The Porfirian and the Context of the Mexican Revolution - Term Paper Example

It was through a Coup d’etat that Porfirio Diaz was raised to presidency in Mexico in 1876 (Miller, 1989, 257). During the initial fifty years of Mexico’s independence, only two Mexican governments had completed full term (Miller, 1989, 257). Mexico was witnessing chaotic periods and highly unstable governance while Diaz assumed office. A previous army man, Diaz had entered national politics after his retirement (Miller, 1989, 257). Unexpected in many aspects, he completed his first term and with some intervals in between, he served a total of 30 years as administrative head of Mexico (Miller, 1989, 257). The prolonged rule of Diaz has been described by historians as the worst period for the ordinary citizens and the best era for the bourgeoisie. Soon after he assumed office, it became clear that he had no intention to leave the place in the near future. It has been observed that “beginning with his first presidential period, Diaz consolidated his personal power and worked to extent his tenure. He carefully masked his maneuvers and appeared to operate in conformity with the Constitution and other laws” (Miller, 1989, 257). Modernisation of Mexico was the proclaimed goal of Porfirio Diaz. The past anarchic history of Mexico was used as an excuse by Diaz to pursue his authoritarian ways (Miller, 1989, 260). He put forward a theme of “order and progress” and this motto was used as a justification for the dictatorship through out his period (Miller, 1989, 266). The regime was typically fascist in essence which is reflected in all the changes brought about by the administration in that period. The rural, poor Mexicans and the Indian tribes were mercilessly driven out of their lands and livelihoods to pave way for monopolistic mega industries. Gonzales (173), a renowned Mexican historiographer, had analysed Diaz’s period and concluded that it was neither a tyranny nor a paternal government. Gonzales (173) called it, instead, a dictatorship and described it as “a style of government concentrated in one person or group, less inhuman than a tyranny and more rigid than a paternalistic rule, which is apt to emerge in order to rectify a chaotic or war-like situation.” But here, the hesitation to use the word tyranny and the softening of the language while describing the Porfirian period are only evidences of the wrong notions of progress that most historians fall prey to. The prosperity of a minority at the cost of even the lives of the majority has been a routine in the history of world’s dictatorships and many of such dictators have been praised as builders of a new modern society. In the case of Diaz also, this common mistake is repeated by a few scholars. It is visible from similar narrations that historians were in two contrasting groups when they assessed the rule of Porfirio Diaz. The group including Gonzales, excused many of his dictatorial crimes, to an extent, by eliciting the so-called progress that the country achieved in terms of industrialization during his period. But Gonzales (175) has also admitted that if the dictatorship “served any group at all, this was the bourgeoisie or capitalists, and for that reason, the epithet which fits best is bourgeois or liberal dictatorship.” If one goes into the study of this period, deep, it becomes crystal-clear that there was not at all any element of liberalism in terms of human freedom and democracy in Diaz’s regime. Three-fourth of the Mexican population lived in villages during that period (Miller, 271). “New land laws enacted in 1883 and 1894” enabled the rich and influential to grab land from the poor, farmers (Miller, 272). Many villages and tribal holdings were handed over to the elite and the influential to turn them into private estates called haciendas. (Brenner and Leighton 25). Historical narrations from that period show that “occupants who resisted being thus reduced to peonage were shanghaied into the army or sold to work in the tropics, or sent to their graves” (Brenner and Leighton 25). The people who lived in these lands for centuries were forced to wage unequal wars with the powerful business-government nexus. “There had been bloody Indian uprisings on this account, and the Yaquis particularly, edged to the sierra deserts by the great land companies in Sonora (dominantly American), waged suicidal war, ” records, Brenner and Leighton (25). Eventually, “over half of the nation’s population, Indians and Mestizos, were now shackeled to the haciendas… rendering perpetual labour for perpetual debt” (Brenner and Leighton 25). New industries sprouted under the patronage of Diaz regime and most of them were owned by foreign companies, especially American. Statistical records show that “by 1910, more than 3000 silver, copper, lead, zinc andiron mines were in full production” (Miller, 1989, 269) in Mexico. A big percentage of these mining companies were North American and these companies got enormous tax concessions (Miller, 1989, 270). “Mexico became world’s second largest copper producer” and “silver production quadrupled” (Miller, 1989, 269). Petroleum was another resource upon which foreign companies were allowed to acquire monopolies (Miller, 1989, 269). Miller (271) has also pointed out that “by 1910, Mexico’s crude oil output averaged ten thousand barrels a day.” Prosperity was in the air, the middle class and the elite flourished. “Mills for processing sugar, flour, paper, textiles and chemicals as well as breweries, glass works, potteries, shoe factories and cement plants” were established in nook and corner of the nation (Miller, 271). But the only contradiction left unresolved was that “this urban industrial progress scarcely touched the majority of the people-the rural population” (Miller, 271) All the profitable traditional work and trade came to a dead end unable to survive the wave of government sponsored mass production factories. The words of Brenner and Leighton (26) impart a look into this phenomenon in a very candid way. They (Brenner and Leighton 26) observed that “the weavers had been displaced by mills; the shoe-makers had been left with only the sandal trade at peasant prices; the potters were now supplying the penny markets; the pack drivers, once numbered by the thousands and the backbone of the transportation system, had been decimated.” Another disaster was that “the small farmers…had to compete with the great plantations which paid scaled-down taxes, had bank credit and were cushioned by debt-bound peon labour” (Brenner and Leighton 26). Camin and Meyer (5) have quoted a member of the rural folk of that period as saying: we see with deep sorrow that those plots that we believe justly belong to us, because we have received them from the father to son and have cultivated them with constant work of more than a century, have been turned over to strange hands simply by presenting a claim and paying a few pesos. Miller (272) has noted the vast and disastrous change that came about in land relations in Porfirian period. He stated: A land law of 1888 authorized formation of companies to survey terrenos baldios, (namely the) unclaimed and vacant lands in the national domain. As compensation, the companies received one-third of the land surveyed; the remainder was usually sold by the government at ridiculously low prices to the land companies or to favoured individuals. The tribes who inhabited the vast expanses of Mexico naturally had no title deeds or legal papers to claim their lands. So, all the lands owned by them were surveyed as unclaimed and taken over. “Regime’s hostile policy toward Indians,” says Miller, was justified by citing “survival of the fittest doctrines” (Miller, 1989, 266). “The struggle against the Indians in the North during the Porfiriato included the ‘pacification’ of the Mayo and the Yaqui Indians of Sonora, a bloody war that disrupted the organizational forms of both tribes, rejected their ancient rights, and transferred their lands to white domination” (Camin and Meyer, 5). The situation was that of a total sale out. “By 1910, about 800 hacendados (owners of haciendas) owned more than 90 percent of the rural land; fewer than 10 percent of the Indian communities had any land; and less than three percent of the agricultural population owned any land whatever” (Miller, 272). Mrs. Ethel Tweedie (1901,338-41) wrote in the book, ‘Mexico as I Saw It’: The village, containing nearly three thousand souls belongs to the hacienda. The people pay no rent and owners of the hacienda hold the right to turn them out….They are all obliged to work for the hacienda in truly feudal style…each man as a rule has an allotted number of days on which he is bound to render service. The lives in haciendas were a combination of feudal and the capitalistic systems with each contributing to the other in a mutually beneficial way. In “tobacco plantations of the Valle Nacional in Oaxaca, the lumber camps of Chiapas, and the henequen fields of Yucatan, …. the most barbaric forms of slavery were practiced” (Arnold and Frost, 273). Knight (469) has recorded instances of villagers complaining about “poverty, lack of work, starvation, agrarian usurpation and the connivance of land lords and military.” There was also a market-driven bonded labour system to ensure that the labourers lived in perpetual slavery. In haciendas, labourers were “compelled to buy at the company store where they received credit and and typically were in debt. Since they could not leave while owing their employer money, this debt peonage amounted to a kind of serfdom” (Miller, 276). “In economics, however, the principle of laissez faire was scrupulously respected to the point of injustice” was the conclusion made by even a Diaz sympathizer like Gonzales (177) about this situation. Miller (276) has also noted that “schools were virtually non-existent in haciendas, thus the peons and their children were condemned to perpetual illiteracy.” Raymond Craib (254) has quoted a merchant in Southern Veracruz writing to president, Porfirio Diaz in 1887 “complaining that the local political boss had forced an indigenous community to contract with an Italian surveyor at an inflatedprize of $20,000 pesos, a sum which, along with forced Indian labour, allowed the surveyorto live in a luxurious ‘feudal encampment’ decorated with Italian flags.” This instance shows that the President was very well aware of the injustices carried out by his subordinates as well as foreign businessmen in his country. The American money pumped into the system actually pawned Mexico to their hands. The take over was far more dangerous than observed in the following words taken from a historical study; “during the Porfiriato, Americans began to go to Mexico in ever-increasing numbers-to invest money, to build rail roads, to buy ranches, to write books,” (Hanke and Rausch, 164). The other side of this seemingly innocent migration can be understood from the lines of another scholar (Miller, 276); “some foreign company compounds had their own police and court system, where Mexican law was secondary to foreign law or company rules.” How farcical was the progress showcased by Porfirio Diaz’s government becomes more clear when Brenner and Leighton (15) describes the example of “the monster drainage tunnel” built by the rulers, “that had freed the capital of valley floods, at enormous cost in pesos and uncounted Indian lives.” Progress at any cost, in this context meant, progress at the cost of the poor, the voiceless who had no power. Thus the foreign industries flourished and “the value of American holdings, virtually nothing in 1877, was gauged at $ 500,000,000 in 1902” (Brenner and Leighton 17). Also, “Foreign investment increased from 110 million pesos in 1884 to 3400 million in 1910” (Camin and Meyer, 2). “The largest technological revolution” of Mexico was “the construction of almost thirteen thousand miles of rail-road tracks” (Camin and Meyer, 2). Agriculture was also “rapidly taking an industrial course, and toward export products, subtracting the best lands and much labour from producing for Mexican bellies” ( Brenner and Leighton 25). “The agricultural modernisation “contributed to the destruction of the peasant economy, usurped the rights of the rural towns and communities, and thrust its inhabitants into the inclemency of the market, hunger, peonage and migration” (Camin and Meyer, 3). The land-deprived people became cheap labour and lived under eternal poverty. The drastic dip in living standards of the majority of Mexicans becomes more evident in the observations made by Camin and Meyer (4) below: The annual per capita consumption of corn in Mexico fell by 20 pounds between 1895 and 1910 (from 330 to 310 pounds); the average life span in those fifteen years fell from 31 to 30.5 years; in the final five years of the nineteenth century, infant mortality increased from 304 to 335 per thousand. Later studies also revealed that “infant mortality was more than twenty five percent” in that period (Brenner and Leighton 26). The legendary story of the Northern rebel leader, Francisco PanchoVilla, and his adventures against the rulers, provide deep insights into the situation prevalent in Mexico at that time. John Reed (365) recalls from legendary ballads about him that “in time of famine, he fed whole districts and took care of entire villages evicted by the soldiers under Porfirio Diaz’s outrageous land law.” This Mexican robinhood could become a hero only because there was utter rejection of the authority of Diaz in the minds of the common people. The industrialization necessarily brought with it, a very big working class, which was exploited and hence disgruntled. Factory workers were getting a little higher wages than peasants but “but they were obliged to labour twelve to fifteen hours a day” (Miller, 276). Labour organizations grew slowly daring oppression and “between 1880 and 1900, there were seventy five strikes in the textile industry, sixty in the rail road sector and thirty-five among tobacco workers” (Miller, 277). Opponents of Diaz were mercilessly persecuted. Leaders like Flores Magon brothers, Ricardo, Enrique, and Jesus who raised voices of protest were imprisoned several times. (Miller, 277). Scholars (Miller, 277) have observed that “violent repression of labour protests created further hostility.” The major changes advocated by the revolutionaries were, “ an eight-hour work day, a minimum wage and prohibition of child labour” on the labour side and “ creation of an agricultural bank to make low-interest loans to small farmers and cancellation of all debts owed by workers to their employers” on the agricultural side. (Miller, 278-79) A crisis in food production and also a world wide economic crisis were looming large on the horizon (Camin and Meyer, 10). The migrant labourer became a common phenomenon and he was dissatisfied in many ways; “job insecurity and lack of family, community or traditional ties to which seek refuge” in bad times. (Camin and Meyer, 10). The domination of foreign companies and their unscrupulous exploitation “contributed to anti-foreignism in Mexico” (Miller, 272). The liberal party founded by Diaz’s opponents advocated revolution in 1906 (Miller, 277). A revolution against the regime of Porfirio Diaz began in 1910. “It was the bloodiest civil war in Mexico’s history” (Miller, 283). In 1917, it won, ended the dictatorship, and the new Constitution came into effect. References Miller, R.R., Mexico: A History, (Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press 1989)257-279. Tweedie, Ethel, Mexico As I Saw It, (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1901) 338-41. Hanke, L., and Rausch, J.M., People and Issues in Latin American History: From Independence to the Present,; Sources and Interpretations, (Markus Weiner Publishers, 1990). Knight, Alan, The Mexican Revolution, the Counter Revolution and the Reconstruction, (University of Nebraska Press 1990) Gonzales, Luis, The Dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz, Caudillos: Dictators in Spanish America, Hugh Hamill ed., (Oklahoma:University of OklahomaPress 1995)173-.177 Arnold, C., Frost, F.J.T., Porfirio Diaz Visits Yukatan, Ed. G.M. Joseph and T.J.Henderson, The Mexico Reader: History, Culture, Politics, (Duke University Press, 2002) 273. Brenner, A., Leighton, G.R., The Wind that Swept Mexico: The History of the Mexican Revolution 1910-1942, (University of Texas Press, 1984) 15-26. Camin, H.A., Meyer, L., In the Shadow of the Mexican Revolution: Contemporary Mexican History 1910-1989, (University of Texas Press 1993) 2- 10 Reed, J., Pancho Villa, Ed. G.M. Joseph and T.J.Henderson, The Mexico Reader: History, Culture, Politics, (Duke University Press, 2002) 273. Read More