaper and destroyed the printing presses and everything in their path. El Progreso had to close.
Once again, the border limit is the thin line we must defend against the invaders (the poor workers), and the border is the vast space over which we can advance with our multi-billion-dollar public and private resources. On April 9, several marines had been detained by the Mexican army in Tampico, Tamaulipas, for crossing the limits reserved for American oil companies in that country. The marines were released without further formalities, but the command of the United States Naval Force demanded an apology and a military salute of 21 cannon shots. Mexico offered its apologies but omitted the military salute, which was considered an offense by Washington. Another offense, like the one that cost Mexico half its territory three generations earlier. In response, Woodrow Wilson sent a new division of the Navy, fifteen warships to occupy the port of Veracruz and “put order in the house” of their neighbor. Once again, Veracruz. Once again, the port city was bombarded. The marines occupied Veracruz one day before the intervention was approved by the United States Congress. In the resistance, 19 marines and 400 Mexicans, mostly civilians, died. Hundreds more were severely injured or maimed. As the marines raised the Stars and Stripes flag at the Terminal Hotel, the headquarters of the invading command, journalist and agent William Bayard Hale sent a cable to Wilson describing Huertas as “an old drunk who looks like a monkey, whose blood is almost entirely indigenous.” [1]
There was a second reason for sending an invading fleet of that magnitude. There were rumors of weapons of German origin approaching Mexico in support of President Victoriano Huertas. The weapons (manufactured at Remington Arms Company, Inc., the oldest factory in the United States) turned out to be part of a business deal involving an American investor named John Wesley De Kay and a Russian named Leon Rasst. As is tradition, President Wilson had read some data and discarded others to confirm the need for another saving intervention.
Under the direction of Vice Admiral Frank F. Fletcher, now 6,500 marines occupy Veracruz. The owner of the New York Journal and the genius inventor of yellow journalism, William Randolph Hearst, wants to take Mexico as Washington wanted Cuba for a century. At least under the leadership of Anglo-Saxon progress. To make matters worse, after the bombardment of Veracruz (as General Santa Ana had done seventy years earlier in the battle of Buena Vista, a decisive battle that his soldiers almost won against the United States invasion), Huertas now orders the withdrawal of his army from Veracruz. But in Mexico City and other cities, the story is different. On the streets, American flags are trampled, and anti-gringo sentiment grows like boiling milk. Fifty thousand American residents become nervous, and most pack their bags to return. In Argentina, Chile, Brazil, and other countries in the south, demonstrations against the new Yankee aggression concentrate in front of United States embassies.
Left to their fate, the inhabitants of Veracruz did not let themselves be impressed and began a resistance of spontaneous guerrillas, barely armed with some rifles, stones, and whatever they could throw at the powerful Yankees. Craftsmen, bakers, teachers, and waitresses managed to twist the old history. Six months later, after unwavering popular resistance, the American marines withdrew. They said they had achieved what they wanted—the resignation of President Huertas. That’s what they say in Washington, always so concerned with honor and the need to be respected by force.
The Americans always know how to choose their battles and, even more, they know how to impose their own narrative of events. The Secretary of the Navy, Josephus Daniels, awarded 56 Medals of Honor to the heroes who participated in the occupation of Veracruz. Beyond the protests and the renewed sentiment against the United States in several southern countries, historians will continue to search for the next century to figure out what the hell this new adventure was good for. Marine Major General Smedley Butler would return his medal, arguing that he had done nothing, but the Navy would force him not only to keep it but to wear it whenever necessary.
Due to the chaotic resistance of the Mexican Revolution, Wilson had been forced to withdraw from the rest of the country, and the offense of not saluting with 21 gunshots was quickly forgotten. Though still poor and convulsed by its old social problems, Mexico is not so small and, now, is no longer so obedient. Its women are strong and give birth like the poor, and in the midst of a revolution, more than a few carry arms. It’s not wise to get involved in such messes, so its powerful northern neighbor renounces military force and sticks to a new dollar policy. If the idea is to instill fear, nothing is worse than a failed invasion. History will continue to prove that the few times Washington was defeated or couldn’t crush a revolution in Latin America was when the invaded were armed and had intense revolutionary experience of at least four years.
In his 1912 electoral campaign against Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson had criticized his predecessors for pushing imperialist policies and accused President William Howard Taft of abusing dollar diplomacy, summarized in the phrase “substituting bullets for dollars.” According to his new campaign rhetoric, it was unfair to pressure the poor republics of the south to take loans from Wall Street knowing that the marines would force them to pay debts inflated by interest. Domestically, the Democratic candidate had a proposal that attracted industrial workers and the rest of the middle class, just as the United States became the largest industrialized nation in the world and its workers became a social class as numerous as it was dangerous.[2] Wilson had insisted on the need to push for labor rights and had refused to accept donations from big corporations for his campaign. Almost red. Pinkish. He had to compete against two other progressives: former President Theodore Roosevelt and five-time Socialist Party presidential candidate, Eugene Debs.[3]
in 1912, defying his own expectations, Wilson was elected president. On October 27, 1913, he declared that “the United States will no longer seek to take even thirty more centimeters of foreign territory.” Now he was serious. More or less, he would keep his word. Annexing territories was no longer as convenient, for the same reason that it had ceased to be profitable to have unpaid slaves. Now, the trend was to establish protectorates to fight against the disorder of blacks, serving private corporations, and tomorrow it would be supporting banana republics serving the same corporations, to fight against communism.
Throughout its history, the powerful northern country has only invaded nations that were poorer or smaller, from the Apache and Cherokee peoples to the Philippines. When it becomes the world’s greatest military power, it will continue to do the same under other narratives. He will send his marines to broken countries, first to the banana republics of Central America and the sugar islands of the Caribbean, and then to Asia, Africa, and South America. Sometimes, the richest and most powerful army in history will be defeated by one of these small and poor southern countries. On the other hand, and despite repeated complaints and laments from Washington and its poorest loyalists, the southern countries have never invaded nor will they invade the United States.
With one rather anecdotal exception in history. A year after the marine landing in Mexico, on March 9, 1915, Pancho Villa will cross the border with five hundred men and vandalize the town of Columbus, New Mexico. Historians will never agree on the reasons for this suicidal decision. Did Villa need weapons? Did he want to take revenge on the United States for its supply of weapons to the government of Huerta before Wilson wanted to remove him from power? Pancho Villa will kidnap Lucy Reed, and in retaliation, 350 Villistas will be killed in Mexican territory by U.S. troops.
The other exception that will not happen will occur three years later. On January 19, 1917, the German embassy in Washington will send a telegram via Western Union to the German ambassador in Mexico, Heinrich von Eckardt, promising that country the recovery of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona in case the United States enters the war. Huerta’s successor, Venustiano Carranza, busy and more concerned with fighting Pancho Villa’s rebels, will remain neutral. His generals will not believe in the possibilities of such a plan, much less in the middle of a civil war. The Zimmermann Telegram will be a page full of numbers that speak. Britain will intercept it and manage to decode it. Soon after, the United States will enter World War I, just as its big companies wanted and for which they had hired the best advertisers in the country for such a noble goal.
That same year, Woodrow Wilson will attempt a new invasion of Veracruz to take control of Tampico, but the new Mexican president, Venustiano Carranza, will order the destruction of the oil wells if the plan is realized.
The plan will not materialize.
[1] Hale had accused Ambassador Henry Lane Wilson of collaborating with Huertas in the assassination of Francisco Madero.
[2] After the worker and anarchist protests of the late 19th century, it was probably at this moment that the American financial elite began the most significant political and cultural attack in history against progressive options and against workers. The cultural war was massive and exported to other countries, often without raising suspicion of being ideological propaganda. As Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart will describe in How to Read Donald Duck (1971), in the Disney World (whose indoctrination will target the most innocent and developing minds), Blacks and natives of other countries cannot govern themselves or appreciate their wealth, so it must be taken in the name of civilization. There is no love, only desire. There is masculine conquest and feminine seduction, but no mothers or fathers, only uncles and cousins. Money is the measure of all things, and accumulation is the goal. The only worker to appear as a character, the Wolf, will be a criminal.
[3] In this electoral campaign, the candidates competed to show who was more progressive and less interventionist than the socialist party candidate, Eugene Debs. American voters a hundred years later would not recognize any of those candidates as American politicians. They would recognize their foreign policies, and surely a majority would support them with the same civilized fanaticism.
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