Revolutions - 9.03- Mexico

Episode Date: August 27, 2018

In the years after independence, Mexico was a bit unstable.  Sponsor: Audible.com/revolutions. 

Hello and welcome to revolutions. Episode 9.3, Mexico. Last time, we raced through an account of the War of Mexican Independence, which started with Father Edelago's Cry of Dolores in September of 1810, and ended with the army of the three guarantees entering Mexico City in September of 1821. Today, we are going to blaze through the next 50 years of Mexican history. as the Mexicans tried to deliver on the dreams they had dreamed while fighting for independence. Unfortunately, those dreams would prove to be far more difficult to deliver on than any of them had hoped,

especially since no one could really agree what those dreams were. So rather than being the dawning of a new glorious age, the period after Mexican independence was marked by constant internal struggles for power, economic stagnation, and the predatory ambitions of foreign powers. There was a very brief honeymoon period after the victory of the Army of the Three Guarantees in September of 1821. As I said last time, the Plan Iguala was just vague enough in its guarantees that everyone, from indigenous and mestizo peasant guerrillas to straight-laced Hacienda-owning Creoyo aristocrats, could read into it what they wanted.

Following the more particular details of the Plan Ijolla, in February of 1822, a Congress convened to hammer out a constitution. To keep royalists in the full during the fight for independence, the plan called for a constitutional monarchy. And there was hope in conservative circles that the monarch might in fact be the beleaguered King Ferdinand the 7th of Spain, that they could like go rescue him from the liberal constraints that bound him in Madrid and set his absolutism free to Rome in the Americas. But that plan was flatly rejected by the king himself, who refused to go along with the scheme, or recognize Mexican independence. So the Congress went with a more local option. A demonstration in Mexico City in support of the victorious Augustine de Iterbide led the Congress

to elect him Emperor Augustine I in May of 1821. Accurately balancing how much of all that had been planned versus how much if it was just improvised will remain an ongoing challenge for historians. But in turning General Iterbide into Emperor Augustine, The Congress did not really go into detail about what the division of power would be in the newly established Empire of Mexico. Was Augustine to be an all-powerful emperor? Or was he to be merely a figurehead? It was not at all clear. Tensions between the new emperor and the Congress came to a head in October of 1821 when a fed-up Augustine dissolved the Congress.

This is the end of the honeymoon period. In response to the emperor's power grab, regional rebellions broke out on. multiple fronts. The first guy to declare himself in revolt was a man who would be at the center of Mexican politics for the next 30 years. That's Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana. Santa Ana was born in Berkruz in February of 1794. As the Creoyo son of an army officer, he followed in his father's footsteps and joined

the cadets at the age of 16. This was in June of 1810, just in time for the war of Mexican. Mexican independence to break out three months later. Santa Ana then spent the entirety of the War of Mexican Independence in the Viceroyal Army, rising up the ranks and fighting the rebel insurgents. But when news of the Cadiz Mutiny crossed the Atlantic in 1820, Santa Ana was among the officers who followed General Iterbide into the ranks of the pro-independence rebels. Now 26 years old, Santa Ana was put in charge of the forces in his native Veracruz, where he performed well in the short campaign that followed. His reward was a promotion to general and being put in charge of

post-independence Farah Cruz. But complaints about financial irregularities and capricious behavior from the young general reached the now Emperor Augustine, and in the middle of 1822, Santa Ana was relieved of his duties. So when Augustine dissolved the Congress a few months later, young Santa Ana used it as an excuse for some personal vengeance. He declared himself in rebellion and in support of restoring the Congress. Over that winter of 1822 to 1823, nearly every other hero of the War of Independence, including the legendary Vicente Guerrero,

declared themselves also in revolt. Realizing he had dramatically overestimated his support on March the 19th, 1823, just about 18 months after riding triumphantly into Mexico City, Augustine de Iterbide abdicated the imperial throne and departed for exile in Europe. and that was the end of the very short-lived first Mexican Empire. Now, this conflict, as I said, ended the patriotic honeymoon and showed for the first time a permanent political division in Mexico, a division that was defined by the battles between conservatives and liberals.

Now, broadly speaking, the conservatives are going to be looking to mostly replicate the vice regal system. They believe the country needed a strong unitary executive. They believed in supporting, and being supported by, the powerful authority of the Catholic Church. They believed in social hierarchy, even if they accepted the need to pay lip service to the abolition of the caste system. The core of the Mexican conservatives emerged from the old Creoyo elite. The types like Iterbide himself, who had only gone over to the independent side after the liberal mutiny of Cadiz. When they went into rebellion, it was to protect the traditional power structures. Meanwhile, the liberals came from the more socially radical rebels who were working out of the Idaogo tradition.

They had followed Jose Maria Morelos and then Vicente Guerrero. They thought the War of Independence was about breaking the tyrannical power of the central government. Like almost all of their revolutionary cousins down in South America, the guys Belivir had so constantly, and ultimately, fruitlessly, clashed with his whole life, They believe that the Declaration of Independence meant an end to centralized rule, that each of the states should be able to govern its own affairs. And frankly, it was such a huge and varied nation out there. They thought that it was the only feasible way to go. They also did not find social equality simply a useful talking point. They actually believed it.

Whatever place you had been born into ethnically, geographically, or economically must not be considered destiny. Look at the heroes of the revolution like Morelos and Guerrero. Where had they come from? Nothing. What had they achieved? Everything. So this very first civil conflict in post-independence Mexico showed these fault lines pretty clearly, with liberally inclined rebels driving more conservative-inclined imperialists out of power.

After the emperor had fled, the ousted Congress reconvened and drafted a new constitution, one that was thoroughly liberal and federalist in its country. outlook. It frankly looked a lot like the Articles of Confederation. The national government was divided into three co-equal branches to prevent the consolidation of power, but then it gave the national government no power to consolidate. Almost all power would now be held by each of the several states, which, as I said in episode 9.1, were now formally emerging from the old boundary lines of the intendancies. The power to tax and legislate would be almost entirely in the state's hands. The national government would have to rely on those states forwarding a long tax revenue

to run itself. The only stable revenue the national government could claim for itself was the customs duties that were paid in Veracruz, but even that money was always going to be at the mercy of whoever happened to be the ascendant political power in Veracruz, like, for example, local caudio, General Santa Ana. The Constitution of 1824 also pursued social equality by proclaiming that everyone was now an equal citizen and subject to the same laws. Well, not quite everyone. Members of the church and the army were still able to maintain certain judicial privileges, thanks to the fact that at this point both the church and the army were simply too powerful to mess with. But everyone else, you are now equal. But though this was written into the Constitution as an effort

to promote social and economic equality, there was a downside, as many indigenous tribes now lost a lot of the collective protections and rights that they had been holding for centuries. And we should pause here at the dawn of what is called the First Mexican Republic or the Federal Republic and establish what exactly it encompassed. When the cry of Dolores was issued, the Vice Royalty of New Spain stretched from Costa Rica in the south to claims as far north as Alaska. It included the island territories of Cuba, Santo Domingo, and Puerto Rico. technically it still included the Philippines way on the other side of the Pacific.

Now, none of those island territories joined the Mexican Republic. All remained under Spanish control. But at least at first, the Central American territories joined the Mexican Empire and only went their own way after the abdication of the emperor. When Iterbide left, the Central American territories dropped their allegiance to Mexico City and briefly formed a united country before going their own separate. ways and becoming their own separate countries. Of the Central American regions, only the state of Chiapas decided to remain with Mexico. Meanwhile, up in the north, the border to the interior of North

America had never been very well defined. And as I said in episode 9.1, after about 1700, the vice royalty of New Spain had been getting squeezed by other expanding colonial powers. First, the British and the French, but by 1810, that included the fledgling United States. States, ever hungry for land to its west. After the Louisiana purchase, the United States became very focused on acquiring more Spanish land, most immediately Florida, but then in the future, lands all the way to California. Negotiations with the Spanish over these territories is one of the big reasons the United States was so loathe to support any of the rebellions down in the Spanish Americas. They did not want to upset the Spanish. Finally, in 1810, the United States and Spain

signed the Adams-Oniz Treaty, where the Spanish seated Florida and dropped claims to anything north of a line arbitrarily drawn over some rivers and points of latitude and longitude, with its northern extremity being defined at the 42nd parallel, which divided California from the Oregon Territory. Those would be the borders of Mexico until, well, we'll get to that in a minute. We should also pause here for a second and take stock of the new Republic's financial situation, which was, to put it mildly, not great. You'll recall from our episodes on South America that after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, investors in Europe, particularly in Britain, were interested in investing in what appeared to be emerging markets and opportunities in the

newly independent nations of South America. This was the heyday for guys like Gregor McGregor. Mexico was no different, and after independence, the new Mexican government floated 16 million pesos worth of bonds back on the British market. Investors believe that old New Spain would be the safest of all investments because its silver would always keep the government solvent. Except independence proved to be a disaster for Mexico's silver output. The Spanish had been using a system that relied on mercury to separate out the pure silver, and the Spanish government had always kept a tight monopoly on the mercury supply. It was always imported from their mercury. mine in Spain. When the Mexicans threw the Spaniards out, the Spaniards withheld the mercury.

This, coupled with the slowdown that had already started in 1800, and then the dilapidation and destruction of mining sites and equipment during the long war of independence, meant that after 1820, silver output from Mexico, which had been one of the principal engines of silver production in the history of the world, was now effectively zero. With no other major exports to speak of, the Mexican economy entered a slow contracting depression that saw most of its citizens, most of the time, engaged in subsistence agriculture, and some, like local arts and crafts. Internally, all of the several states raised money by throwing up imports and export tariffs that further hindered the creation of any kind of internal market, and then internationally,

though there was always brisk trade down in the Caribbean southeast, it was never going to be enough to make the nation, nor its new government, particularly rich. certainly not rich enough for the government to pay back its European investors. By the end of the 1820s, the South American bubble had crashed. Mexico defaulted on interest payments for the bonds, and no one would lend the Mexican government any money, which further inflamed their economic troubles. The issue of those outstanding debt obligations would dog the government for decades, as we are about to see. Now, after the settlement of the Constitution of 1824, things were, were politically speaking, mostly calm. But starting with the disputed election of 1828,

instability became the defining feature of Mexican national politics. Between 1829 and 1855, the presidency would change hands 48 different times. Now, that's not 48 different presidents, mind you. They just kept bouncing back and forth as revolts and counter-revolts and abdications and overthrows being ousted from power and then returning to power defined the central government. The broad battle lines were drawn between conservatives and liberals, between centralists and federalists. But as with much of post-independent Spanish America, caudio networks really form the basis of political power. Regional leaders, usually high-ranking military officers, would form personal patron-client networks, with clients offering far more loyalty to their caudio patron than the state,

especially since it was usually the caudio leader who could guarantee money and security, medical supplies, food, and other necessities when the central government could not. These caudio networks then folded into the broader ideological struggles between liberals and conservatives, between centralists and federalists, creating cycles of unstable chaos as no one was quite willing to recognize the objective legitimacy of anybody else. Lingering racial factors also tended to inform a lot of this, as the pure white creoyo tended to be conservative centralists, and the more mixed-race leaders tended to be liberal federalists.

Vicente Guerrero, for example, the Afro-Indigenous leader of the rebellion, fought his way into the presidency in 1829, and then was driven into rebellion and executed two years later. with his enemies constantly raising the specter that he would usher in Haitian-style racial revolution if he was allowed to live. And these big struggles massed a million smaller struggles, with individual cities and pueblos taking the federalist theory still further, and resisting encroachment not just from Mexico city, but from state capitals.

All of this was informed by 300 years or more of struggles between indigenous communities and invading outsiders. So Mexican politics was defined by struggles nested inside of larger struggles, most of it personal, some of it ideological, and all of it a matter of life and death. So I do not have time to get into all the details, but the First Republic endured all of these political revolts and counter-revolts along with worsening economic conditions. Now the Spanish tried to take advantage, and they had convinced themselves that the people must be crying out now for a return of Spanish rule. But they badly misread the situation,

and after a small invasion from Cuba landed in Tempico in July of 1829, there turned out to be no swelling of popular support, and the Mexican army was able to drive them off handily. This was the last time the Spanish would attempt to recapture what had once been the vice-royalty of New Spain, and in 1835 that gave up and formally recognized independence. But the other big upshot of the Battle of Tampico in July of 1829, is that it made a national hero of the man who had defeated this small Spanish invasion force. That was General Santa Ana. Santa Ana was now popular enough that when the state of Halisco went into revolt against the centralizing reforms of some conservatives who had taken power in Mexico City, they invited Santa Ana to lead their rebellion. He agreed, the rebellion

worked, and in 1833, Santa Ana was elected president of Mexico for the first time. The first of 11 times. That's right, I said 11 different times that he was president of Mexico. Santa Ana was the Caudillo par excellence of this period. Operating from a regional base in his native Veracruz, he was usually able to count on access to money from the customs houses to fund his various rises after his various falls in Mexican politics. Now, in the big long-term picture, Santa Ana clearly inclined towards conservative, centralist authoritarianism.

But the general consensus is that he never had much of an ideological backbone. He seemed to believe whatever it took to persuade whoever he needed to put him in power. So, for example, in his first term as president, Santa Ana left most of the day-to-day decision-making to his vice president, who happened to be a radical liberal who took the opportunity to start implementing an array of, radical liberal reforms. When all of these reforms started making waves that Santa Ana was afraid might swamp him and his presidency, he abruptly switched sides. He switched so hard that with the help of conservative leaders, Santa Ana all but rewrote the constitution in 1835 by introducing what are called the seven laws. The seven laws, taken together, consolidated power in the presidency,

and all but eliminated popular participation in representative government. It swept decide the federalism that the conservatives blame for all the political instability. States were downgraded from states to mere departments. Their legislatures were abolished, and governors would now be appointed by the president. The seven laws were the end of the First Republic, and it ushered in a new form of government that has been dubbed by historians the Centralist Republic. The Centralist Republic would last through to the outbreak of the Mexican-American War, and was, surprise, surprise, dominated by regional revolts against the centralist government. The first two of these revolts after the introduction of the seven laws in 1835 happened in Zacatecus, and you guessed it, Texas.

Okay, so I have been getting bugged to do a series on the Texas Revolution since I started the Revolution's podcast. I will now dispense with it in a four-minute summary. It goes like this. After independence, Mexico was having trouble securing its recently defined northern borders. In particular, the Apache and Comanche both operated as if they were not living under Mexican rule, because, well, they really weren't. In an effort to create a buffer zone, the Mexican government invited Anglo-American settlers, mostly from the southern and western United States, to come live in the northeastern state of Kwahua I Tejas. But when those Anglo settlers came over, it turned out they had little interest in going out to the dangerous frontiers and acting as like a border

guard. Instead, they settled in the more fertile east. And it became very apparent, very quickly, that these settlers did not have much interest in taking orders from Mexico City. And some of them were very interested in getting the whole territory annexed into the United States. It got bad enough, fast enough, that the Mexican government then forbade further immigration from the United States. In fact, Mexico's formal abolition of slavery, in 1829 was in part aimed at making immigration unattractive to the slave-owning white Anglos coming across the border. The tense relationship between these white Anglos and the official government in Mexico City blew up when Santa Ana enacted the seven laws. And Tejas was one of the

several regions that declared itself in rebellion. A Santa Ana first prioritized the closer and more lucrative region of Zacatechus, and he marched in in May of 1835 and put that rebezzarrow. down pretty easily. But when Santa Ana moved north, he overconfidently misplayed his hand. After defeating a bunch of rebellious Anglos who had taken some random little mission complex in the middle of nowhere called the Alamo, Santa Ana doesn't seem to have taken seriously the possibility of defeat. He divided his forces and just sort of spread them out across the countryside. I mean, we are, after all, only talking about a few thousand rebels. But on April the 21st, 1836. Sam Houston led about 900 Texian rebels in a surprise attack on Santa Ana at San Jacinto.

Not only did the Texians win the battle, but the next day they tracked down and captured Santa Ana himself. Held prisoner, he was forced to sign a treaty recognizing Texas independence. Santa Ana would then be held prisoner for the next few weeks and then return home in disgrace. The rest of the government refusing to recognize the treaty he had signed, and Santa Ana retiring to his ascienda, presumably out of Mexican politics now forever. I mean, how do you come back from a thing like this? The Texians, meanwhile, formed themselves into the independent Republic of Texas, and among other things, re-legalized slavery, which had been outlawed since 1829. The Texas humiliation was only the beginning of a run of humiliations from Mexico

at the hands of other foreign powers. As the Centralist Republic was dealing with further regional instability, the French king, Louis Philippe, told his ambassador in Mexico City to communicate to the Mexican government that they owed 600,000 pesos to France. This total was drawn from a collective accounting of lost or destroyed property of French nationals living in Mexico, thanks to various wars and riots. This accounting included most prominently a French pastry shop in Mexico City, which had been destroyed in the midst of a political riot back in 1829. The Mexican government refused to pay, so Louis Philippe ordered the French Navy to blockade all Mexican ports facing the Atlantic and seize the custom house in Veracruz until reparations were made.

The resulting conflict, called the Pastry War, started in November of 1838 and lasted until the Mexican government agreed to pay the bill in March of 1839. The big upshot of the Pastry War, though, was that when the French landed in Veracruz, native son Santa Ana sprang back into action. He personally led a patriotic defense of the city that saw his leg so riddled with shrapnel that it had to be amputated. He lost his leg, but his reputation among his countrymen was now rehabilitated. After the pastry war, Mexico continued to be plagued by all kinds of rebellions in the north, as more states declared themselves either in rebellion or just totally independent from the centralist

Republic. This included the Republic of the Rio Grande and the Republic of the Yucatan. Presidents came and went. The resurgent Santa Ana himself returned to the presidency, but was then driven from power, arrested and sent into exile in 1844. Probably, again, never to return. So going into the mid-1840s, the authority and legitimacy of the Centralist Republic was hanging by a thread, and it was finally fatally destabilized in 1846 when it was under, able to cope with an aggressive foreign invasion in the north. So that must mean that it's time to talk about the Mexican-American War. Now, to put the Mexican-American War into broader historical context, we're now in the 1840s, which was the heyday of manifest destiny, that the United

States needed to fulfill its divine mission to stretch from sea to shining sea. The path was already clear through the Oregon Territory, but that wasn't good enough, especially because all that territory lay north of the latitude defined in the Missouri compromise of 1820 as being free territory, not slave territory. So there was a strong sentiment to acquire most of northern Mexico, everything stretching from Texas to California. I mean, what's Mexico even doing with it anyway? This process had begun informally with the secession of Texas, but then it came to an acute head in 1845 when the United States Congress voted to annex the Republic of Texas. Since the Mexico, since the Mexican government did not recognize the legality of Texas secession. This was a provocative

act, to put it mildly. The Polk administration then made efforts to secure recognition of the Texas annexation and by the other northern Mexican states, but these efforts were rebuffed. They were considered insulting to Mexico's sovereign dignity. Undeterred, the Polk administration then employed more creative methods. Seizing on the ongoing dispute about whether the southern border of Texas lay on the Nuasus River or further south on the Rio Grande, President Polk ordered a small army under General Zachary Taylor to go down, cross the Neuasius River, and wander around until they were attacked. Ulysses S. Grant, who was a young officer on this mission, speaks plainly on the record that the U.S. Army was there to provoke an attack.

When the Mexican army did in fact attack, Polk was able to go to Congress and say that American blood had been spilled on American soil by a foreign invader, and so war must be declared. And war was declared in May of 1846. Down in Mexico, the declaration of war led first to the collapse of the Centralist Republic. In August of 1846, an alliance of Federalist rebels overthrew the government and re-enshrined the Federalist Constitution of 1824. The American invasion also allowed the ever-wily general Santa Ana to play his way back into the game.

In exile in Cuba since 1844, Santa Ana convinced President Polk to let him pass through an American naval blockade to get into Mexico after promising to sell all the territory in question to the United States at a good price. Then when Santa Ana got through the blockade, he promised the Mexican government that he he had only come to fight for national honor and not retake the presidency. But upon arrival, he reneged on both promises. He took back over the army, he took back the presidency, and then he rode off to fight the invading Americans. The war did not go well for Mexico.

The Mexican army, though numerically larger, was full of demoralized conscripts who deserted more often than they fought. They were also equipped with older weapons, still mostly surplus from the Napoleonic Wars, rather than the more advanced modern weaponry of the Americans. Anzanta Ana's generalship left a lot to be desired, and though the war was not without hard fighting and setbacks for the American army, Zachary Taylor pushed his troops south into Monterey. To further press the American offensive, President Polk then sent a second army under General Winfield Scott

to land in Veracruz and march up to Mexico City, which they did from March to September 1847. Scott captured Mexico City and Mexican resistance. collapsed, as regional governors believed capitulation inevitable, and they refused to provide more men and money for Santa Ana's now lost cause. In October of 1847, Santa Ana made one last ditch attempt to cut the Americans off in Mexico City by attacking Puebla, but the attack failed. Mexico surrendered, and in February of 1848, they signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Idauggo. The treaty imposed American manifest destiny on the Mexicans, in addition to securing recognition

of the Texas annexation, the victorious United States also took what is today the states of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, parts of Colorado, and Wyoming, and of course the really big prize, California. For this, the Americans agreed to pay the Mexican government $15 million, most of which was immediately passed on to British bondholders. It was a humiliating defeat in all ways on all fronts that saw Mexico reduced from 1.7 million square miles to 800,000 square miles, and the borders to which it is basically contained to this day. After this defeat, the battered Mexico then fell back into the hands of the Conservative Alliance, who concluded, once again, that the only way the country could survive was to resume a central dictatorship. The disunity and infighting that had

plagued the Mexicans during the war had been an embarrassing national disaster. So in 1853, Santa Ana and a click of supporters staged another coup. This time they did not even bother with the pretence of Republican government. After the authoritarian coup, they arrested and expelled all liberal leaders who might challenge them. And then Santa Ana started styling himself his serene highness, ruling as a naked military dictator. But the conservatives were never very popular, both for ideological reasons and because they simply threatened too many other powerful regional interests any time they tried to concentrate power in Mexico City. So it did not take long for a bunch of rebellions to get going. And these rebellions, unbeknownst to Santa Ana, would finally bring his

30 years at the forefront of Mexican politics to an end, which brings us to the man who would pick up that mantle, at least for the next 20 years, and that is Benito Juarez. Benito Juarez was born in the mountains of Oaxaca in 1806. A Juarez is unique. not just because he was the poor son of a peasant family, but because he was fully indigenous. He was Zapotech. He in fact grew up speaking the Zapotec language and did not begin to learn Spanish until he was 12 years old and working as a young household servant. But Juarez was apparently precocious enough that he was spotted by a lay priest who pushed him towards getting an education in the hopes that he would then go off to seminary. Wares got his education, but instead went to study

law, not theology, and he graduated with a degree in 1834 from the Secular Institute of Arts and Sciences in Wauhaca City. For a variety of reasons, Wauhaka had become one of the main centers of liberalism and federalism and secularism in Mexico, and the Institute of Arts and Sciences was known as a hotbed for recruitment into the ideological fold. Wares became first a promising member of, and then the most successful leader of the Wauhaca liberals. He joined the city council before he even graduated law school. He was later elevated to a judge ship, and then in 1843 made a unique and rare pairing when he married Margarita Masa, a member of a prominent Creoyo family, and this kicked him into a higher rung of the social order, a social order which still existed despite the formal abolition of the caste system. Now, almost all mixed-race marriages and the whole history of New Spain were usually a Spanish man marrying an indigenous woman, and it was on.

almost unheard of for an indigenous man to marry a white woman. The marriage was long and happy and successful, and it helped further cement Wahaka as the center of progressive liberalism in Mexico. Juarez then continued to rise up the ranks. He served as a state prosecutor and then served in the National Congress before returning to Wahaka and being elected governor in 1847 in the midst of the Mexican-American War. Though he had no love for Santa Ana, Juarez supported the war for patriotic reasons, but when the wall started to close in, he was among those regional governors who refused to send any more men or money out of the state to support a hopeless effort, which marked him down on Santa Ana's enemies list, and when Santa Ana staged his latest authoritarian

coup in 1853, Juarez was ousted and driven into exile. This exile did not last long, however. Settling in New Orleans, Juarez and other prominent liberals had the chance to meet and communicate with each other face to face. They drafted a declaration calling for the overthrow of Santa Ana and the convening of a new constitutional assembly to draft a new liberal constitution. This liberal framework drawn up by the exiles then migrated back down to Mexico,

where it was taken up by the liberal-leaning governor of the state of Guerrero, Juan Alvarez, who was preparing to go into armed revolt against Santa Ana's regime. Alvarez took Juarez and the exiles framework, and on March the 1st, 1854, proclaimed the plan of Ayutla, named after the town where it was proclaimed. Supported by the exiles, Juan Alvarez waged a guerrilla war in the mountain south of Mexico City. Santa Ana could not ultimately crush this rebellion, and when he returned to Mexico City from a campaign in April of 1855, the capital turned its back on him. And so, he abdicated and went into exile. Now, though Santa Ana no doubt expected this to just be

one more step back in a career that had always seen him step forward again, when Santa Ana departed Mexico this time, it was for good. He fled to Cuba. All of his estates were confiscated, and he spent the next 20 years bouncing around between Cuba, Colombia, and the United States. He never stopped trying to raise money and men to return to reclaim what he considered to be his country, but Santa Ana's time had passed. A general amnesty issued in 1874 allowed him to return home, but by then he had few friends, no money, and zero political support of any kind. Santa Ana died in poverty and almost totally anonymous in 1876. But to get back to it, the liberals under Juan Alvarez then stormed into Mexico City in 1855,

kickstarting a phase of Mexican history called La Reforma. The main thrust of La Reforma was to try to follow the lead of the United States and exalt the individual as the basic building block of the state. society. The liberals had concluded that corporate ownership of property was one of the main things holding Mexican economic development back, particularly property held by the Catholic Church. The church held mass amounts of property that they put to little productive use, and the liberals wanted to break it up and parcel it out to individuals who would have an economic incentive to improve its productivity and profitability. They also pass laws to end once and for all any

remaining social privileges for members of the church and the army who still operated outside of regular civil law. In the midst of this Benito Juarez, now serving as Minister of Justice, drafted what's called the Juarez law, which stated clearly and without exception that everyone was equal to everyone else. There would be no social or ethnic distinctions in Mexico anymore. All of this was enshrined in the Constitution of 1857, which codified an array of individual and civil rights. It also banned the corporate ownership of land and forced Mexican real estate into being based on individual claims of private property. The Constitution of 1857 also declared freedom of religion, and for the first time, competitors to the Catholic Church were allowed to operate in the

open. But though all of this was liberal and modern and progressive, it had severely negative impacts for the indigenous population, who still made up a good 50% of the population of Mexico. The attacks on corporate property were an attack on village communal property, and it forced the indigenous villages to break up what they own together and dole it out in individual plots, which left them all much weaker in the face of large hossendados, who could now pick plots off one by one instead of running into a single block of communal land. This, coupled with liberal attacks on the Catholic Church, made many of the local indigenous villagers willingly sign up with a conservative rebellion to put things back the way they were.

So, yes, of course, there was going to be a conservative rebellion against the Constitution of 1857, led by many of the same conservatives who had been ousted from power just a few years earlier. In 1858, these guys stormed into Mexico City and retook the Capitol. But the liberals refused to just scatter, and instead set up a liberal counter-government down in Veracruz. And for the next two years, Mexico was engulfed in a particularly hot civil war called the Reform War. war. It was in the midst of this war that Benito Juarez first became provisional president of Mexico, at least the territory that they were claiming from Veracruz. He led the liberals through two years of successful resistance until support for the conservatives collapsed, and in January of 1861,

the liberals returned to the capital. But this war had done further damage to Mexico's economic infrastructure, and as the liberals settled back into power, Juarez recognized the government was basically bankrupt. So him and his advisor started ditching non-emergency items from the budget, and among those was debt servicing on foreign loans, the most recent of which had been contracted by the conservative government to fight the liberals. Juarez had no interest in paying back those loans. So President Juarez announced that he was suspending all of these payments. Now, he never did repudiate the debts. He just said, we're not going to pay this for a couple years. But it turned out to be a far more momentous decision than anyone anticipated, because when word of the repudiation

reached Paris, it gave Emperor Napoleon III an idea. So I talked about this idea briefly in episode 8.1 on the Second French Empire, but I intentionally skipped over it knowing that I was going to be talking about it now. Remember, Napoleon III is still riding a bit high from his international successes in the Crimea and in Italy, and he's looking for an even more. more glorious expansion of French power. When Benito-Wara suspended interest payments on the foreign debt, the governments of Britain, Spain, and France got together and decided that tough action was needed. As France had done once before during the Pastry War, the three governments agreed to a joint naval operation that would blockade Mexican ports and seize the all-important Veracruz Customs House.

This, they hoped, would be enough to force Juarez to agree to pay off Mexico's creditors. Upon arrival in December of 1861, everything was going fine, until the French Navy and its troops started to go way beyond what felt like the limited mission of forcing debt repayment. It dawned on the governments of Britain and Spain that for Napoleon, this had all been a pretext for a larger invasion and like turning Mexico into a client state. So Britain and Spain broke off their support and recalled their troops in April of 1862, just as the French were launching a full blown invasion of Mexico. Napoleon III did indeed harbor vast ambitions in the Americas, now made possible both by the pretext of Mexico's financial default and the fact that the

United States had just fallen into its own civil war and could do nothing about a French invasion south of its border. But the invasion was not fully Napoleon's invention. The conservatives who had been defeated in the reform war had been actively lobbying for foreign assistance to oust the liberals and restore good traditional authoritarian order. So the French armies were met by plenty of conservative leaders eager to help. The French tried to capture Mexico City in 1862, but they were temporarily held to the coast when they were defeated in the famous Battle of Puebla on May the 5th, 1862, this being the Cinco de Mayo that drunk American college kids so love to celebrate for some reason. But the Battle of Buble only held the French at bay temporarily, and in June of 1863,

they tried again and captured Mexico City. This sent President Juarez and his government into a fighting exile. France and the Conservatives then convinced the Austrian Archduke Maximilian that he should come over and be the new emperor of a second Mexican empire. It took a bit of convincing, but Maximilian finally agreed in October of 1863 and then finally landed in Veracruz in the spring of 1864. But it would appear that no one had much thought out how this was going to, to work in practice. Much to the conservative's chagrin, Maximilian turned out to be a fairly

enlightened and liberal and liberal and liberal and enlightened reforms, which is not what the Mexican conservatives had signed up for. Maximilian then reached out to Juarez and the rebel liberals, but as a matter of national honor, they refused to have anything to do with this foreign usurper. So Maximilian was almost immediately isolated and unpopular with everyone. With the Mexican expedition turning into a costly and slow-moving disaster, Emperor Napoleon III decided to cut bait on the whole project, especially because the United States was now wrapping up its civil war and able to turn its attention south. The Americans, of course, supported Juarez, and when the liberals and exile started stumbling across U.S. army surplus that the U.S. army kept carelessly leaving around and then

telling Juarez where he could find it, the French knew that it was all over. So Napoleon recalled the French troops and told Maximilian to get out of the war. the country. But Maximilian refused to leave. He refused to leave behind what few supporters he had, knowing that they would probably all be executed as soon as they were captured. Wares's forces then retook Mexico City and captured Emperor Maximilian. Despite howls of protest and pleas from governments across Europe, Juarez ordered Maximilian executed on June the 19th, 1867. You can't just come into somebody else's country and declare yourself emperor. The expulsion of the French and the death of Maximilian ushered in an era that is called

the Restored Republic, where liberals in Mexico were totally ascendant. The conservatives had fatally discredited themselves by inviting the French in, and for the foreseeable future, conservative and traitor were all but synonymous in many political circles. Juarez was re-elected president in 1867, and with fewer direct challenges to his authority, he started consolidating more power and implementing more liberal reforms, reforms that had been mere promises since the Constitution of 1857 had been inaugurated. As Mexico approached the 1871 presidential election, though, there was a feeling among many liberals that after 10 years in power, it was time for Juarez to step aside. But instead, Juarez ran for re-election, stoking fears that he was never going

to give up power. And that kind of turned out to be true. Warez won't. One of the first, re-election, but then he died in office in 1872. His re-election bid, though, left a legacy of instability in his wake, as the cry of no re-election had now become a rallying cry for rebellion across the country. And we are going to leave it right there for this week, because one of the principal promoters of the no-relection cause was a 41-year-old hero of the war against France, Porfario Diaz, And there is no more amusing irony in Mexico City than the fact that Porfirio Diaz, of all people, fought a rebellion under the banner of no re-election.