American roots of Porfirio Diaz’s dictatorship began with the looting of the border region; it ended with a rebel victory at Ciudad Juarez
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.
Last week a brief story appeared in the United States and Mexican media reporting the September 19 death of Ruben Zuno Arce, brother-in-law of former Mexican President Luis Echeverria Alvarez and son of a former JaIisco Institutional Revolutionary Party governor, Jose Guadalupe Zuno. Zuno Arce was 82 years old and died of lung cancer and cardiovascular disease at the U.S. federal prison in Coleman, Florida.
Both modern Mexico and current “popular” foreign sources have a hard time figuring out who the instigator of Mexico’s great War of Independence, Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, was. This is not a new problem, but one worsened by a lack of present-day historically well-tuned analysis. The “dusty” pueblo of Dolores (in the intendency of Guanajuato), where the 50-year-old priest was assigned in 1803, has been said by one Hidalgo aficionado to be a “coveted parish.” It brought in a handsome sum – eight-to-nine thousand pesos a year, he contended. Yet the majority of its parishioners were described by contemporary Mexican sources as “illiterate, poor indios,” a description that included the mestizo population also. Hidalgo’s constant efforts to create, and train his parishioners to manage numerous small enterprises were aimed, by all evidence, at improving thin family economies. These included a pottery business, the forbidden production of grapes to produce forbidden wine, planting and nourishing forbidden olive trees to produce forbidden olive oil, beekeeping, a tannery and a silk-making industry, among others.