Villa and Zapata: A History of the Mexican Revolution

by Frank McLynn

  This was the context in which Mexico's third great autocrat first came to the fore. Porfirio Diaz, a Mixtec Indian with some Spanish blood in his veins, was born in the town of Oaxaca in 1830, narrowly escaped death from cholera in childhood and trained as a priest before switching to the law. Diaz became a national figure during Juarez's five-year struggle with the French, being wounded twice and imprisoned thrice (each time he escaped). At first the French swept all before them, but they could never subdue the countryside, and the quick victory Napoleon III hoped for soon evaporated. When the United States turned its attention south of the border after Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox in April 1865, ending the American Civil War, Bonaparte faced the logistical nightmare of having to supply an army across 5,000 miles of ocean in order to fight what was in 1865 probably the most military nation on earth. The aptly named `Little Napoleon' took the prudent course and pulled out of Mexico. Refusing to withdraw with his military protectors, Maximilian was captured by Juarez and executed at Queretaro, north of Mexico City, in 1867.

  A war hero with a reputation for financial probity, Diaz was never liked by Juarez, but it was from Juarez that Diaz learned the taste for constant presidential re-election. In 1871 the all-conquering president sought a fourth term as chief executive, but was vehemently opposed by both Diaz and the hitherto faithful henchman Miguel Lerdo de Tejada. In the ensuing election, no candidate received a clear majority, showing that Juarez, for all his autocratic tendencies, really did believe in democracy and free elections. The election was thrown into Congress, who nominated Juarez as president. The disgruntled Lerdo had to make do with the consolation prize of presidency of the Supreme Court but Diaz, made of sterner stuff, raised the standard of revolt. This was crushed, and Juarez seemed set for undisputed hegemony. Then, in July 1872, he had a fatal heart attack. Lerdo succeeded as president, but in 1876 made the perennial mistake of all nineteenth-century Mexican presidents and tried to overstay his welcome through re-election. Once again Diaz raised an armed rebellion, fighting under the slogan `effective suffrage and no re-election'. After initial reverses and when the situation looked hopeless, Diaz was rescued from despair by a new outbreak of liberal factionalism, this time between Lerdo and the new president of the Supreme Court, Jose Iglesias. Able to deal with his enemies piecemeal, Diaz defeated both in turn and entered Mexico City in triumph in November 1876.

  Diaz aimed at absolute power and he had learned enough under Juarez to know how to get it. He had worked out that, provided you conciliate certain key social groups, you can repress the rest. Diaz offered deals to landowners, generals, local elites, foreign capitalists, sections of the middle class and even powerful bandit leaders; the rest he killed or cowed. He was convinced that every man had his price and, when confronted by a recalcitrant politician or general, always tried bribery first; he liked to cite a peasant tag from his childhood, illustrating his base view of human nature: `This rooster wants corn.' If bribery failed, he turned to murder. This was Diaz's famous pan o palo system - bread or the club. He made it clear that he wanted no opposition, either in presidential elections or elsewhere. Two generals, Garcia de la Cadena and Juan Corona, allowed their names to go forward as presidential hopefuls only to be mysteriously murdered. It became known that sudden death awaited all who opposed don Porfirio.

  Usually, however, there was no need for extreme measures, for money did the trick; as Diaz, in another of his farmyard saws, put it: `A dog with a bone in its mouth neither kills nor steals.' Diaz quickly built up a hierarchy of political influence, with himself at the top, then the twentyseven state governors he appointed, followed by 300 jefes politicos (local political bosses) and i,8oo mayors or municipal presidents. Diaz nominated representatives to the toothless Congress in Mexico City, sometimes accompanied by rigged elections, and controlled the Supreme Court by appointing placemen and stooges. He showed particular favouritism towards the men of his native state: out of 227 representatives he nominated in 1886 to comprise the paper tiger masquerading under the name of Congress, sixty-two came from Oaxaca.

  There was rigid government control of all aspects of education. The press Diaz dealt with by carrot and stick. The ley mordaza or gagging law, which he cunningly put on the statute book during the chaotic `presidency' of Manuel Gonzalez (see below) abolished the right to a jury trial for journalists guilty of `libel' or `sedition' and such guilt was established by the mere say-so of a single magistrate, inevitably a Diaz stooge. Newspapermen could also be jailed without trial if anyone reported their unpatriotic or seditious `state of mind' or even their `intentions' to the police. On the other hand, Diaz paid out generous subsidies to proprietors and editors, provided they reported the news as he wanted it reported. He even maintained the fiction of `opposition' newspapers so that, at judicious intervals, they could be given the nod to destroy the reputation of anyone in the Army or politics Diaz thought was becoming too powerful. If the generous `subsidies' did not work, Diaz sent in his gangs of thugs, known as the bravi, to smash up presses and newspaper offices or to provoke unwary editors into fatal duels. At the limit Diaz could silence any press critics by sentencing them to noisome tropical penitentiaries from which scarcely anyone returned alive. One intrepid editor, a one time Diaz supporter named Filomeno Mata, actually beat the odds by going to jail no less than thirty-four times during the Porfiriato.

  Diaz's next task was to perpetuate his rule. At first he trod carefully, mindful of the resonance of the `no re-election' slogan in the Mexican unconscious. In 188o he appeared to step aside, allowing Manuel Gonzalez to become president. However, Gonzalez was his creature and did his bidding in every respect. The years 1880-4 were notorious for government profligacy and financial incompetence, so that Mexicans in 1884 welcomed Diaz back as a saviour. This was a favourite Diaz ploy. If he spotted a man with ambition, he found a political bed of nails for him, some post as governor where he would lose all reputation and credibility. By 1888 Diaz's grip on Mexico was so tight that he no longer needed the farce of proxies like Manuel Gonzalez. `No re-election' was forgotten about, the constitution was amended in 1887 to allow a second successive term, and again in 189o to allow an infinite series of successive presidencies by the same man; between 1884 and 1904 Diaz had himself re-elected six times (the other `elections' were in 1888, 1892, 1896 and 1900).

  Diaz's regime was a repressive tyranny but he lacked the technology to impose a totalitarian dictatorship or police state. He did not seek to control every aspect of Mexican life and was relaxed about conflicts between local elites or powerful families within a state; his main concern was that no one should emerge who could contest his power at the centre. Diaz's rule was thus an intermittently coercive tyranny, whose chief outward sign was the rurales, the quasi-military mounted police force that patrolled the countryside. The rurales, uniformed in suede and armed with the latest Mauser rifles, were effectively above the law outside Mexico City and were much feared as a consequence. Their favourite method of dealing with opponents was through the ley fuga, or law for dealing with fugitives from justice: this allowed anyone to be shot dead who `tried to escape'. The Houdini-like propensity of Mexicans was evidently high in the Diaz years, for over io,ooo people died under the ley fuga.

  It is sometimes suggested that Diaz's 34-year hegemony was an easygoing dictatorship, but the evidence suggests that there were few revolts only because of the terrifying consequences. The rebellion in Veracruz by supporters of the exiled Lerdo in 1879 resulted in execution for innocent parties as well as the genuine rebels. In all regions of Mexico the jefes politicos allowed themselves the privileges of droit du seigneur in the villages, taking any woman who caught their fancy. In the state of Hidalgo, Indians who had rebelled after their lands were unjustly seized were buried up to their necks in their ancestral lands and trampled to death by the rurales, who rode over them at the gallop. Those who opposed Diaz or his officials, or were disliked by them for any reason, were branded `criminals': the penalty for `crime' wa
s to be worked to death on chain-gangs or sent to plantations in the extreme south of Mexico, where the broiling sun or tropical diseases would do the executioner's job for him.

  The level of violence in Mexico during the so-called Porfiriato has also been downplayed by Diaz's apologists. This is because most of them were foreigners, for whom Mexico was indeed a land of peace, safety and security. It was otherwise for most Mexicans, and especially for the indigenous ones. In the 188os there was a bitter and bloody war with the warrior tribe of Sonora, the Yaquis, predictably on the issue of land stolen from the Indians by Diaz's henchmen. At first the Yaquis were invincible and defeated every army Diaz sent against them; but in the end a remorseless campaign of attrition reduced them to starvation and surrender in 1887. The governor of Sonora interviewed the Yaqui chief, Cajeme, after his capture and found him highly intelligent and well versed in military strategy - not surprisingly, since he had fought with Juarez against the French in the 186os. However, the governor's sympathy was unavailing: he had his orders from Diaz, so Cajeme went to the firing squad. Fortunes were then made by the governor and his cronies, who sold the Yaqui warriors at 75 pesos (£7) a head for slave labour in the plantations of Yucatan, where most of them died an early death under the tropical sun.

  It is difficult to overstate the sufferings of the Yaquis during the dreadful thirty years after M o. In the 189os, following another Yaqui rebellion, Diaz offered a bounty of ioo pesos (about £io) for the ears of all dead Yaqui warriors. This prize-money degenerated into a cruel farce as bounty hunters slaughtered unarmed peasants, cut off their ears, and claimed they were Yaqui organs. Other brutalities included the extermination of the entire male population of the town of Navojoa in 1892, and in the same year 200 Yaqui prisoners were taken out in a gunboat into the Pacific Ocean off Guaymas and thrown into the sea to drown or be food for sharks. When the desperate Yaquis rose again in 1898, they were slaughtered in droves at Mazacoba by the federal army, now equipped with the most modern Mauser rifles. In 19o8 a boatload of Yaquis, bound for slavery in Yucatan, committed mass suicide.

  Diaz always believed in divide-and-rule: in a political clash, support a state governor against the local military leader until the governor had won, then change tack and build up the military leader again as a counterweight so that the governor was not too powerful. Don Porfirio extended this thinking to the indigenous peoples: by transferring the Yaquis to Yucatan he hoped to set the most martial Indians in Mexico at the throats of the second-most bellicose. The so-called War of the Castes - a full-scale rebellion by the Mayas which had flared violently in 1848-51 and was a race war in the true sense, where the Mayas killed whites on sight and vice versa - had never been fully extinguished. However, when the Yaquis died in droves on the plantations of Yucatan, Diaz decided he would have to make a huge military effort to crush the Mayas. In 1900 he sent in the Army on a massive search-and-destroy operation. For two years, under the brutal General Victoriano Huerta, the Army systematically laid waste the Yucatan peninsula, scorching the earth, burning villages, destroying food until at last, as with the Yaquis in Sonora, the final Maya strongholds were reduced through starvation.

  Divide-and-rule was just one of the ways in which Diaz's regime presented a dual, ambiguous or ambivalent face. There was no set of official state doctrines or myths, so that the ideology of the regime was a confusing mixture of positivism and Catholic piety. Positivism (roughly, the application of scientific method in all intellectual contexts and the denial of a distinction between fact and value) was a powerful force in Europe, itself representing a reaction to the Romantic movement which had challenged the wisdom of the Enlightenment. During the Porfiriato, Diaz's most influential advisers were the so-called cient f cos or Mexican positivists, who believed in capitalism, industrialisation and modern technology; they despised Mexico's colonial past and Indian heritage. Most of the Mexican elite - politicians, bankers, editors, businessmen, generals - subscribed to cientfco ideals: capitalism in preference to the hacienda mode of production; the white creole as the racial superior to the mestizo or Indian; the foreign entrepreneur with his greater skill to the native Mexican one; and Gradgrindian fact-worship and numbercrunching to all talk of spirituality or ancient values.

  Positivist bankers and economists, who with Diaz's help quickly became millionaires themselves, formed a powerful ruling clique under the dictator's tutelage. Three cientifico positivists had a particular influence on Diaz. The first was his secretary of the treasury in the i 88os, Manuel Dublin, a believer in sound money and balancing the budget, who cleared up the mess left behind by Manuel Gonzalez and achieved economic stability through classic deflationary policies. Gonzalez had promised to pay the debts of qi million pesos (£q million approximately) owed to British bondholders since Juirez's repudiation of foreign debt and, though this was widely criticised as a climb-down `giveaway' to the gringos, Dublin honoured the pledge.

  The second great influence was Romero Rubio, formerly Lerdo's political manager, who rapidly switched sides once he realised Diaz was there to stay. Rubio was given the important post of minister of the interior and control of the police and bravi and was thus Diaz's enforcerin-chief. However, Diaz kept back a trump card by conniving at Rubio's acquisition of a string of illegal gambling dens in the capital; if ever it became necessary, Diaz could indict him on grounds of moral turpitude. To cement ties even further, in 1881 the 51-year-old dictator married Rubio's 18-year-old daughter Carmen; dona Carmelita, as she was usually known, was an important influence on Diaz.

  The third cientifico was the most important of all. When Romero Rubio died in 1895, a new leader emerged, Jose Yves Limantour. Under his aegis Dublin's dream of balancing the budget was finally achieved: in 1894 revenue amounted to 43 million pesos and expenditure to only 41 million. Limantour was in some respects the Bernadotte of Mexican history. Of lowly origins, the illegitimate son of a French adventurer who had panhandled for gold in the 1849 California gold rush, Limantour made a new life in Mexico, where he revealed entrepreneurial talents of a high order, first as a speculator in confiscated Church lands and later as a stockbroker and financier in the twilight world between graft and big business. Limantour, given a free hand by Diaz to manage the economy, swept away such feudal residues as internal tariffs, established state banks, abolished bimetallism and put Mexico on the gold standard. International confidence in the Mexican economy skyrocketed and government bonds began to be sold on the international market.

  This emphasis on capitalism, modernisation and scientific ideas, grafted on to the juarista programme of liberalism, free trade and anticlericalism should logically have made the Diaz government as strongly anticlerical as the regimes of Carranza and Calles in the twentieth century. However, once again Diaz revealed his peasant caution and his instinct to play both sides against the middle. During his presidency the Catholic hierarchy - or at any rate the conservative sections thereof - enjoyed a halcyon period. He kept the Catholic Church in line by neither repealing nor implementing the anticlerical Laws of the Reform, which Juarez had introduced in the late 185os; he maintained an official stance of anticlericalism while secretly colluding with the Church, especially his close friend Archbishop Eulogio Gillow of Oaxaca.

  This entente with the Church had two main sources. One was his young wife Carmelita. Captivated by Carmelita, Diaz returned from honeymoon outwardly a new man: instead of the coarse, unmannerly Indian peasant of yore, there was a dapper, well-groomed, courtly Porfirio Diaz, fastidious and meticulous in appearance, etiquette and social graces. More importantly, he heeded his wife's devout Catholicism. Romero Rubio, like Bernadotte, had begun life as a Jacobin but, again like the Gascon apostate, had changed his spots once he got his hands on power, becoming a pillar of the establishment and a bastion of the Church. Through the good offices of Carmelita, Diaz held a secret meeting with the head of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in Mexico, Archbishop Labastida y Divalos. It was agreed that the Laws of the Reform would not be en
forced and that the Church could own property; in return Labastida pledged the Church to submit all ecclesiastical appointments to Diaz for his approval and to encourage parish priests to preach submission to don Porfirio. It was yet another in the long line of Faustian pacts between the Catholic Church and the powers temporal.

  The other impetus towards an accommodation came from his youth. Until old age blunted his faculties, Diaz had remarkably good political antennae, and his instinct told him that conflict with the Catholic Church was a mistake. When governor of Oaxaca in 187o his brother Felix had implemented Juarez's Reform Laws with Jacobin zeal, closing church schools, expelling nuns, banning the teaching of the Catechism, destroying or defacing statues or idols of favourite saints. Particular offence was given to the village of Juchitan when Felix Diaz stole the statue of its patron saint and returned it with its feet cut off. In 1871, when Porfirio Diaz staged his unsuccessful revolt against Juarez, Felix joined him, fled on the failure of the rebellion, and was pursued and captured by the vengeful men of Juchitan. First they cut off the soles of his feet, then his genitals, and finally forced him to walk on shards of glass and burning coals before leaving him to die an agonising death. Diaz learned the lesson: he never asked how many divisions the Pope had and, even when he had supreme power, did not seek to avenge his brother.

  Diaz seemed to have attained all his political aims, but his economic ones were more difficult to achieve. He was neither the first nor last dictator to find that the economy will not yield to an autocrat's fiat. The problems he confronted were myriad: how to turn Mexico into a modern capitalist economy, without delivering it wholly into the hands of foreign interests; how to integrate the hacienda and the Indian villages into this system; and, most of all, how to juggle the fissiparous interests of a nation-state with centrifugal and conflicting economies. Roughly speaking he faced the dilemma of the United States before the American Civil War, except that the North had to integrate just one antagonistic economy whereas Diaz had to rationalise several.