On November 21, 1877, General Porfirio Diaz, military hero of Mexico’s liberals, entered Mexico City after opposing one of the nation’s great liberal presidents, Benito Juarez (primarily out of pique), and then (out of political opportunism) Juarez’s much disliked, much less liberal successor, Sebastian Lerdo de Tejado. Diaz immediately called for a new election, flourishing his political (and soon to become ironic) banner: “Effective Suffrage. No Re-election.” He won by a landslide, one that had been cunningly launched a year earlier by a group of aggressive New York/Texas-based U.S. businessmen. As early as December 1875 Diaz had visited New York and New Orleans. In January 1876, he was in Brownsville, Texas, for intensive consultations with the town’s creator, the wealthy and inexhaustibly shrewd New York-born businessman, Charles “Don Carlos” Stillman, and his son James.
The multi-layered backing of Stillman and his wealthy and well connected friends financed the beginning of what became the brutal Porfirian dictatorship that was to last 35 years, and ultimately ignited the 1910 Mexican Revolution. Diaz, elected by a landslide in 1877, stepped down as he had promised (“No re-election”) four years later. He placed in office General Manuel Gonzalez, a Diaz subordinate in the overthrow of Lerdo de Tejada. But Gonzalez, in office, proved a careless administrator, and so childishly vain he sold off rich portions of Mexico to whatever foreigners that most flattered him. And the “gringos,” it was widely acknowledged, were the most lavish and manipulative practitioners of that art.
Diaz next became the governor of Oaxaca, straightening out its morass of debt and administrative bumbling. But he found provincial life boring. He missed the intrigue and scent of power of the capital. When Gonzalez mentioned an open seat on the court of justice, Diaz leaped at it.
Mexicans were ready when Diaz announced his candidacy for president in 1884; the concept of “No Re-election” had faded. He won easily, of course. And he began to solicit investment – and “aid” – from his American benefactors, granting lavish concessions and project contracts such as a railway system, modern mining strategies, etc. He got the help, the Americans got economic advantages.Porfirio Diaz had learned a great deal in his associations with the East Coast Americans who had come to Texas to scoop up what seemed an endless river of profit along the banks of the Rio Bravo, which they called the Rio Grande.
Even before the Mexican-American War, the syndicate of Stillman, and ranchers Richard King (later of King Ranch fame), Mifflin Kenedy and associates, was busy with numerous successful intricate schemes. During the U.S. Civil War, they had made huge amounts of money once New Orleans was captured by the Union. They transported arms and goods from Port Isabel on the Gulf of Mexico coast to Brownsville where they were offloaded, then freighted overland to the Confederacy.
In January 1876 Diaz was not only in Brownsville to “represent his business interests,” but to direct a revolution to overthrow Lerdo de Tejado. That’s exactly what the Mexican government had been complaining about to the U.S. government for some time.
Diaz promised Stillman, King, Kenedy & Co. that he would suppress the long-running raids on Americans and the interests in the border region. Even more important to both parties, he allied himself with expansive foreign forces “far more powerful than himself or Mexico.” But Diaz and his Mexican allies needed such outside capital to finance the modernizing change they envisioned. Diaz wanted to make Mexico as energetically innovative and “modern” as the United States.
The fact was that the men he was attaching himself to had made themselves land and ranch barons by buying property from Mexican owners who, after the Mexican-American War, had fled or were fleeing Texas, as they became, as one historian has said, “racially despised.” In the wake of the U.S. Civil War, many more Americans began arriving in the area and the land market became lush.
The investors, land-grabbers and “industrialists,” some of whom had New England social pedigrees dating from the 17th century, while financially versatile, were single minded. They wanted to accumulate great sums of money, land, goods and influence. Charles Stillman landed in Matamoros in 1828 with a consignment of goods from his father’s New York import-export firm for marketing in northern Mexico. Stillman wrote home, ecstatically, “There’s nothing down there across the Rio Grande but Matamoros. There’s nothing in Matamoros but the gateway to all of Mexico for cotton, hides and gold.”
In order to subvert the new (1840) law which prohibited foreigners from buying property on or near national borders and coast lines, Stillman selected Jose Morell, a merchant in Monterrey as a junior partner. Morell’s prinicpal job at first was as a busy prestanombre (name lender), allowing Stillman to buy land virtually anywhere in Morell’s name. Stillman was soon joined by King and Kenedy in a series of richly rewarding deals. By the 1850s, the three were consolidating vast estates. In the wake of Mexico’s 1847 defeat, Stillman was even able to purchase the ejido of Matamoros, and though the municipal property was inalienable under both Spanish and Mexican law, Stillman quickly subdivided the land and began selling it as city lots. Audacious illegality was considered merely another business tool. King’s first large “purchase” was 15,000 acres of grazing land which he got for just 300 dollars. And in the 1850s the three men bankrolled a foolhardy attempt by a Mexican general, Jose Maria Carabal, to invade Mexico so they could set up their own “Republic of the Sierra Madre.” When that proved unfeasible, they backed the De Garza uprising.
At first, little about these schemes was publicly known. But Diaz knew, and simply ignored these crimes against his fellow Mexicans. He was looking, first, for financing for his revolution against Lerdo de Tejada – which he got – then later, when “elected” a second time as president, to finance his administration’s ambitious goals.
When Diaz was first elected president, he had created a rural police force – called los rurales, a term that struck fear into Mexico’s huge rural population. Their purpose, Diaz said, was make the nation’s roads and byways safe. Recruits were acquired by capturing bandits, giving them some “do-or-die” instructions, tidy gray uniforms, felt hats, pistols and a horse, and promised regular pay if they brought in more bandits, either as volunteers for the rurales corps, or as prisoners. Rural crime soon dropped. For the first time “in memory” the roads were safe to travel. But for rural people, the rurales were just bandits in fancy uniforms who committed heinous crimes with impunity.
When a drought created a mild depression, Diaz chose Jose Limantour as finance minister. Limantour was a fan of Auguste Comte, a 19th century writer whose philosophy seemed to make a religion out of science. All matters – economic, social, racial – were judged on a kind of Euclidean scale. Mexican enthusiasts argued that the single guiding principle was profit. At that moment, one Mexican historian said, “Diaz lost what roots he had among common people as his government identified with the rich – the rich got richer and the poor got poorer.”
By May 8, 1910, Franciso I. Madero, lead by a muleskinner (Pablo Orozco) and a bandit, Doroteo Arango (aka Pancho Villa), were laying siege to the border town of Ciudad Juarez, as Americans and non-combatant Mexicans on the other side of the Rio Bravo cheered. The end of the Porfiriato was undeniable. His American supporters were seeing their domination of Mexico destroyed by what they saw as bunch of untutored campesinos.