It is an ancient principle of politics that a revolution devours its children. Danton and Robespierre began as rebel leaders against France’s ancien régime but Robespierre ended by cutting off Danton’s head — and then being separated from his own. Kerensky led the bourgeois revolution that overthrew the Tsar — only to be replaced by a more radical revolution headed by Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky. Lenin died and then Stalin had Trotsky murdered and all his followers purged in the sensational show trials of the 1930s.

This is the story of a “child” who devoured his revolution — one who began as an activist against reaction and privilege and ended as a longtime dictator and staunch defender of the very forces he had once opposed. As absolute ruler of Mexico for 35 years, Porfirio Díaz served as president from 1876-80 and from 1884-1911. In the four year interim, the post of president was held by a Diaz puppet named Manuel González.

Like Benito Juárez, his onetime ally and later enemy, Díaz was an Indian from Oaxaca. Born in 1830, he was the son of José de la Cruz Díaz and Petrona Mori. His father died when he was three and the young boy did odd jobs to help support his mother. He received his early education at the same seminary that Juárez attended and then matriculated at the Institute of Science and Art in Oaxaca. When the U.S.-Mexican War broke out, Díaz was studying law. He enlisted in Mexico’s National Guard but the war ended before he saw any action.

In March 1854 a group of dissidents met in Ayutla, Guerrero, to plot the downfall of the flamboyant and corrupt dictator Antonio López de Santa Anna. The conspirators included Ignacio Comonfort, an Acapulco customs official with liberal views, and General Juan Alvarez, at whose hacienda the meeting took place. Alvarez was angry because Santa Anna had arbitrarily removed a number of state officials who were his friends. There they launched the Plan de Ayutla, a manifesto calling for the ouster of Santa Anna.

News of the Plan spread throughout Mexico and soon the country was in open revolt. Juárez and Díaz, who had been exiled by Santa Anna, returned to Mexico and enthusiastically joined in the insurrection. Santa Anna tried his usual tactic of trying to buy off his enemies but this time he was facing a group of idealistic liberals who were impervious to bribes. Santa Anna fled the country in August 1855 and Alvarez took over as provisional president. Juárez became minister of justice and Díaz, only twenty-five, was named subprefect of the town of Ixtlán in Nayarit.

A new constitution adopted on February 5, 1857, contained provisions restricting the power of the Church. These infuriated clericals and conservatives and thus began the bloody Reform War of 1858-61, so named because of the “Reform Laws” that were so obnoxious to fervent Catholics.

During both the Reform War and the 1864-67 war against Maximilian and the French intervention, Díaz distinguished himself as a strong right arm of the liberal cause. He was wounded twice, escaped capture three times, and between 1864-67 led forces that inflicted nine defeats on the imperialists. He also gained a reputation for honesty, returning to the government a 87,232 peso surplus that had not been spent during the campaign against Maximilian. By the end of the two wars he was a general and a household name throughout Mexico.

Díaz and Juárez had been staunch allies during the two bloody periods of conflict. The incident that estranged them took place on July 15, 1867, when Juárez was making his triumphal entry into Mexico City. In a brilliant uniform and mounted on a white horse, General Díaz rode out to meet his old friend and mentor. But Juárez just nodded curtly and signalled for his coachman to drive on.

The snub wasn’t so much personal as an expression of principle. Juárez was anti-militaristic and after the defeat of Maximilian he dismissed two-thirds of the army. Díaz resigned his commission in February 1868 and retired to La Noria, a hacienda in Oaxaca that his grateful state had awarded to him on December 27, 1867.

Juárez ran for reelection in 1871 and triumphed in a narrow three-way race against Díaz and Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada. Díaz had also made an unsuccessful run against Juárez in 1867. After losing in 1871 he issued a manifesto called the Plan de La Noria, named after his estate. Claiming that the election was fraudulent, it called for the overthrow of Juárez. Particularly ironic, in view of Díaz’s later career, was the provision in the manifesto that Juárez should be removed because he was trying to perpetuate himself in office by running for another term. It is also significant that Díaz was revolting against Juárez as a liberal populist rather than as a general attempting to stage a putsch.

The revolt failed and Díaz had to go into hiding. On July 16, 1872, Juárez died of a heart attack. Under the constitutional process, he was succeeded by Lerdo de Tejada, chief justice of the supreme court. Though Lerdo was a liberal and anticlerical, he was disliked in many quarters because he never flinched from using the power of the state to enforce his goals. In addition, it was widely believed that he had granted excessive concessions to U.S. railway interests. In January 1876, Díaz again went into revolt. This time his proclamation was called the Plan de Tuxtepec. As with Juárez, he portrayed himself as a liberal reformer rather than as an incipient military dictator. The Plan called for more democracy at the municipal level and once more attacked the principle of reelection. After initial reverses, the rebels prevailed and Díaz entered the capital on November 21. The porfiriato — Díaz’s 35-year stranglehold on Mexico — had begun.

Díaz had come to power as a champion of liberal principles — more municipal democracy, no reelection, etc. Once he assumed the presidency, it soon became clear that his main concerns were internal stability and foreign investment. To be fair, a law and order program was desperately needed in the country. Two bloody wars had taken their toll and banditry was pandemic. This unstable situation was scaring away foreign business and Díaz was anxious to create a climate of confidence for investors. He addressed the problem of internal security with a simple solution: by co-opting the most notorious bandits and putting them into the dreaded Rurales (“Rural Police”), a paramilitary force that was far better trained and paid than the unwilling conscripts dragooned into the army. The bandit problem disappeared overnight and, as time went by, the Rurales served as an effective force against peasant revolts.

Having brutally achieved domestic tranquility, Díaz next opened the country up to foreign capital, both U.S. and European. William Randolph Hearst acquired vast tracts of cattle country, the Guggenheim-controlled American Smelting and Refining Company set up ore smelters, and such big oil companies as William Doheny’s Mexican Petroleum Company and the Waters Pierce Company, with links to Standard Oil, dominated in the petroleum producing regions of the Gulf Coast. So eager was Díaz to attract foreign capital that he adopted the odious policy of paying foreign employees more than Mexicans for the same work. This was the main reason for the bloody strike, ruthlessly suppressed, at the Cananea Mining Company in Sonora. Díaz also cleverly played one side against the other, encouraging British and European capital as a counterbalance to its U.S. counterpart.

If you go by one set of statistics, the porfiriato was a howling success. Kilometers of railroad track increased from virtually zero to 14,000, silver production from 607,037 kilograms in 1877-78 to 1,816,605 in 1900, copper from 6,483 tons in 1891-92 to 52,116 in 1910-11 and henequen (sisal) from 11,283 tons in 1877 to 128,849 in 1910.

But here’s another set of porfiriato statistics. In 1893 infant mortality (death before the age of one) was 323 per thousand in Mexico City as opposed to London’s 114 and Boston’s 120. In 1895 life expectancy was 30 years and the 1910 census classified 50 percent of Mexican houses as unfit for human habitation. A 1900 survey in Mexico City showed that 15,000 families (16 percent of the population) were homeless. Wealth was being created but it certainly wasn’t trickling down.

Keeping his promise not seek reelection, Díaz didn’t run for president in 1880. As his successor he handpicked Manuel González, considered the most corrupt and incompetent of his inner circle. Gonález, living up to his reputation, gave Mexico such a wretched administration that the way was instantly paved for don Porfirio’s return to power. After that, all talk of “no reelection” died — until Francisco Madero raised his standard in 1910.

What toppled Diaz in the end was not a popular revolution but a quarrel between two ruling elites over whom Diaz had for a long time exercised a successful policy of divide and conquer. One was made up of a circle of European-educated intellectuals in Mexico City, known as científicos because they believed in the “scientific” positivist doctrines of Auguste Comte. The other comprised a provincial coalition of landowners, businessmen and generals who believed that the científicos, with their European orientation, were excessively subservient to foreign capitalists at the expense of Mexican entrepreneurs. The provincial power structure was strengthened when it managed to attract a considerable portion of the middle class to the anti-Diaz cause, small businessmen and professionals who had been hurt by the 1907 panic.

When the aging Diaz, who celebrated his eightieth birthday in 1910, came increasingly under the influence of the científicos, the provincial leaders began to balk. Organizing a group they called the Democratic party, they urged Diaz to accept General Bernardo Reyes, governor of Nuevo León, as his vice presidential candidate in 1910. Diaz refused and sent Reyes on a military mission to Europe to get rid of him. Then he nominated a highly unpopular científico, Ramón Corral, to be his running mate.

This is what set the stage for the Madero revolution of 1910. Madero came from one of Mexico’s richest families — a family in the northern state of Coahuila that typified the provincial elite that Diaz managed to alienate late in his career. Madero believed in honest government but he was no social or economic radical. Though the revolution attracted such populist rebels as Pancho Villa, Emiliano Zapata and Pascual Orozco, only Villa remained loyal to Madero. Zapata broke off from this upper middle-class rebellion to the left because he thought Madero was dragging his feet on land reform. Orozco broke off from the right — selling out to the Terrazas-Creel family of Chihuahua cattle barons who were completely identified with the científico faction.

Díaz would probably never have fallen if he had continued to control both elites that kept him in power so long. By favoring one over the other, he sealed his doom.

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History has rarely furnished a more striking example of high-profile-low-profile than that of the first presidents of the United States and Mexico. George Washington was and is the quintessential household word — Father of his Country, leader of the Continental armies during the Revolutionary War and two-time president whose name is every bit as much a legend today as it was in his lifetime.

And Guadalupe Victoria? In the first place, it wasn’t even his name. Christened Manuel Felix Fernández, he took the name Guadalupe Victoria for its symbolic value — “Victoria” for “victory” and “Guadalupe” from the name of Mexico’s patron saint.

Guadalupe Victoria — and we’ll call him that from now on — was born in 1786 in Tamazula, Durango. Though little is known about his origins and early life, he was teaching school at the time the Independence War began. Serving under José Maria Morelos, he took part in the attack on Oaxaca on November 25, 1812. In 1814, on orders from the Chilpancingo Congress that declared Mexico’s independence, heassumed the leadership of the rebel movement in Veracruz. He seized several royalist convoys but after being defeated at Palmillas in 1817 he was forced to go into hiding. His hiding place was the Paseo de Ovejas hacienda in the state of Veracruz.

Victoria reappeared in April 1821, two months after Agustin de Iturbide and Vicente Guerrero had issued the Plan de Iguala that called for Mexico to become an independent constitutional monarchy. Expressing republican views, he urged that Mexico be led by a revolutionary leader who would serve as president rather than by a king or emperor. This greatly displeased Iturbide, who stripped Victoria of his command and put him in prison. Victoria escaped and took command of the forces in Veracruz rebelling against Iturbide’s imperial rule.

When Iturbide was forced to abdicate, Victoria arranged his passage into exile on the British frigate H.M.S. Rowlins. Though Mexico was now independent, a Spanish garrison remained at the Fort of San Juan de Ulua in Veracruz harbor. When the garrison opened fire on the port, Victoria organized resistance and then negotiated an armistice so that the soldiers in the garrison could be sent back to Spain.

After Iturbide’s fall, Victoria, Nicolás Bravo and Pedro Celestino Negrete formed a triumvirate that held temporary executive power until October 1824, when Victoria took office as Mexico’s first president.

Victoria’s main distinction as president was that of being the only chief executive in the first fifty years of Mexico’s history to serve out his full term. But he was hampered by severe financial problems. His expenses averaged eighteen million pesos annually but he was only collecting half that amount in revenues.

So Victoria was forced to seek foreign aid — in this case from Britain. The 19th century was a high noon of British imperialism, both military and economic. While British troops were marching through China and India, diplomatic envoys in Latin America were instructed to seek favorable trade pacts backed by loans.

The key figure in these negotiations was H. G. Hart, a competent diplomat who served as British chargé d’affaires in Mexico. Knowing how hard-pressed Victoria was (the Army alone accounted for twelve million pesos of the budget), Hart persuaded him to accept two loans, each of over three million pounds. These loans, negotiated through such banking houses as Barclay and Goldschmidt, averted bankruptcy and contributed toward social peace, factors that undoubtedly enabled Victoria to serve out his full term. At the same time, they turned Mexico into an economic satellite of the British empire.

Despite these financial problems, there were some highly positive aspects to Victoria’s administration. Two of the first president’s most positive achievements were establishment of the National Treasury and abolition of slavery. In addition, he improved education, accorded amnesty to political prisoners, laid plans for a canal in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, opened new ports for shipping, began construction on the National Museum, garrisoned Yucatan to thwart a contemplated Cuba-based Spanish invasion and unmasked a conspiracy led by a monk named Joaquin Arenas to restore Spanish rule.

During Victoria’s reign there was a political struggle that was remarkably similar to that waged in the American colonies between supporters of independence and Tories, or, as they preferred to be called, Loyalists. Such large cities as New York and Philadelphia were hotbeds of Tory intrigue and it will be recalled that Benedict Arnold’s treason was partly fueled by his marriage to Peggy Shippen, a beautiful young girl from a Loyalist family. The same situation prevailed in Mexico and independence-minded Mexicans were continually accusing rightists of subversive activity aimed toward restoration of Spanish rule. In some cases (notably that of the Arenas conspiracy) these suspicions were justified but in other cases they were not. The able conservative Lucas Alamán was forced out of Victoria’s cabinet in 1825 because he was considered too friendly toward Spain. Though Alamán did not favor a return to Spanish rule, he was friendly to the idea of a Mexican monarchy ruled by a European prince. Stung by suggestions that they were disloyal, the conservatives shot back that Victoria and other liberals were under the thumb of the American minister Joel Poinsett, a Protestant and York rite Mason.

Victoria was only forty-two when he finished his term of office. But years of strenuous military campaigning and political activity had taken their toll. Withdrawing from public life, he retired to his estate at El Jobo, on the coast of Veracruz. There he died in 1843, at the age of fifty-seven.

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Carlos Fuentes was an internationalist from birth. Though one of Mexico’s best-known citizens, he was born on November 11, 1928, in Panama, where his father represented the Mexican government. Mexico played only a minor role in his early childhood, most of which was spent in Washington, DC. He also lived in Chile and Argentina.

In 1944, at the age of sixteen, he came to Mexico. He received a law degree at Mexico’s National Autonomous University and in 1950 went to Geneva, Switzerland, to serve as secretary to the Mexican delegate to the International Law Commission of the United Nations. While in Geneva, Fuentes wrote his doctoral dissertation while also working as press secretary at the U.N. Information Center. He returned to Mexico in 1951.

Before long, Fuentes was following two careers — diplomacy and literature. His first major work, published in 1954, was Los días enmascaradas (“The Masked Days”), containing three short stories. In 1956 he teamed up with Manuel Carballo to found a literary publication called Revista Mexicana de Literatura. Between 1956 and 1959, in a role that combined government service and the arts, Fuentes was director of international cultural relations for Mexico’s Ministry of Exterior Relations (Foreign Affairs).

Fidel Castro came to power in 1959 and Fuentes was an early and enthusiastic supporter of the Cuban Marxist leader. This militant stand brought him into disfavor with the U.S. government and Fuentes was barred for a time from entering the United States. He moved to Paris in the mid-sixties and in 1975 was appointed Mexican ambassador to France. But he resigned in 1977. He had become dissatisfied with his government, then headed by President José López Portillo.

Unlike David Alfaro Siqueiros, who was a consistent leftist, Fuentes meanders all over the ideological lot. When the Cuban poet Padilla, a personal friend, was jailed, Fuentes became disillusioned with Castro. Though he served several Mexican presidents in a diplomatic position, he joined a march to protest repression of the teachers’ union in the late fifties and denounced the Tlatelolco student massacre in 1968. Today he seems to have made peace with a government that he has alternately served and skewered. The gist of his much-discussed Newsweek article, “Let Them Eat Enchilada,” is that if Mexicans prefer a one-party government, let them have it.

If the ideological orientation of Fuentes resembles a roller coaster ride, there is nothing up-and-down about his literary career, which has been an unbroken string of successes and awards. In 1967 he won the Biblioteca Breve prize in Barcelona, in 1975 the Javier Villarutia prize in Mexico City and in 1977 the Rómulo Gallegos prize in Venezuela. In the same year he won the Premio de Embajadores de Paris, in 1979 the Premio Alfonso Reyes in Mexico City, in 1984 the National Prize for Literature in Mexico and in 1987 the super-prestigious Miguel Cervantes prize.

Possibly because Fuentes has spent so much of his life outside Mexico, a dominating theme in his work is the search for Mexican national identity. Of his eleven novels, it is in The Death of Artemio Cruz that this mindset is expressed most strongly. Published in 1962, the book highlights the failure of post-revolutionary Mexico to implement the goals of the Revolution. The author’s technique is to narrate, through a series of flashbacks, the story of a dying tycoon named Artemio Cruz who came to the Revolution an idealist but who was corrupted by success and wealth. But not entirely. Though Artemio has become a rich, powerful man who owns businesses, publishes his own newspaper, and advocates breaking a railroad strike, he still remains a revolutionary in his anticlericalism and in encouraging Lorenzo, the son he adores, to go to Spain and fight on the Loyalist side-during the Civil War. In a Manichean scenario, it is as if an angel of revolutionary purity and a devil of corrupt power-seeking are fighting over the soul of the dying old cacique (regional boss).

Other flashbacks reveal what pushed Artemio into revolution in the first place. His father was the pampered son of a colonel on the staff of dictator Antonio López de Santa Anna — and his mother an Indian girl he raped. So Artemio resentfully grows up in the worst of both worlds: his upper-class lineage negated by the stigma of mixed blood and illegitimacy. Though allowed to live in a hut on the family’s vast property, he is never allowed into the hacienda.

As a revolutionary, Artemio is not only a gifted soldier but shows an unerring instinct for picking the winning side. He supports Madero against Díaz, Huerta against Pascual Orozco (the first revolutionary to turn against Madero), Villa-Carranza-Obregón against Huerta, Carranza-Obregón against Villa and Obregón against Carranza.

In sharp contrast to Artemio’s acuity in picking political winners is his luck with women. Regina, a young soldadera (camp follower) who is the great love of his life, is captured and executed by the federals. He then becomes infatuated with Catalina, daughter of a conservative Catholic landowner. When Catalina fails to reciprocate his ardor, Artemio proposes a cynical deal to her father: his property will be spared from revolutionary pillage if Catalina agrees to marry him. Though Catalina submits to the arrangement, for the rest of her life her attitude toward her unwanted husband is one of cold, malevolent hatred. This feeling is in no way mitigated by her bearing him two children. “At night you conquer me,” she says during a 1924 confrontation, “but I defeat you during the day.”

Catalina’s terrible last victory comes while her husband is on his deathbed. Fully aware of his anticlericalism, she calls a priest. When Artemio is burning with fever, she even refuses his request that a window be opened. As he lays dying, his body is a mass of putrefaction.

A grim story — but one that dramatically showcases the intensity of the author’s desire to lock into the most poignant period of Mexico’s history.

In the manner of Dickens, Balzac and Sinclair Lewis, Fuentes spent a great deal of time familiarizing himself with the social environments he would later use in his books and short stories. In one of his plays, deceptively titled Todos los gatos son pardos (“All Cats are Brown”), he presents an epic tableau of the Conquest in which the Aztec deity Quetzalcoatl is shown as representing life, love and justice. Significantly, he links the injustices of the Conquest to the horror of the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre. For all his critical and commercial success and political tergiversations, it would appear that Carlos Fuentes is a man very much in the market for a spiritual anchor.

Carlos Fuentes Discussion Forum

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1998 witnessed the passing of such diverse figures as Frank Sinatra, legendary boxer Archie Moore, two-term Florida Governor Lawton Chiles, cowboy star and entrepreneur Gene Autry, and Clayton (“Peg Leg”) Bates, the one-legged tap dancer who was so skilled with a wooden limb that he forged a career (including twenty appearances on the Ed Sullivan show) that lasted from the 1920s to 1989.

It also witnessed the passing of Octavio Paz, the protean Mexican writer who won the Nobel Prize in 1990 and who was as noted for ideological integrity as for literary talent. In 1968, after the student massacre at Tlatelolco, Paz angrily resigned as Mexican ambassador to India.

Paz was born in Mexico City on March 31, 1914. His father, Octavio Paz Solórzano, was a lawyer who supported Zapata during the Mexican Revolution and made notable contributions in the area of agrarian reform. His grandfather, Ireneo Paz, was a journalist during Porfirian times who rallied to the standard of Madero.

Intellectually precocious and having access to his grandfather’s extensive library, Paz was a voracious reader his entire life. After studies in Mexico, he received a scholarship to study Hispanic poetry in the United States.

Paz was always a political man. In 1937 the sanguinary Spanish Civil War was at its height. A sympathizer with the Republican cause, he traveled to Valencia, the Loyalists’ provisional capital, to attend a congress of antifascist writers. At the meeting were figures who were united against Franco but who would later split over Soviet Communism. Both Paz and André Malraux became vigorous critics of Stalinism while Louis Aragon and Pablo Neruda continued to defend the Moscow regime. Accompanying him on the trip to Spain was his young wife, Elena Garro, from whom he was later divorced. Garro would become a successful novelist and film writer.

Returning to Mexico in 1938, Paz helped found a socialist-oriented magazine called El Popular. He wrote a daily political column for this publication and helped found another, Taller, which encouraged new poets. Among these, who became known as the “Taller Group,” were Rafael Solana and Naftali Beltrán. Paz had been a published poet since the age of 19, when he brought out a collection titled Luna Silvestre (Wild Moon”).

In 1944 Paz received a Guggenheim Fellowship and studied Spanish American poetry in New York and San Francisco. During this period he gained valuable insights into the differences between North American and Mexican cultures and these served him well when he came to write his most famous book, The Labyrinth of Solitude, in 1950. The first part of this widely acclaimed work is an analysis of the Mexican character and the second part an interpretation of Mexican history and its influence on the Mexican psyche.

In 1945 Paz joined Mexico’s diplomatic corps and served at posts in France, Japan, and Switzerland, among others. Then came his appointment to India in 1962, followed by the 1968 resignation in the wake of Tlatelolco.

Though a man of the left, Paz was just as opposed to repression and human rights violations in countries that called themselves socialist as in authoritarian countries of the right. In 1951, living in Paris, he wanted to publish a report on the death camps of the Soviet gulag. This was a period when the Korean War was raging and the French Communist Party’s enormous power embraced not only the country’s largest union but also a clamorous stable of intellectual camp followers. These were led by Louis Aragon, whom Paz had known in Spain, and included even members of the Catholic clergy. One cleric, Abbd Boulier, referred to NATO commander General Matthew Ridgway (who had commanded U.S. forces in Korea) as “Ridway (sic) le pestell (“Ridgway the plague bearer”) — thus parroting communist charges of germ warfare in Korea.

Operating in such a cultural climate, it took courage for Paz to denounce the Gulag. Though excoriated in such fellow traveling literary publications as Les lettres Françaises, Paz stuck his guns. “It is inaccurate,” he declared, “to say that the Soviet experiment is a perversion of socialism. The crimes of the bureaucratic (Soviet) regime are its own … and not of socialism.” Though Paz supported Fidel Castro in the beginning, he would later sour on the Cuban dictator for his dismal human rights record.

Another highly acclaimed book, Corriente Alterna (“Alternating Current”) (1967), shows Paz as a scrupulous analyst of political insurgency. He makes a distinction between the revoltoso (“mutineer”) , revolucionario (“revolutionary”), and rebelde (“rebel”). The first is an individual who rises spontaneously against injustice, the second is one intellectually committed to party or movement and the third is a solitary individualist unruly toward authority. Though Paz is not an apostle of non-violence in the tradition of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, he emphasizes that he prefers “lucid violence” and a revolution based on clear ideas.

The Tlatelolco massacre was obviously a source of tremendous spiritual agony for Paz. He compares it to the Aztec rituals of mass sacrifice designed to keep the people in line and comments on the irony that the pyramid at Tlatelolco was a place where “rivers of Indian blood” flowed in the heyday of Aztec dominance.

After Tlatelolco, Paz went into a three-year period of self-imposed exile. He taught at Cambridge in 1969 and in 1971-72 he held the Charles Eliot Norton Chair of Poetry at Harvard. Then he returned to Mexico and became an independent critic of one-party domination over Mexico’s political system. He founded a magazine called Plural, a supplement to the well-known daily Excélsior. Plural became a highly-regarded intellectual gadfly publication but Paz suffered a setback when Julio Scherer García, the editor of Excélsior, was forced from his post by President Luis Echeverría because of the paper’s attacks on his government. In 1976 Paz founded another literary and cultural monthly, Vuelta, which lost no time in acquiring the sort of prestige that Plural had enjoyed.

Paz’s works have been translated into many languages. Among educational institutions that have awarded him honorary degrees are Boston University (1973), University of Mexico (1978), Harvard University (1980), and New York University (1984). His awards include the Jerusalem Literature Prize and the Premio Nacional de Letras in Mexico (both 1977), the Cervantes Prize (1981), the German booksellers Peace Prize (1984), the Oslo Poetry Prize (1985), and Spain’s Menendez Pelayo Prize (1987). The culmination, in 1990, was the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Octavio Paz was one of those figures who was as fortunate in his choice of enemies as of friends. Like George Orwell, Arthur Koestler and the Italian antifascist Carlo Tresca (assassinated in 1943), Paz was hated by both totalitarians of the left and of the right. This hatred, and the respect he won among lovers of freedom, was a badge of honor every bit as impressive as his Nobel Prize.

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The election that brought Miguel de la Madrid’s successor to power was clearly fraudulent. On July 6, 1988, when the first results began to arrive at the interior ministry’s office on Avenida Bucareli, a shockingly high proportion was marked for the main opposition candidate. He was Cuauhtemoc Cárdenas, son of former President Lázaro Cárdenas, the most left-wing and, along with Benito Juárez, the most honest president in Mexican history.

In a panic move that in the end proved effective, a computer glitch was created, one long enough to manipulate results in favor of the government candidate, who was declared the winner.

That candidate was a forty-year-old technocrat named Carlos Salinas de Gortari. Like de la Madrid, he was a Harvard graduate. He also resembled his predecessor in having little practical political experience. Though he had served in de la Madrid’s cabinet as minister of planning and budget, he never held elective office.

Things did not look good as the new president took office. Along with the economic crisis, there was a marked decline of public confidence in the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Where the PRI percentage of votes in presidential elections had been 90 percent for López Mateos and almost to 100 percent for López Portillo, it declined to 72 percent for de la Madrid and barely 50 percent for Salinas — and that in a blatantly fraudulent election.

Then Salinas’s fortunes took a dramatic turn for the better. As the Berlin Wall tumbled and former socialist countries now decided that capitalism was the wave of the future, Salinas made a bold move: he effectively canceled the Mexican Revolution.

His rejection of revolutionary principles, known by press pundits as salinastroika, took place in several areas — political, economic, even religious. Where anticlericalism had long been a leading principle of the Mexican Revolution, Salinas completely reversed course. Nuns and priests could once more appear publicly in clerical garb, they could vote, the Church could own property, diplomatic relations were re-established with the Vatican, and religious schools were once more authorized.

Salinas also struck at the hitherto all-powerful unions. The measure was generally popular because the main target was a clique of labor bosses who had become virtually a law unto themselves. The most powerful of these was Joaquín Hernández Galicia (” La Quina“), head of the oil workers union. Though the ostensible reason was fraud and corruption, Salinas had a strong personal reason for arresting and jailing La Quina. During the presidential campaign the union had distributed leaflets accusing Salinas of murder. This referred to an incident that took place when the president was a little boy. In the course of a war game in which she was an unwilling participant, he had shot and killed a teenage servant girl. What followed was a depressingly typical case of social injustice. The Salinas family was powerful and the victim was a poor Indian girl from the slums. So little Carlos got off with counseling. Salinas also went after the heads of the Veracruz dock workers union and the Journeymen and Industrial Workers Union. The latter was charged with tax evasion — on the eve of calling a strike against thirty-three maquiladora plants owned mainly by North American interests.

Another act in the drama of a Revolution reversed took place in the countryside. For a long time a sacred tenet of the Revolution had been support for the ejido system of agricultural cooperatives. The ejidos were at the center of the land reform program and to attack them was something like coming out against Motherhood and the Flag. But now Salinas did exactly that. “In the past,” he declared in a 1992 speech, “land distribution was a path of justice; today it is unproductive and impoverishing.” Technically, this represented an advance because the campesinos (peasant farmers) were now free to rent, sell, trade or mortgage their lands. But, predictably, it was the wealthy who bought up all the land that had become available.

Privatization was also a leading priority in the new president’s program. State control was out and by early 1992, 85 percent of companies formerly owned by the government had been sold to the private sector. Among major companies privatized were Banco Nacional de Mexico (BANAMEX), Banco de Comercio (BANCOMER) and Telefonos de Mexico (TELMEX).

There is no doubt that these measures paid off. By 1993 inflation had been lowered to 10 percent and the foreign debt reduced by some $25 billion. This set the stage for fulfillment of Salinas’s most cherished dream: inclusion of Mexico into the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The old revolutionaries (whom Salinas dubbed “the new reactionaries”) believed that NAFTA would strike a crippling blow to Mexico’s lower-middle class, wiping out Mom and Pop establishments all over the country as the WalMarts, McDonalds and Kentucky Fried Chickens proliferated.

Salinas partisans countered that NAFTA would attract more capital investment and result in more well-paying jobs for Mexicans. The president’s dream was realized on November 17, 1993, as the U.S. Congress approved NAFTA. Within a week Salinas revealed his choice to succeed him as president in 1994: a handsome, articulate Northwestern graduate and fellow economist named Luis Donaldo Colosio.

Salinas’s prestige had never been higher. He was only forty-four and a brilliant future was predicted for him — in the international arena. Having achieved an economic miracle in Mexico, who would be better suited to become president of the World Trade Organization?

On the opening day of 1994 everything fell apart. Santayana wrote that those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it. When Echeverria’s term ended, everybody hailed López Portillo as a savior. With the end of the disastrous Echeverria-López Portillo-de la Madrid cycle, it looked for a while like Salinas would be the new Moses. History was about to teach the Mexican people another harsh lesson.

It began on January 1, 1994, with an Indian revolt in Chiapas. With Salinas’s version of agrarian “reform,” with the implementation of NAFTA, the campesinos in Chiapas had reached a nadir of despair. No longer protected by the ejido system, their lands were being taken over by creditors and landlords. And how could they possibly compete with their new international “partners,” the farmers of America’s prosperous Middle West? So they sold whatever they had, bought guns, and took to the hills. Their leader, who called himself Subcomandante Marcos, was a white, upper-middle-class furniture magnate’s son from Tampico who had absorbed French-style Marxism at UNAM and served with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.

Though fighting gave way to negotiation within a week, and remains at this stage today, Marcos has won one propaganda victory after another over his foes in Mexico City. In defeating Napoleon and Hitler, the Russians had an indispensable ally in General Winter. With Marcos, it is Generals Fax and the Internet that have made him a global Robin Hood — along with his own skills as a media manipulator. The ski-masked Zapatista leader has hosted international conferences in his jungle retreat and appeared on such programs as “Sixty Minutes,” getting his message across in accented but highly articulate English.

As the Salinas myth continued to wane, the president now faced a snag in his relations with the Church. In the revolutionary past, the Church had always been associated with the generals, the landowners and big business. But a considerable segment of the Catholic clergy has embraced liberation theology — and many churchmen now oppose the government from the left. Most prominent of these mavericks is Samuel Ruiz García, bishop of San Cristobal de las Casas, capital of Chiapas. Though Ruiz has served as a negotiator in that troubled state, it is clear that his sympathies are with the downtrodden Indians.

Then came a cycle of high profile political murders.

In March 1994 Luis Donaldo Colosio, who surely would have been the next president of Mexico, was shot to death in Tijuana. Two weeks earlier, on March 6, he had made a speech that distanced him from the Salinas government. Stating that Mexico was still a Third World country, he pledged to implement political reform and to separate the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) from the government. Though a half-crazed young man, instantly labeled as “the lone gunman,” was arrested for the shooting, Mexicans are still asking themselves whether or not this was a political execution. As presidential candidate, Colosio was replaced by Ernesto Zedillo, who had been his campaign manager. The son of a poor family who once shined shoes but proved sufficiently upwardly mobile to get an education at Yale, Zedillo won in what was considered by international observers to be a fair election. A competent and intelligent technocrat, honest but colorless, Zedillo has been referred to by political satirists as “Nerdedillo.”

In September 1994 there was another high-level political assassination that tarnished the prestige of the Salinas family. The victim was PRI secretary general José Francisco Ruiz Massieu, Salinas’s former brother-in-law. The marriage to the president’s sister had terminated in a bitter divorce. Charged with masterminding the murder was Raill Salinas, the president’s older brother. (He was recently found guilty of the crime and sentenced to fifty years in prison.)

Raul Salinas proved to be a detriment to his brother in more ways than one. It was discovered that he was at the center of a vast web of corruption and influence peddling and that the Salinas economic “miracle” consisted more in creating twenty-one new billionaires than in raising the general standard of living.

The Salinas reputation continued to slide as the end of 1994 was marked by another of those disastrous devaluations Mexicans hate so much. Worst of all, the devaluation was performed in a singularly clumsy manner by the new finance minister, Jaime Serra Puche, coming when nobody was expecting it.

Two other blights on the national scene have been an increase in violent crime and in the influence of powerful drug dealers. Mexico City, once considered safe, has been hit with a wave of kidnappings — some of the victims have been millionaires and high level foreign executives, but also some ordinary tourists. Foreigners coming to Mexico have been warned never to take any but authorized taxis that are at a sitio (cab stand) or which can be summoned by telephone. There have been too many cases of tourists being picked up by freelance taxis (mostly VWs) and having the cab boarded by the driver’s confederates at a designated spot. The tourist is then forced to cough up his/her credit card to the kidnappers and to authorize outrageous charges (This type of kidnapping is called an “Express Kidnapp”). There have also been assaults on intercity buses, with instances of female tourists being raped as well as robbed.

The most disturbing aspect about the drug trade is the way it has reached into political life. Governors, including a potential PRI candidate for president in 2000, are regularly accused of being on the drug lords’ payroll. These accusations have gone as high as a general who was appointed to be Mexico’s drug czar. All this has induced tremendous cynicism among ordinary citizens. Should drug king “A” be arrested, it is widely believed that he was set up by his rival, drug king “B,” and a compliant political leader who can then masquerade as an anti-drug crusader. The baneful influence of the drug lords has provided fuel to enemies of NAFTA. Under the agreement, Mexican trucks can cross the border to destinations within the U.S. NAFTA critics claim that many of these vehicles carry drugs and that inspection by U.S. border officials is deplorably lax. Some even suggest that this laxity is deliberate and that the enormously wealthy narco dealers may have gotten to the inspectors.

Today, the Salinas family is in total disgrace, with Raul beginning his fifty-year prison term and Carlos a political exile in Ireland. Though the former president is surely not hurting financially, gone are all dreams of becoming president of a prestigious international monetary association or of a professorship at Harvard.

On the bright side is what may be the emergence of a multi-party system. The relatively conservative National Action Party (PAN) holds several governors’ seats and the left-of-center Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) has installed its standard bearer, Cuauhtemoc Cárdenas, as mayor of Mexico City.

As Mexico closes in on the millenium, what we are looking at is not answers, but a series of baffling questions.
Will dialogue continue in Chiapas?
Or will the government compensate for its defeats in the propaganda war by waging a long postponed campaign of extermination against the Zapatistas?
Does PAN have a chance in 2000 to unseat a party that will have been in power over seventy years?
Or will PRI again rig the election?
Will street crime and assaults on tourists be brought under control?
Will there be serious and effective action against the drug kingpins?
Or will Mexico risk becoming “Colombianized”?

In 1917, Winston Churchill described Russia as a riddle in a mystery wrapped inside an enigma. He could have been talking about Mexico in 1999.

The post High hopes, baffling uncertainty: Mexico nears the millennium appeared first on MexConnect.

Lázaro Cárdenas, the most left-wing president in Mexican history, became an international bogey man but a national hero by expropriating the foreign oil companies in 1938. Though even such political enemies as the Church and business conservatives applauded this nationalistic gesture, Mexico faced a grim period two-year period when the United States, Great Britain and Holland agreed on a boycott of Mexican oil.

What saved Mexico’s oil industry was the Second World War. Disturbed because Cárdenas was selling petroleum to Hitler — which he had to do to keep Mexico from drowning in its own oil — the boycotting powers lifted the ban. Thanks to a global conflict, the expropriators had gotten away with their daring move.

Oil would become a truly major factor in Mexican politics in the late 1970s and early 1980s. New deposits had been discovered in the Gulf area in 1972, while Luis Echeverría was in office, but their true magnitude would not be revealed until after the accession of his successor, José López Portillo.

Echeverría came to power with an obvious guilty conscience about Tlatelolco (Student massacre in 1968, Mexico City). To then President Díaz Odaz, he must have seemed a Jekyll and Hyde. On his way up, Echeverría was completely in the “bean counter” tradition, a loyal, servile, anonymous bureaucrat who entered government service in 1946 and served eight years as private secretary to General Rodolfo Sánchez Taboada, president of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).

Between 1954 and 1958 Echeverría was chief administrative official in the Ministry of Education, where he combined quiet efficiency with a gift for negotiation. This brought him to Díaz Ordaz’s attention. Here was an individual who combined the attributes of being hard-working, loyal — and easy to control. He made Echeverría minister of the interior and Echeverría in every way justified his confidence at the time of Tlatelolco. From this came the dedazo (The ‘magic finger’ by which the outgoing President identifies his successor)– with Díaz Ordaz certain that he was being succeeded by a man he could manage.

Then — as far as Díaz Ordaz and his fellow conservatives were concerned — “Mr. Hyde” came out of the closet. Moving sharply to the left, Echeverría now presented himself as the new Cárdenas. He released most of the students imprisoned after Tlatelolco, ordered rigid price controls on basic commodities, added a 10 percent tax to luxury items and a 15 percent surtax to bills in first-class restaurants and nightclubs, increased subsidies to universities and technical institutes and gathered the highest percentage of National Autonomous University (UNAM) graduates (78 percent) in his cabinet. (UNAM had been the cradle of student leaders whose militancy brought on Tlatelolco.) Remarked Díaz Ordaz ruefully: “I thought I knew him but I was mistaken.”

Though Echeverría was able to co-opt some of the former student radicals, others remained intransigent. In an article in the left-wing periodical Siempre, he was described as a “historic criminal.” On a visit to the UNAM campus, he was booed and stoned. Some radicals took arms, notably those who formed the revolutionary 23rd of September League. A former schoolteacher, Lucio Cabañas, organized a guerilla band in the mountains of Guerrero.

Echeverría also developed what many considered delusions of grandeur. He wanted to be Secretary-General of the UN after his term and he tried to enlist Mother Teresa’s support in a bid for the Nobel Peace Prize. Gonzalo Santos, one of the last of the old-fashioned caciques (regional bosses) voiced the opinion that Echeverría was mentally unbalanced.

A lavish public spender, Echeverría kicked his Treasury Minister upstairs (as ambassador to London) when he pointed out the difference between the internal and external debt and said Mexico had reached her limit in both. Then Echeverría made the vainglorious announcement that henceforth the country’s economy would be managed from Los Piños (the presidential palace).

Echeverría’s term was due to end in 1976. The same year witnessed the death of Daniel Cosío Villegas, one of Mexico’s most brilliant intellectuals. Shortly before passing, Villegas made this gloomy comment to a friend: “Have you seen the size of our external debt? It’s risen to almost $26 billion. We are screwed.” As if to lend weight to Cosío’s words, Echeverría was forced to devalue the peso from 12.50 to the US dollar to 20 pesos to the US dollar just before he left office.

Though few knew it at the time, the transition from Echeverría to his successor was one of frying pan to fire — in this case an oil-fueled fire. José López Portillo was a member of the old, Spanish-descended Creole aristocracy. Until he was forty, in 1958, he had a private law practice. He also taught law at UNAM, but did not appear greatly interested in politics. Then he entered public service in the first year of López Mateos’s presidency. He held a series of minor posts through two administrations and succeeded in winning the close friendship of President Luis Echeverría. As young men, the two had taken a trip to Chile and Argentina. Though López Portillo had no background in economics, Echeverría appointed him finance minister toward the end of his term. This was the springboard to his becoming the destapado (“uncovered one”) who would be the next presidential candidate of the PRI and next President of Mexico.

Historians will be tempted to draw a parallel between this succession and one that took place in Rome in C.E. 37. The repressive, paranoid old tyrant Tiberius had just died and the new emperor was a young man of twenty-five whose father had been one of Rome’s most popular generals. As the empire reverberated with joy, the new emperor promised an enlightened rule in which all secret police dossiers on political enemies kept by his predecessor would be destroyed. The young man was Caligula.

LIke Caligula, López Portillo got off to a good start. His inaugural speech was well-received for its sobriety and good judgment. Instead of grandiose promises, López Portillo committed himself to two years of recuperation (from Echeverría’s extravagances), followed by two years of consolidation, and two more of growth. He also pledged to promote economic growth by establishing an “Alliance for Production.”

For the first two years things went well. The economy showed signs of revival and oil reserves were discovered to be far larger than originally predicted. Again, we return to the Roman analogy. Caligula’s reign of extravagant misrule has been traced to a brain fever which, according to the Greek historian Philo, overtook him eight months after he came to power. Though Caligula survived the illness, it deranged him to the point that he practiced unspeakable cruelties and publicly proclaimed himself a god.

In López Portillo’s case, it was oil rather than a brain virus that transformed him into a spendthrift that made Echeverría look like Ebenezer Scrooge. It also induced a form of personal megalomania, one that led him to place members of his family in prestigious government jobs and install his mistress as Secretary of Tourism. A boyhood friend, Arturo Durazo, became chief of Mexico City’s police. On a $350 a month salary Durazo was able to acquire a string of race horses, a $2.5 million estate (that included a discotheque) and a pleasure palace on the Pacific coast he called “the Parthenon.”

Between 1976 and 1980, López Portillo rode the crest of the wave. Oil production rose from 800,000 to 2.3 million barrels a day and earnings from a half billion to 6 billion US dollars. With international bankers virtually forcing loans on Mexico, López Portillo went on a spending binge that included government construction, public works, social welfare projects and subsidies of consumer goods.

This orgy of deficit spending was predicated on the assumption that oil prices would continue to rise and that a never-ending flow of black gold would easily satisfy Mexico’s obligations to her creditors.

Then came the oil glut of the early eighties. Other producers reduced the price of oil to Mexico’s customers and Jorge Díaz Serrano, director of the government oil monopoly PEMEX, sensibly lowered the price of Mexican oil by four dollars a barrel.

But López Portillo would have none of this defeatist attitude. He promptly fired Díaz Serrano and then raised the price of oil by two dollars. The increase came with a threat that if customers failed to buy at the higher price they would get none of Mexico’s oil in the future. The buyers called his bluff. They bought the cheaper oil from elsewhere and Mexico now found herself in the position of being priced out of the market. By 1981, 87 percent of every dollar of PEMEX’s assets was owed to foreign banks.

All this caused nervousness in the financial community. Capital began fleeing the country, $9 billion between July and August of 1981 alone. Pressure on the peso was increasing but such was López Portillo’s hubris that his response was a blustering statement that he would “fight like a dog” to defend the peso. (To this day, he is greeted by barks when he appears in a public place.)

When devaluation came, it was the worst in Mexico’s history. In July 1982 the peso plunged from 22 to 70 to the dollar and kept right on going down. By August Mexico was virtually bankrupt. But López Portillo was nothing if not a buckpasser. On September 1, 1982, the day of the Informe (“State of the Union Message”), he blamed the bankers and sacadólares (“exporters of dollars”) for the crisis and nationalized the banks.

This was the situation encountered by López Portillo’s successor, Miguel de la Madrid. Born in 1934, He was the first of Mexico’s “Ivy League” presidents, having graduated from Harvard. (His successor, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, also has a Harvard degree and the current president, Ernesto Zedillo, went to Yale.) Though he had a good record in the areas of finance and public administration, de la Madrid had little practical political experience.

Pledging himself to “moral renovation,” de la Madrid sent two top figures of López Portillo’s administration to jail. One was Arturo ( “El Negro“) Durazo, the police chief who was so ingenious at stretching his $350 a month salary. (Here the nickname was not racial but referred to the blackness of his deeds.) Durazo, who was charged with murder, drug trafficking and extortion along with corruption, fled to the United States but was extradited in 1986 and sentenced to a long prison term. The other was former PEMEX chief Jorge Díaz Serrano. Though Díaz Serrano was correct in advocating a reduction in oil prices, his management of PEMEX had been flagrantly dishonest.

For all his good intentions, de la Madrid could do little to allay Mexico’s economic woes. In 1987 alone, the peso plummeted from 950 to 2,300 to the dollar. The debt continued to increase and de la Madrid had to take such unpopular measures as eliminating 51,000 federal jobs and slashing the salaries of other government employees.

Then nature struck a terrible blow. On September 19, 1985, a devastating earthquake (measuring 8 on the Richter scale) struck Mexico City, killing eight thousand and causing $4 billion in damage. Inflation continued to be a menace, registering 63.7 percent in 1985, 105.7 percent in 1986 and 159 percent in 1987. In December 1988, when de la Madrid concluded his term, the foreign debt was up to a staggering $105 billion.

The post Black gold, fool’s gold: The oiling of Mexico’s petroleum crisis (1938-1988) appeared first on MexConnect.

Because of the many fables he wrote, there are those who may wish to compare José Joaquin Fernández de Lizardi to La Fontaine. Such a comparison fails to do justice to both writers. Apart from the Contes, skillfully etched narratives of casual romance published in 1664, La Fontaine is chiefly known for his animal fables in the tradition of Aesop. Fernández de Lizardi’s range was much wider. In addition to the fables, he was also a dramatist, novelist, journalist and political activist. La Fontaine, along with Boileau, Racine, Molière and other writers of the 17th Century French neo-classic period, was an establishment figure in that he enjoyed at all times the favor of Louis XIV. Fernández de Lizardi resembled Voltaire both in the wide range of his output and as a gadfly who mocked and defied the establishment. There was also a resemblance in popular nomenclature: where Voltaire was “the sage of Ferney,” Fernández de Lizardi was “the Mexican thinker.”

Fernández de Lizardi was born in Mexico City on November 15, 1776. In view of his subsequent career as an independence fighter in his own country, the year takes on a special significance. He received his early education in Tepoztlán, then studied Latin in Mexico City. At sixteen he graduated from the University of Mexico’s high school program and at seventeen he was studying theology.

Opting for government service rather than the church, he was a provisional judge in Acapulco when the independence struggle began in 1810. Two years later, while serving as lieutenant of justice in Taxco, he surrendered his arms and position to the liberating forces of José Maria Morelos. For this, he was taken prisoner by the royalists and sent to Mexico City. But Spain at the time had a liberal constitution, the reactionary Ferdinand VII having been replaced by Joseph Bonaparte. Taking advantage of an article regarding freedom of the press, Lizardi founded a newspaper he called El Pensador Mexicano, “The Mexican Thinker”. Since the designation became forever associated with Lizardi, this was an unusual case of the man being named after the newspaper rather than vice versa.

One of the first articles in the paper, a criticism of Viceroy Venegas, landed Lizardi in prison. One recalls Voltaire’s denunciation of the Duke de Rohan, causing him to be beaten up by thugs in the Duke’s employ. Released in 1813, Lizardi wrote several articles about the plague that was then gripping Mexico. During 1815-16, while the Independence War was raging, he published two newspapers titled Alacenas de Friolera (“Cupboards of No Importance”) and Cajoncito de la Alacena (“Little Drawer of the Cupboard”). Despite the flippant titles, these journals contained a wealth of socially and politically significant material.

Obviously believing that print media played an important part in the independence struggle, he founded the Public Society of Reading in 1820. The Society facilitated the distribution of books and newspapers through subscriptions. He also published another newspaper, El conductor eléctrico, (“The Electric Conductor”).

After independence, the military adventurer Agustín de Iturbide set himself up as emperor. This action ran counter to Lizardi’s democratic ideals and he joined the Freemasons, then a center of liberalism in Mexico. Because the outspoken nature of his articles was causing consternation among his editors, he bought a press and published his own work throughout 1822-23. In the latter year, he published a satiric journal called El hermano del perico (“The Brother of the Parakeet”). Though Iturbide was ousted in 1823, Lizardi remained dissatisfied with the third article of the constitution, one that promoted ecclesiastical privilege. To express his views on church-state affairs, he published a bi-weekly called Conversaciones del payo y el sacristan (“Conversations between the Peasant and the Sacristan”). In 1825, during the presidency of liberal President Guadalupe Victoria, Lizardi received his greatest honors when he was named editor of La Gaceta del gobierno (“The Government Gazette”) and given the military rank of retired captain.

But this gifted man was coming to the end of the line. Afflicted with tuberculosis, he founded his last publication in 1826. This was a newspaper called Correo semanario de Mexico (“Weekly Correspondence of Mexico”). On April 27, 1827, sensing that the end was near, he drew up his testament. This epitaph summarizes his life and work: “Here lies the Mexican thinker, who did what he could for his country.”

Despite his relatively short life span, Fernández de Lizardi was born at exactly the right time to accomplish the mission he had set for himself. That mission was to work for Mexican independence and the cause of liberalism; he was born during the last years of Spanish reign and was perfectly placed to fight for independence and then for liberal reform in the new Mexican nation.

For all his renown as a political journalist, Lizardi is also considered the pioneer of the novel in Spanish America. When persecuted and imprisoned for his newspaper articles, he turned to didactic fiction to express his views. In El perico sarmiento (“The Mangy Parakeet”) he mixed plot with didactic observations as he created an unusual but appealing character in the form of a mestizo vagabond. His mockery of the oppressing classes is even more apparent in Vida y hechos del famoso caballero don Catrín de la Fachenda (“Life and Works of the Famous Gentleman don Catrin de la Fachenda”). In this work he effectively uses irony, sarcasm and mockery, as well as skillfully incorporating proverbs and popular sayings into the text.

At the time when Mexico was finding itself as a nation, the wit and wisdom of this engaging iconoclast played a singularly appropriate role.

The post Mexico’s Voltaire: Jose Joaquin Fernandez de Lizardi (1776-1827) appeared first on MexConnect.

Revolution is the ultimate test for survival of the fittest. In times of stormy social change, intense competition is generated among leaders of forces seeking that change and, inevitably, one man emerges alone at the top. Sometimes this process is peaceful but that is the exception rather than the rule.

By the time Napoleon assumed power, such earlier revolutionary leaders as Danton, Robespierre and St. Just had all died on the guillotine. The Russian Revolution was even more sanguinary, as Stalin’s ascent to the top was played out against the background of a widespread purge and vast man-made famine.

The Mexican Revolution was equally turbulent. Francisco Madero overthrew the old tyrant Porfirio Díaz — only to have his naiveté and trusting nature set him up for a putsch by another tyrant: Victoriano Huerta. Pancho Villa, Venustiano Carranza, Emiliano Zapata and Alvaro Obregón combined to overthrow Huerta — only to be followed by civil strife between Villa-Zapata and Carranza-Obregón. With the triumph of the latter faction, the field was reduced to two. Carranza was overthrown in 1920 — ten years after the Revolution began — and only Obregón remained. Considering his personal qualities, and those of the other leaders, it seems almost inevitable that Obregón should have triumphed. He was astute where Madero was naive, prudent where Villa was reckless, flexible where Carranza was rigid and, unlike the insular Zapata, he had a vision that embraced all Mexico.

Alvaro Obregón was born on a farm near Alamos, Sonora, on February 17, 1880. There is an intriguing mystery about his ancestry. Some historians claim that he was of part-Irish background and that the family name was originally O’Brien. While his biographer, Linda Hall, makes no mention of this, she does record a rumor that his grandfather was the Irish foreman of a railroad company. Fair-skinned and sporting a walrus mustache most of his life, Obregón could easily pass for a turn-of-the-century Tammany politician. If wit is an Irish characteristic, Obregón had it in abundance. Though his speeches were bombastic, in private he was relaxed and given to making sharp quips, many at his own expense.

Obregón’s father died when he was young and the family went to live in Huatabampo, in a marshy coastal area populated mainly by Mayo Indians. The youth became fluent in their language and a strong defender of Indian rights. When he emerged as a military leader, some of his most devoted followers were warlike Mayos and Yaquis from Sonora.

Obregón’s formative years see him as a resourceful jack of all trades. Not born to wealth, he scratched out a living as a sugar mill mechanic, barber, painter, schoolteacher, salesman and organizer of a small orchestra. In 1906 he went into garbanzo (chick pea) farming. This proved to be his most successful venture, as he invented a garbanzo seeder and sold his product on the profitable export market.

Obregón’s entry into politics came in 1910, when he refused the request of a local political boss that he sign a statement supporting Porfirio Díaz. The following year, with Madero as president, he was elected municipal president (mayor) of Huatabampo.

In his autobiography, Obregón expressed shame that he did not play an active role in the Madero revolution against Díaz. Harshly self-critical, he described his rationalization at the time — that he had children to support — as “cunning” and “cowardly.”

But he more than made up for this lapse when Madero’s government faced its first armed challenge: Pascual Orozco’s rising in 1912. Commanding a battalion of irregulars from Sonora, many of them Mayos and Yaquis, he routed an orozquista cavalry detachment at San Joaquin in northern Sonora. It was during this action that Obregón displayed the qualities that would make him such an outstanding military leader: a good intelligence service, realistic assessment of his own resources, mastery of surprise maneuvers and a photographic memory. The latter quality had made him a formidable poker player. He could look at a deck of cards once and then recite their order from memory. In combat, Obregón was able to familiarize himself with every terrain detail of a site that he wanted to select as a battlefield.

Victory over Orozco did not bring tranquility to Mexico. General Huerta, the very man who led Madero’s forces against the orozquistas, staged a coup against his president in February 1913, the coup followed by Madero’s murder.

On March 5, 1913, the Sonoran Congress refused to recognize Huerta as Madero’s successor. Obregón was appointed head of military forces in Sonora and three weeks later Venustiano Carranza proclaimed the Plan of Guadalupe, calling for the forcible overthrow of Huerta. At the same time, Pancho Villa had crossed into Mexico from the U.S. on March 9 and was organizing his famed Division of the North which would play such a decisive role in the movement to oust Huerta.

Thus was born the triumvirate — Obregón, Carranza and Villa — that waged the successful 16-month campaign which drove Huerta into exile in July 1914. Obregón, at the head of the newly-created Army of the Northwest, won decisive victories at Culiacán, Sinaloa, and Guadalajara, Mexico’s second city. On August 15, 1914, his troops marched into Mexico City.

Still, there was no harmony in Mexico’s revolutionary family. From the very beginning, relations between Villa and Carranza were marked by mutual antagonism and hostility. Carranza, who had been a federal senator under Díaz, viewed Villa as an undisciplined bandit; Villa, suspicious of Carranza’s upper-class and establishment background, saw him as a “stand patter” who would sell out the revolution at the first opportunity.

Between October 10 and November 18 of 1914 a convention was held at Aguascalientes. Although its avowed purpose was to bring together the feuding revolutionary factions, it only succeeded in hastening the final split. Neither Villa nor Carranza attended though Obregón, to do him credit, did all he could to ease factionalism.

His efforts were in vain. The Zapatistas and Villistas concluded an informal alliance and the convention — completely torn by the Villa-Carranza rivalry — ended by choosing a relative unknown named Eulalio Gutiérrez to be provisional president of Mexico. Carranza refused to recognize Gutiérrez and the conventioneers, possibly intimidated by the proximity of Villa’s forces, declared Carranza an outlaw and Villa commander of the convention’s military forces. From then on the rival factions were known as Constitutionalists (those who followed Carranza) and Conventionists (those who followed Villa and Zapata).

Though Obregón had his reservations about Carranza’s authoritarianism and inflexibility (to say nothing of his jealousy of Obregón’s military skills), he decided that between Villa and Carranza the latter was the lesser of two evils. Obregón had even less reason to like Villa than he did Carranza. In September 1914, while Obregón was on a mission to Villa’s headquarters, Villa had ordered him shot — but then mercurially changed his mind.

In late November Obregón led the Constitutionalist retreat from Mexico City to Veracruz. In December Villa and Zapata captured Mexico City and there they had their epic meeting. The Zapatistas, in a drive toward Veracruz, captured Puebla in mid-December, 1914, but Obregón re-took the city on January 5, 1915.

The real showdown came in April. At Celaya, in two sanguinary battles, Obregón pitted his grasp of strategy and defensive tactics against Villa’s suicidal recklessness — and won hands down. In May-June he again defeated Villa at León — an engagement in which he lost his right arm. Steadily pursuing Villa north, winning victory after victory, Obregón was unable to finish off his rival but at least reduced him to what he had been at the start of the Revolution, a bushwhacker in the Chihuahua sierra.

The United States extended de facto recognition to Carranza on October 19. Villa, formerly pro-American but now outraged by what he saw as gringo perfidy, mastermined a March 1916 raid across the border into Columbus, New Mexico, in which several Americans were killed.

This act resulted in the futile U.S. Punitive Expedition into Mexico, which, if anything, enhanced Villa’s prestige as he evaded eleven months of efforts to catch him. Obregón’s prestige was also enhanced. The presence of U.S. troops on Mexican soil was a great affront to Mexican public opinion and Obregón won high praise for the skill with which he negotiated their removal in talks with General Hugh Scott.

In late 1916-early 1917 a Constitutional Congress was held in Querétaro. Result was the Constitution of 1917, a radical document that restricted the power of the Church, spelled out the rights of labor and declared that Mexico had sovereign rights to such subsoil deposits as petroleum. Two factions emerged at this conclave — the relatively moderate “Renovators,” supported by Carranza, and the radical “Jacobins,” backed by Obregón. Carranza, seeing the radicals were dominant, adopted a strategy of “if you can’t whip ’em, join ’em” as he submitted leftist proposals of his own. But the convention only served to exacerbate growing tension between Carranza and Obregón.

Obregón had been serving as Secretary of War since March 1916. Carranza was elected president on March 11, 1917 and took office in May. At that time Obregón resigned his cabinet post and retired to private life. Though many were surprised that such an ambitious man would take this step, there were compelling reasons for Obregón’s decision. First, he was only 37, and it was to his advantage to build a secure political base in his native Sonora for an eventual return to politics. Second, his profitable garbanzo business did much to restore his finances. Third, Obregón also needed to restore his health, greatly undermined by the terrible wound he had suffered.

Back in Sonora, Obregón lost no time laying plans for his comeback. In late 1917 he made an extensive and highly successful trip to the United States. As far back as 1915 Colonel House, Wilson’s closest advisor, had described Obregón to Wilson as “the man of the hour in Mexico.” Wilson received Obregón cordially and he was praised in the press and by business and political leaders. He also scored a financial coup by selling most of the 1918 garbanzo crop to the U.S. Food Administration under Herbert Hoover for use in Europe.

Though he knew that Carranza viewed him with suspicion and hostility, Obregón’s strategy was to make himself so popular in the country that Carranza would have no alternative but to designate him as his successor in 1920. To that end, he strengthened ties with labor, liberals and agrarian groups. By June 1919 he felt strong enough to openly announce his candidacy in the coming election.

But Carranza remained as inflexible as ever. Though daily losing supporters, and though presiding over a corrupt and repressive regime, he was determined to ram his own candidate down the throats of the Mexican electorate. His handpicked successor, Ignacio Bonillas, was an MIT graduate who was then serving as Mexican ambassador in Washington. Bonillas had spent so much of his life in the United States that political enemies jeeringly referred to him as “Meester” Bonillas. Some even claimed that Bonillas had difficulty speaking Spanish. When a group of pro-Obregón railroad workers derailed Bonillas’ campaign train, carefully planted rumors went out that Bonillas had cancelled a meeting to take a Spanish lesson.

To make up for the deficiencies of his chosen candidate, Carranza launched a campaign of harassment and intimidation against Obregón’s supporters. Obregón wanted to win legally but daily this was becoming more difficult. As the situation deteriorated, Carranza sent troops into Obregón’s home state of Sonora. Obregón was then in Mexico City, testifying at the trial of a subordinate whom Carranza had accused of plotting rebellion. Positive that he was about to be arrested, Obregón escaped into the tropical wilderness south of Mexico City. In Sonora, the state government withdrew recognition of Carranza on April 10. On the 23rd obregonista leaders in Sonora announced the Plan of Agua Prieta, calling for Carranza’s overthrow.

His fall was accomplished with breathtaking speed. On May 7 he and his followers evacuated Mexico on the “Golden Train,” so named because it was laden down with loot. His destination was Veracruz, which he had used as a base against Villa and Zapata in 1915. Rebel attacks forced Carranza to leave the train. On May 20 he was treacherously assassinated on the orders of a local cacique who had promised to give him shelter.

Obregón was now truly alone at the top. Elected to the presidency on September 5, 1920, he took office in December of that year. During his four-year term, he showed himself to be more a pragmatic reformer than a wild-eyed destroyer of existing political structures. He favored labor but also encouraged foreign investment and domestic private enterprise. Though he distributed almost ten times as much land to campesinos (peasant farmers) as Carranza, he differed from radicals in his administration by arguing that land distribution should be accompanied by instruction in the techniques of farming. Obregón also showed restraint in dealings with the Church. Though personally anticlerical, he followed a policy of enforcing anti-Catholic laws laxly or not at all in areas where religious sentiment was strong.

Obregón’s boldest initiatives were in the field of education. His Education Minister, José Vasconcelos, was a brilliant scholar with many innovative ideas. Under his supervision, the ministry held festivals and sponsored hundreds of idealistic young teachers who gladly went into the most remote sections of the country. Vasconcelos also took a lively interest in the arts and his ministry provided initial impetus to such future artistic celebrities as Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros and Gerardo Murillo ( “Dr. Atl”).

Obregón faced one serious revolt during his term. Adolfo de la Huerta, interim president between Carranza’s death and Obregón’s installation, went into rebellion in December and took more than half the officer corps with him. De la Huerta had previously served as treasury secretary and resented the fact that his successor, Alberto Pani, had blamed him for the poor state of the nation’s finances. (De la Huerta, who prided himself on personal honesty, was a relatively poor man.)

The rebellion was brief but bloody, Obregón winning mainly because he had widespread labor and agrarian support. When it was over, he demonstrated that he could be ruthless if the occasion demanded. Recalling that Madero’s fall was partly caused by failure to purge the old regime’s officer corps, Obregón ordered every rebellious officer over the rank of major to be executed. One rebel, an attorney, protested that he was a civilian and could not be tried by court martial. Obregón’s Secretary of War immediately commissioned him a general — and shot him the next day.

Obregón was succeeded by another Sonoran, Plutarco Elias Calles. Where Obregón had been a pragmatic anticlerical, Calles was an anti-Catholic fanatic whose persecution of the Church sparked the terrible 1926-29 religious war known as the Cristero (“Christer”) Rebellion. Centered in west-central Mexico, it tied up the federal army for almost three years and in the end was only settled through negotiations. Although “no reelection” was a cardinal principle of Mexican politics, Obregón altered the meaning to “no consecutive reelection” as he decided to run again in 1928. Announcing in June 1927 that he would run, he got supporters in Congress to ram through an amendment to the Constitution that a president could be reelected to office after the interval of one term and that the term be extended from four years to six.

To nobody’s surprise, Obregón was elected in early July. On the 17th he and some deputies from Guanajuato were seated in an open air restaurant in San Angel called La Bombilla. Sidewalk artists are a common phenomenon in Mexico and nobody thought it unusual when a young man approached Obregón’s table and extended his sketch pad. As Obregón reached for it, the artist pulled a pistol out of his pocket and fired five shots into his face. He died instantly.

The Cristero Rebellion was still in progress and the youth was a Catholic fanatic named José de León Toral. Swayed by a manipulative nun named Mother Conchita, Toral had come to the conclusion that Obregón was the Anti-Christ and should be eliminated in any way possible.

Alvaro Obregón was only 48 when he was assassinated. Considering what he accomplished in that relatively short span, it is interesting to speculate on how much more he could have contributed to his country and to the world.

References:

Alvaro Obregon : Power and Revolution in Mexico, 1911-1920 By: Linda Biesele Hall
Available through Amazon Books – Hardcover

History Index -|- Time Line -|- Famous People

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From Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz to Gerard Manley Hopkins, the Catholic cleric who is also a poet is an unending subject of interest. Given the poet’s traditional role as a free spirit and the Church’s tradition of rigid intellectual discipline, the term poet-priest (or poet-nun) may seem to some an oxymoron. And there is indeed conflict. Sor Juana, silenced by her ecclesiastical superiors, had to give up her brilliant writing career and spend the last four years of her life doing routine work until she died aiding the victims of a plague, As for Hopkins, he was silenced by … Hopkins. A convert to Catholicism who entered the Jesuit order at the age of 24, he burned most of his poetry at the time. All that has survived is a small body of his work that he saved, plus some poems he sent later to a friend named Robert Bridges.

Fortunately, a multi-faceted Mexican scholar named Manuel Ponce Zavala seems to have escaped the restrictions imposed on Sor Juana by her superiors and on Hopkins by himself. A teacher and prodigious contributor to literary reviews, Ponce is considered one of the poets most responsible for revitalizing religious lyric poetry in Mexico during the twentieth century.

Ponce was born on February 19, 1913, in Tancítaro, Michoacán. He received his early education at the Morelia Seminary, where he studied philosophy, Latin and literature. Ordained a priest in 1936, he taught history, literature and apologetics at the Seminary for the next twenty-five years. During this period Ponce also served as editor of Trento, a highly-regarded regional publication that featured the works of several generations of Michoacán poets.

A builder and administrator as well as a writer/teacher, Ponce founded the Fra Angelico Academy and the Academy of Regional Ecclesiastical History. The latter facility published a number of team projects, among them Vasco de Quiroga y el arzobispado de Michoacán and Jardín moreliano de poetas. The first celebrates Vasco de Quiroga, the famed 16th Century bishop renowned for his humanity and creative approach to Indian education and vocational training, while the second spotlights poets who have flourished in the “Morelian garden.” Ponce also founded the Arca Cultural Institute, a charitable and educational organization aimed at the youth of Michoacán’s capital city.

In 1969, on orders from the Mexican episcopate, Ponce started up the National Commission of Sacramental Art, a body dedicated to preserving Mexico’s patrimony of religious paintings. This talented ecclesiastic is also responsible for restoration of the El Calvario (“Calvary”) Church in Tlalpan, on the outskirts of the Federal District.

With this heavy burden of pastoral and administrative duties, Ponce’s literary output has been intermittent though highly praised. In addition to Trento, where he was at the editorial helm, his articles have appeared in Abside, Letras de Mexico, Romance, El Hijo Pródigo, Viñetas de Morelia and América — all intellectually prestigious publications.

Best-known among Ponce’s prose works are a monograph on retirement, published in 1948, a literary study titled Diego José Abad (1954), the introduction to a compilation of sermons by Bishop Luis Altamirano (1955), and a pastoral monograph titled Tota Pulchra (1956).

His most acclaimed poetic works are ” Circle of Virgins” (1942), ” A Second Passion at Forty” (1944), ” Mysteries to Sing Under the Poplars” (1946), ” The Incredible Garden” (1950), ” Christ and Mary” (1953), ” Pastoral Register” (1954), ” Elegies and Theophanies” (1963), and poetic anthologies published in 1982 and 1983. All these titles are translations from Spanish, in which they were published. But one of his works, with the title ” Some of my Poems” ( Amazon.com link) was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 1987.

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Adolfo López Mateos (1909–1970) and Gustavo Díaz Ordaz (1911–1970)

In 1958, the year Adolfo López Mateos became president of Mexico, the world was relatively tranquil. The Korean War was over and Vietnam was in a lull between the defeat of the French in 1954 and the formation of the National Liberation Front (Vietcong) at the end of 1960. In France, Charles de Gaulle had averted civil war by becoming chief of state. Fidel Castro was still a guerrilla in the mountains of Cuba — and a highly popular one. The corrupt Batista dictatorship was universally despised and the conventional wisdom on Castro (which he did nothing to discourage) depicted him as a democratic nationalist rather than a revolutionary Marxist.

Eisenhower was at the peak of his prestige, Joe McCarthy had died of alcoholism the year before, and an era of national paranoia had succumbed to one of good feeling and material progress in which the Four Aces sang no songs of protest and Ozzie and Harriet reigned supreme over their squeaky-clean household.

Preceding López Mateos in the presidency was another Adolfo — Ruiz Cortines. A Mexican “Ike,” this former governor of Veracruz gave Mexico a frugal, sober and efficient government aimed at growth but curbing the lavish public spending of his predecessor, the flamboyant Miguel Alemán.

Without overworking the comparison, it could be said that in a limited way López Mateos played “Kennedy” to Ruiz Cortines’s “Eisenhower.” Where the outgoing president was 67, his successor was twenty years younger. Having served as secretary of labor, López Mateos had support among liberals and trade unionists and had infinitely more personal charisma than his predecessor. Where the latter was an indifferent speaker, the former was one of the finest orators in Mexico. Since the last three presidents — Avila Camacho, Alemán and Ruiz Cortines — had been conservative and business-oriented, it was now felt that a move to the left was indicated. But not too drastic a move. As the president-elect himself put it: “I am left within the Constitution.”

López Mateos was born on May 26, 1909, at Atizapán de Zaragoza in the state of Mexico. His father was a small-town dentist and his mother a schoolteacher. The father died when the boy was young and the mother moved to Mexico City, serving as director of an orphanage to support the family.

Adolfo attended primary school on a scholarship and in 1929 graduated from the Scientific and Literary Institute of the state of Mexico, located in the state capital of Toluca.

It was at this time that he received his political baptism of fire — a baptism that was almost a funeral. López Mateos had been a follower of José Vasconcelos, the brilliant educator who ran as an opposition candidate against Pascual Ortiz Rubio, handpicked candidate of former president and perennial strongman Plutarco Elías Calles. He and fellow student vasconcelistas were attacked by callista gunmen and one of his best friends was killed. López Mateos had to flee to Guatemala, returning in 1930 when he saw that the pressure had eased. Chastened, he decided the most prudent course was to enter the government bureaucracy.

Where López Mateos had opposed one strongman, he now became the protégé of another — Mexico state political boss Isidro Fabela. Fabela, who admired his intelligence and political skills, shepherded López Mateos into such posts as director of the state Literary and Scientific Institute, alternate federal senator, and then senator. López Mateos also established a close friendship with Ruiz Cortines. When the latter became president, he made López Mateos minister of labor. At the end of his term, Ruiz Cortines bestowed on his friend the all-important dedazo (“pointing finger”) which meant that he would be candidate of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), a nomination guaranteeing his accession to the presidency.

As a self-proclaimed “left within the Constitution” president, López Mateos soon made clear that he had no patience with those he considered left of the Constitution. After a crippling strike, he imprisoned the head of the railroad union, Demetrio Vallejo, on charges of “social dissolution.” Also jailed was the head of the teachers union and the internationally known painter (and militant Communist) David Alfaro Siqueiros.

But, within parameters he set for himself, López Mateos was no parlor radical. He parceled out more land to the peasants than any president since Lázaro Cardenas, he nationalized U.S. and Canadian owned electric companies, he brought the government into the field of low-cost housing (with rents deliberately kept down), he expanded the social security (IMSS) apparatus, he waged an aggressive public health campaign, and he vigorously attacked illiteracy.

In the field of foreign policy, López Mateos managed the tightrope feat of remaining on excellent terms with the United States while declining to go along with U.S. initiatives on Cuba. Mexico voted against Cuba’s expulsion from the Organization of American States, refused to go along with economic sanctions and remained the only country in the Western Hemisphere to retain diplomatic relations with Cuba.

At the same time, Mexico rejected alignment in any form with the developing Moscow-Havana axis and condemned the placing of missiles in Cuba. López Mateos’s independent policy in the global conflict won him the admiration of President Charles de Gaulle, who was also aiming at a neutral position in the East-West struggle.

A signal diplomatic triumph for López Mateos was the return, in the summer of 1963, of the Chamizal to Mexico. This was a 600-acre strip of formerly Mexican territory that had ended up in Texas when the Rio Grande changed course. The Chamizal pact had been worked out in the course of a friendly 1962 meeting in Mexico City between López Mateos and President John F. Kennedy.

But trouble loomed as López Mateos neared the end of his term. For one thing, his health was precarious. Although a relatively young man, he had long suffered ferocious migraines, these the result of swollen blood vessels in his brain. A few days before his inauguration, an attack had forced him to be carried out on a stretcher. The health problem caused López Mateos to delegate more and more authority to his interior minister and successor, Gustavo Díaz Ordaz. As leftist militancy rose in the middle and late sixties, it was a collision course situation between increasingly militant students and workers on one side and a hard-line authoritarian like Díaz Ordaz on the other. Though López Mateos agreed with the action, it was Díaz Ordaz who masterminded the smashing of the teachers’ and railway workers, unions. Now he would soon be in power officially. As for López Mateos, he suffered a crippling stroke almost as soon as he left office. When he died, in 1970, he had been in a coma for six years.

Gustavo Díaz Ordaz

Gustavo Díaz Ordaz was born in Puebla on March 12, 1911. Authoritarianism ran in the family. His father, Ramón, had been a local political chief under Porfirio Díaz. Losing his position when the old dictator was overthrown, he worked at any position he could to maintain his family — for a time he was a hacienda administrator and then a bookkeeper. The family was poor and one time suffered the humiliation of being evicted for nonpayment of rent.

A further negative was Gustavo’s extreme ugliness — with a big mouth and huge, protruding teeth. This is significant because personal taunts from students are believed to have ignited the murderous rage that led to the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre. Díaz Ordaz could engage in self-deprecating humor about his looks, once commenting to Lyndon Johnson that political enemies had called him two-faced. “If I had another face,” he quipped, “do you think I’d go around with this one?” Though he could be humorous in give-and-take with U.S. presidents, insults from screaming mobs of youthful revolutionaries was quite another matter.

But poverty and ugliness would be overcome by intelligence, a capacity for hard work, driving ambition and an inflexible will. Also, Díaz Ordaz resembled López Mateos in having a “rabbi” — an influential man who appreciated his qualities and took him under his wing. He became the protégé of General Maximino Avila Camacho, brother of former president Manuel Avila Camacho. Unlike his presidential brother, who had a conciliatory nature, Maximino was a brutal tyrant who gained the nickname El Carnicero El Carnicero (“The Butcher”) during the Cristero War. In Díaz Ordaz he spotted a comer, a tough young hard-liner who wore the espolones (“spurs”) of a fighting cock. With the patronage of Maximino, his “fighting cock” rose quickly in the ranks of the state and federal apparatus. In 1939 he became president of the state Superior Court, followed by election to the state legislature and then to the federal senate. López Mateos was also a senator and the two became close associates and fast friends. Though it seemed like a classic “odd couple” relationship — one genial and expansive, the other somber and driven — the two complemented each other well. While López Mateos was an attractive and articulate front man, Díaz Ordaz ably performed the donkey work. Respecting his friend’s skill as an administrator, López Mateos made him interior minister and then — a crowning moment — recipient of the dedazo.

Except for one dark stain, the presidency of Díaz Ordaz was a signal success. Inflation remained low, the increase in gross national product averaged a healthy 6 percent annually, and the percentage of the budget expended on education was one of the highest in the world. In making Latin America a nuclear free zone, Mexico played a leading part at international conferences. In such northern cities as Ciudad Juárez, Tijuana and Matamoros, urban renewal projects made them highly attractive to tourists. During the turbulent years to come, the Díaz Ordaz administration’s fiscal prudence and intelligent management of the economy would make Mexico look to some like a paradise lost.

The stain of course was Tlatelolco. Though these were relatively prosperous times, the revolution on campuses was one of rising expectations. Students devoured Marx and Marcuse and thrilled to the derring-do of Che Guevara.

All this filled Díaz Ordaz with rage. Mexico had won her bid to be host country at the 1968 Olympics and the last thing the president wanted was the Olimpiada disrupted by street violence and student unrest. What probably made Tlatelolco inevitable was an August 27, 1968, demonstration ending with a mob of students marching on the presidential palace and shouting the words: ¡SAL AL BALCON, CHANGO HOCICON! — “Come out on the balcony, monkey with a big snout!” Though Díaz was not rash enough to appear on the balcony, he did make his sentiments known to a writer friend. “Youth!” he exploded. “Those sons of bitches are not youth! They’re nothing! Blood-sucking parasites! … Stinking filth! And they don’t even have the balls to really stand up and fight…”

But Díaz Ordaz did. The National Autonomous University, a hotbed of anti-establishment feeling, was occupied by army troops on September 18. On October 2, a week before the Olympics were scheduled to begin, a mass meeting began at 5 p.m. at the Place of the Three Cultures, in the Tlatelolco neighborhood. Tlatelolco, with a huge temple, had been one of the most important centers of the Aztec civilization. it was estimated that between five and ten thousand people were on hand.

Then the firing began. There were three groups of attackers — police, uniformed soldiers and young men in civilian clothes wearing white gloves or knotted white handkerchiefs as an identification badge. These were members of Batallon Olimpia, a paramilitary force trained to provide security at the Olympic games. Later, there were also attacks from helicopters. The firing died after six but started again before seven and didn’t let up until eleven. Jean François Held, a journalist with the French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur, had been in Vietnam and in the Middle East. “Never have I seen a crowd fired on like that,” he said.

How many died at Tlatelolco? Though official government sources admitted first eight, then eighteen, then forty-three deaths, unofficial estimates ran as high as four hundred. Nobody believed the official government version — that the massacre began when “terrorists” in nearby apartment buildings fired on the police — or the version in Díaz Ordaz’s memoirs — that the demonstrators were trying to seize the nearby Ministry of Foreign Relations.

There was widespread belief, however, that much of the blame could be placed at the door of Luis Echeverría Alvarez, Díaz Ordaz’s interior minister and designated successor. Echeverría, as we shall see, was so disturbed by the accusation that he would devote his entire administration to expunging the stain of Tlatelolco.

As for Díaz Ordaz, he stubbornly continued to insist that the events of 1968 gave him a chance to serve his country and save it from disorder. “I do not have my hands stained with blood,” was his final comment. Appointed ambassador to Spain in 1977, he resigned within a week. Shortly afterwards he died of colon cancer.

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