Mexican Revolution: The Porfiriato
March 17, 2023
Previously: Overview
Okay so the museum can’t just jump right in to the old regime. Of course there is a bunch of prehistory, brutal colonization, and finally independence from the Spanish Empire. This is supposed to be microblogging, we’re gonna skip all that.
The main thing to understand is from independence at the beginning of the 1800s to 1876 there were back and forth struggles between liberals and conservatives (including the brief reintroduction of a Hapsburg monarch mentioned before) before the liberals won. Here’s a bunch of them:
One of these liberals was a guy named Porfirio Dias. He was a war hero in the struggle against the French who were propping up Maximilian.
Then and now, Mexico had/has a strong presidential system. These are unstable garbage, arguably among the USA’s worst constitutional exports. Presidents have a lot of power, can easily become dictators, and those precious checks and balances are basically legitimacy minefields. You’ll never guess what happens when President Benito Juerez decided to run for re-election.
That’s right baby! We get ourselves a coup d'état!
Dias takes power in 1876 on a platform of “no reelection”. Yet he stays in power until 1911, curious!
Porfirio Dias runs the kind of “democratic” dictatorship Hungary’s Victor Orebon and boot licking American conservatives thinks he invented because he’s just such a clever boy. “Oh I wasn’t going to run for reelection again but gosh darn it the people just demand it.”
To the US, he’s just the kind of shithead we like, absolutely happy to sell out his country’s natural resources and human labor in exchange for foreign investment in rail, telegraphs, his bank account etc.
Anyway, next post let’s turn our attention to the election of 1910. Dias is like 80, there’s no good succession plan, and there’s this guy named Francisco Madero who is actually making a real, non-fake run for the presidency? We’re about to enter the Cool Zone.
