Revolutions - 9.04- The Porfiriato

Episode Date: September 3, 2018

Porfirio Diaz ruled Mexico for so long they named a whole section of Mexican history after him.  Sponsor: harrys.com/revolutions

And welcome to revolutions. Episode 9.4, the Porfirio. Porfirio Diaz was born in Wauaca on September the 15th, 1830. He was of mestizo descent, because though his father was a white Spaniard, his maternal grandmother was an indigenous woman. Diaz made no secret of his mestizo heritage and occasionally used it to his political advantage, though later in life there were plenty of rumors that he used various powders to whiten his skin. Because remember, even though the caste system is officially abolished, the unofficial caste

system remained. Dias went off to school at the age of 15 and 1846 with the intention of joining the priesthood. But the arrival of the Mexican-American War led him to join a local militia unit composed of fellow students, and from that point on, he aimed himself towards war and politics, not religion. After the Mexican-American War, Diaz entered law school at the secular Institute of arts and sciences, and he joined the ranks of the Wahaka liberals, currently led by Benito Juarez. When Santa Ana staged his latest dictatorial coup in 1853, a coup that, as we saw last week, sent Benito Juarez into exile, the 23-year-old Porfiro Diaz took to the mountains. When the revolutionary plan of Ayutla was declared, Diaz joined the army of Juan Alvarez and

fought in the guerrilla campaigns that ultimately ousted Santa Ana from power a few years later. After that liberal victory, Diaz temporarily enjoyed political posts in Wahaka before heading back out into the field to help fight in the Reform War, which lasted from 1858 to 1860. And then, of course, right on the heels of that liberal victory comes the French invasion. And it was in the war against the French that Diaz catapulted into the national spotlight. He was the hero of the famous Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1863. He personally led the cavalry charge that broke the French and sent them back down to the coast. But of course, that battle did not end the war, and so Diaz spent the next four years fighting the French and their conservative allies, and in so doing became something of a folk hero. He won tons of battles and was twice captured in the field, only to twice stage a daring escape.

By the end of the war, he was a general leading the liberal army of the east, and when the liberals finally captured Mexico City, Porfirio Diaz was a national hero. hero. Always politically ambitious, Diaz tested the waters of his fame by entering into the subsequent presidential election of 1867. But Benito Juarez was easily elected after having spent the past five years as head of the patriotic government in exile. So Diaz retired to Oaxaca to tend to the great big ascienda he had been given as a reward for his service. But the election of 1871 stirred Dias back to politics. President Juarez announced that he would be seeking re-election, which did not sit well with many of his liberal comrades and allies.

After all, Juarez had basically been president since the beginning of the Reform War way back in 1858, and liberal ideology was opposed to men just holding executive power indefinitely, especially now that there was no wartime emergency to keep him in power. But Juarez showed no interest in giving up his power. So, Porfirio Diaz recristened himself the champion of the cause of no re-election, and he stood for the presidency in 1871, but Juarez defeated him again. This time, though, there was a flurry of charges of electoral fraud. Diaz challenged the results. But when Juarez's victory was confirmed by the National Congress in October of 1871, Diaz and his allies declared themselves in rebellion.

They declared the plan of La Noria, the rallying cry, was no re-election. But the revolt did not really ever get off the ground. Dias's forces did not fare well in skirmishes with the army in the spring of 1872, but the whole thing became moot on July 9, 1872, when Benito Juarez died in office. With Juarez dead, the president of the Supreme Court, guy named Spastion Lairdo de Tadha, succeeded to the presidency and offered amnesty to all the rebels. Juarez was dead. The threat of perpetual tyranny was over. So Diaz took Lardo up on the amnesty offer and went home again to Wauaca. This retirement lasted until the election of 1876 when President Laredo announced that he

would now be seeking re-election. So this reactivated the slogan of no re-election and reactivated its most famous standard bearer, the now 46-year-old Porfirio Diaz. Having learned from the failure of his Norio Rebellion, Diaz this time made sure his rebellion was better armed and better financed. So in late 1875, Diaz first went to New Orleans, then New York, then Brownsville, Texas, to line up foreign support for his revolution. Specifically, Diaz presented his case to a click of American bankers and landowners who had a great deal of interest in expanding their businesses into Mexico. Dias's pitch was that President Lardo's economic worldview was far more protectionist and nationalist, especially with regard to the expansionist

threat posed by the United States. Lardo said, for example, that it was wise to keep a desert between the strong and the weak. And he meant that literally. He had recently canceled a bunch of railroad contracts with American businessmen that would have connected Mexico City to Texas through the vast, empty desert lands of northern Mexico. So Diaz not only promised to reinstate those railroad contracts, he also made it clear that he believed American investment in Mexico should not just be allowed, but encouraged. With the American financiers sensing a golden opportunity to tap into Mexico, they provided Diaz hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, as well as rifles, bullets, mules, and other

supplies. In January of 1876, the rebellious, the plan of Tuxtapek was proclaimed. It denounced President Laredo and affirmed the rebel's commitment to the principle of no re-election. Now, despite this rebellion, the election of 1876 proceeded and Laredo won, but he was already isolated and unable to obtain any foreign assistance. All of that assistance was now going to Dias. On November the 16th, 1876, Dias' Rebels' forces won a small but decisive battle, when Diaz's trusty comrade, Manuel Gonzalez, arrived with reinforcements in the nick of time. Laredo was forced to go into exile, and Diaz marched into Mexico City.

He briefly assumed the presidency before handing it off to a provisional successor in preparation for new elections that would be held in 1877. When those elections were held, Dias won in a landslide. Now, the ascension of Porfirio Dias to the presidency, achieved by way of an armed rebellion was merely another in a long line of Caudillo's ascending to the presidency after an armed rebellion. But unbeknownst to anyone at the time, this was going to be the last time that that happened for 35 years. Now, there was no real reason to think in 1877 that this guy, Dias, is actually going to rule Mexico for an entire generation. Nothing in Mexican history or Dias's biography so much is hinted at that possibility.

but it happened, and his long dictatorship became a special subset of Mexican history, known as the Porphyriato. So how did he do it? Well, ironically enough, one of the first things he did was insert an amendment into the Constitution of 1877 that forbid re-election to the presidency. And this seemed to confirm that he had in fact been fighting for that liberal abstract principle rather than his own personal aggrandizement. and this bought Dias some time and some goodwill, as it convinced potentially rebellious rivals that in a couple years Dias would be gone and they would have their chance to rule. Potential rivals, thus lulled into a false sense of security, Dias then revealed himself to be an incredibly adept politician. Though he had emerged onto the scene as a liberal partisan, President Dias did not seem to have any real partisan edge at all.

Rare among political leaders, he was absolutely eager. to bury as many hatchets as he could find. If you had once been his rival or his enemy and were now willing to listen to reason, Diaz could be extremely accommodating. As most Caudillo challenges to a central government come from a regional base of power, Diaz went out of his way to confirm and back up those existing regional power structures. So rather than try to supplant your family with somebody more overtly loyal, Diaz would let you be governor and keep control of patronage inside your state. He much preferred compromise to confrontation. And this non-ideological cultivation of former rivals and potential enemies not only blurred the lines between liberal and

conservative, but it also ended the long conflict between federalists and centralists that had helped define Mexican politics for the last 50 years. The victory was for the centralists. From this point on, Mexico would always have a strong central government run by a strong central government run by a strong executive branch. But this triumph of centralism was secured because Dias intentionally did not antagonize local leaders. As I just said, he basically arranged a deal that said, I won't challenge you if you don't challenge me. And he did that with many powerful families in many of the several states.

So what developed initially here was a hybrid of centralism and federalism, a kind of feudal power structure where the local powerful families pledged personal loyalty to Dias, fealty to the king, as long as the king did not presume too much. And Dias never did presume too much. Candidate lists and political appointments for the national legislature or local office or state office were always drawn up in collaboration with state leaders. And of course it went without saying that Dias never interfered with a family's economic activity.

Your profits were your business. But there was another side to this equation. One of the enduring quips during the Perfriotto was that Don Perfiro offered you Pan-o-Palo, which we can roughly translate as bread or stick. Like, he was willing to give you what you wanted. A plumb job, control of the state house, fat salary. He'd look the other way when you skimmed money. He would give you lots of latitude and your conduct of your own affairs.

He would make sure that your local rivals stayed in their personal. place. You could have all that. That was the bread. But if you refuse the bread, you got the stick. And as the years went on and the regime became ever more permanent and entrenched, sedition was dealt with swiftly and harshly. An attempt at rebellion did pop up over the years. Sometimes an ambitious general, more often rebellions of indigenous tribes, particularly up in Sonora. The stick was deployed up to and including arbitrary arrest and summary execution. Now, Diaz was never quite as bloody-minded as other Spanish-American dictators, but when Diaz indicated that he wanted some particular bunch of troublemakers dealt with, quote, unquote,

severely, everybody knew what that meant. So given the choice between the bread or the stick, between getting fat and rich or poor and dead, most chose fat and rich. Fat and rich is what the Porphyriotto was all about. So the mix of Pan O'Palo created, mostly, the internal piece Dias wanted. But this piece was about much more than just securing his own power. It also allowed him to begin an aggressive courtship of American capital. As soon as he took over the presidency in 1877, he went about trying to fulfill the promises he had made in Brownsville,

so that his American Vackers would turn around and report to Washington, D.C., that this new D.A.S. regime, illegitimate in its birth, ought to be recognized in its infancy. So he prioritized both securing peace on the border of the southern Rio Grande River and paying off a $300,000 debt to the Americans that had been lingering since the post-Mexican American war settlements. He also promised railroad concessions to American capitalists. After a tense period where the New Hayes administration was making noise about possible intervention south of the border, American business interests prevailed, and in 1878, the Americans

formally recognized Dias's government. Now, the easiest way to sum up Dias' policy here in the early going is that he is about to sell Mexico out to the Americans. And it's true that when Dias came to power, foreigners, especially Americans, came flooding into Mexico. But that doesn't really capture the complexity of the situation, nor the delicate balancing act that Dias was trying to pull off. He really did believe that Mexican prosperity tomorrow could only be achieved through American investment today. He and his inner circle believed that they were about to oversee a necessary transition period, that foreign capital and technology and expertise were going to be required to modernize Mexico. And then, when the time was ripe, Mexico would move out of this

transitional phase and start to promote local priorities and national sovereignty. Diaz was also kind of a cynical realist, and he believed that the Americans would be coming no matter what, so may as well welcome them with open arms, rather than try to defy them and invite also the American army. So Diaz is not just some American dupe here. He's also the guy who's famous for saying poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States. So with its eyes mostly wide open, the Porfarian government actively promoted Mexico as a land of golden opportunity. natural resources everywhere and a government that would do anything to protect businesses that chose to invest their money. Indeed, far from some laissez-faire free-for-all, one of the ways Dias was able to promote foreign investment

was often by promising to make the investors into whatever sector of the economy we're talking about, de facto monopolists. They would be protected from competition, both international and domestic, with various taxes and tariffs that would be imposed on their rivals. Diaz was also happy to use the army or law enforcement to prioritize the protection of some company. He would appoint judges to man the courts who were almost uniformly pro-business. Diaz made protecting foreign investors and their profits a top priority. They got low taxes. They got all kinds of concessions. They got ready access to cheap labor, police protection for work sites and their headquarters.

And there was a line, not entirely undeserved, that Porfirio Diaz was the month. mother of foreigners, but only the stepmother of Mexicans. This aggressive cultivation of foreign investment during the Perfuriato led to an economic boom. And the most visible symbol of that boom, so much of a visible symbol that it's all but synonymous with the Porfariato, was railroads. Crummy lines of transportation and communication had been the bane of both the vice-royalty of New Spain and independent Mexico. Inattention to infrastructure and the perils of Mexican geography meant that when Diaz first took office, most people still travel long distances on foot or by donkey. But with the railroads taking off in Europe and the United States,

Diaz and his inner circle believed that Mexico could vault into the modern world and conquer its own internal infrastructure failings by building railroads to and from everywhere. So President Diaz quickly approved concessions to American companies to start building north-south railroads that would link the United States to central Mexico, and then also hopefully require them to build east-west lines that would link key cities and ports to each other. Soon, railroads were criss-crossing the country. And when he came into office, there was one single line that had recently been completed linking Veracruz to Mexico City. That was it. By 1884, there was 5,700 kilometers of track. By 1898, that number was 12,000.

on the eve of the revolution in 1910, nearly 20,000 kilometers of railroad had been laid. But controversially, these lines were laid by foreign companies who were in this for their own personal profit, not the profit or advancement of Mexico. And as we'll discuss at the end of today's episode, even Dias was aware of how dangerous that was. The other huge explosion in foreign investment was in the mines. As we discussed last week, silver production had cratered after independence, but it was now going to make a comeback. This was thanks in part to the development of a new extraction process that used cyanide rather than mercury, but it was also because foreign companies were able to make large capital investments that the Mexicans themselves had never

been able to make. So silver was once again, soon one of Mexico's principal exports. But with the second Industrial Revolution taking off in Europe and in the United States, it now wasn't just silver that was being mined. There was a variety of industrial metals that were now in demand. Copper topped that list, but also base metals like lead and zinc. The possibility of making a fortune extracting Mexican minerals attracted lots of American and also British investment, and this was helped along by laws passed in the 1880s that for the first time allowed for direct foreign ownership of land, eliminating the trouble of having to start up a front company with Mexican partners. This was followed up a few years later by what became an incredibly controversial

and widely despised law. Previously, the ownership of land had never technically extended to subsurface resources, which were always owned by the nation. But in 1892, the Congress passed a law allowing for direct ownership of those subsurface resources, meaning that foreign owners could now technically own outright Mexico's mineral well. So yeah, the mines were booming and cranking out more metal than ever, but to whose benefit? Dias and his advisors hope that in time the benefits of this flood of foreign investment and modernization would become obvious to everyone. But in both the short and medium term, it caused enormous disruption. Wherever new railroads were built or mines established or land surveyed and parceled out,

somebody who was already there was going to get kicked out. And now it wasn't just absentee landlords in Mexico City who were drawing the ire of local communities. It was Anglo financiers in Texas and New York City. They were bringing in Anglo operators, experts and workers, to install foreign technology and machinery, to run foreign operations whose profits would primarily accrue in foreign hands. And I'm also just going to kind of shoehorn this in here because it needs to be said. But along with the railroads and criss-crossing between them, These companies also set up 20,000 kilometers of telegraph lines, which made every part of Mexico

suddenly and instantly in communication with every other part of Mexico, to say nothing of every other part of the world. So with the arrival of the telegraphs and the railroads, suddenly communities that have been geographically isolated hell since before the Aztecs were now suddenly at the doorstep of the whole world. It integrated rural Mexico to central Mexico and to the rest of the world, but in very disruptive ways. So yes, Mexico underwent rapid industrial modernization over the span of about 30 years, but most of the immediate benefits went to foreigners, while Mexicans seemed to bear all the costs. And in many ways, the coming revolution was a reaction to this process. In terms of politics, though, Diaz continued to play his hand

flawlessly through most of the Porfariato. He conspicuously stuck to his no re-election principles as his first term neared its end. Having staked his entire public persona to being the enemy of re-election, Diaz declined to seek a second term in 1880, but he had no intention of just departing from politics. The mostly staged-managed election of 1880 elevated Dias's longtime comrade in arms Manuel Gonzalez to office. Gonzales was devoted to his Caldillo, Perfiro Diaz, and it's hard to not paint him as a mere cipher, just a puppet, especially since Diaz was named Minister of Development in Gonzales's first cabinet, and then given a larger budget than even the War Department got.

But Gonzalez was not merely a puppet. He didn't really have to be. The two men believed in basically the same thing, that Mexico's interests lay in opening up the country to foreign development. Gonzalez was perfectly capable of doing the job as president without Dias micromanaging him, and indeed his term in office from 1880 to 1884 actually saw most of the quintessential aspects of the Porfriotto brought into being, including a lot of the pro-business legislation and much of the first real construction on the railroads.

Some of this turned out to be controversial and unpopular, though, especially because Gonzalez and his cronies tended to make a lot of money on these deals. and I'm sure at the time Diaz was happy to let his friend take credit for the work. And speaking of credit, and yes, you can high-five me anytime you want for this segue. It was during Gonzales's term in office that the Mexican government finally established a national bank. No Mexican government had ever been able to draw low-interest loans or manage its money supply effectively. But in 1884, after nearly a decade of proving that Mexico was now stable and safe, for investment, the government oversaw the merger of two financial institutions into a single

Banco de Nacional Mexico, better known as Bonamex. Since Mexico did not have nearly enough wealth to capitalize a national bank, they had to attract foreign investors. And like railroad and mining investors, these financial investors were given every concession, tax break, and protection the government could think of to get their money into Mexico. Bonamex was practically the monopoly bank in Mexico after its creation. It controlled the national money supply, minted coins. It was the only bank allowed to open branches in multiple states. It was given control over state revenue, the tax collection and customs duties. The big inducement, though, was that it was also given control of managing the state's national debt, particularly its

foreign debts. And this was, for example, how the English debt unsettled since it had been first been floated back in the 1820s, was finally resolved and settled. So, foreign money came in, and 70% of the capital of Bonnex was a foreign origin, and oddly enough, almost all of that came from the French. Not seeing much to be gained by competing with the Americans and British and railroads and mining and other large capitalist industries, the French zeroed in on finance as their way to make money in Mexico. And French cash became the means by which the government was now able to finance, quote, unquote, itself. And for the first time, they were able to draw low-interest loans to provide the subsidies necessary to do business with all of those British and American investors.

Fortunes were made. Many of them were made by well-connected members of the Dias regime, but most of the fortunes wound up in Paris and in London and in New York. When the 1884 elections came around, President Gonzalez was just unpopular enough and associated with just enough corruption that there was a great clamoring for the return of Don Porfirio. A clamoring, Dias studiously cultivated by not actively seeking election. So, of course, he won the 1884 election in a landslide, and after that, Dias shed like a snake. His old form is a radical liberal partisan and the standard bearer of no re-election. Instead, he transformed himself into a perpetual dictator who would not relinquish the presidency for 26 years. During this second term, the Constitution would be amended to allow for one

re-election. And so Diaz was re-elected in 1888. Then as that term neared its end in 1792, the Constitution was amended again. This time, there would be no limits on re-election. Dias would be subsequently elected in 1892, 1896, 1900, 1904, and then as we will discuss in more detail, the fateful election of 1910. That was after the presidential term had been extended to six years. This move from no re-election to hell yeah, re-election, was followed up and down the political line. State governors were now elected and re-elected sometimes for decades on end. Members of the National Congress were re-elected and re-elected again in perpetuity.

By the close of the Porfirriato, they were derided as less a legislature and more a natural history museum. Not that any of these re-elections had any basis in democratic participation, mind you. Elections were deemed far too important to be left to the voters. And so though through the entirety of the Porfirio, the charade of annual elections was carefully maintained, only candidates approved by the government ever won. Dias believed Mexicans, at least those in the ruling class, cared more about economic security than abstract concepts like liberty and freedom. And for a long time, he wasn't wrong.

Everyone got rich and everyone got fat. But before anyone knew it, they all found themselves living under one of the longest dictatorships in the history of the Americas. As his regime entrenched itself, Adias went to great length to neuter the one institution that had always proven so troublesome to any existing regime, the army. Now, you may think that because he was a soldier and a caudio, that the Porfriato was a military dictatorship. But it really wasn't. During the first 50 years of Mexican history, the army had eaten up like 75% of the national

budget, and Diaz wanted to break that stranglehold, not just because they might threaten his power, but because he needed to free up that money for economic development. So over the long course of the Perfriato, Diaz did his best to year by year, reduced the army's budget, the number of enlisted soldiers, the number of senior officers, and he always made sure that political reliability rather than military skill was the reason for a promotion. This marked the Porfarian dictatorship apart from other contemporaneous dictatorships in Central and South America, and this was mostly because Porfarian Mexico didn't really face the threat of a foreign war. The Central American states at the South were far too small to worry about,

and Diaz was managing, hopefully, the American Colossus to the north. Mexico's size and real lack of border rivalries made a large standing army a political liability without serving much of a national security purpose. And so over the years, the size of the army was reduced from 30 to 20,000, and even then a lot of that enlistment was only on paper. The neutralization of the army was a key part of the Porfuriato's longevity, It would also contribute mightily to its downfall when the shit hit the fan in 1910. As he won each successive re-election, Dias transcended to a higher plane of politics, at least in his own mind.

He was looking to become something of a Republican sovereign who was above and beyond factional fighting. So he would reconcile with old conservative elements. He would play regional and ideological rivals off one another. His only goal now was order and progress, or as was encapsulated by another quip from the Porfariato, Dias's goal was poca politica, much administration. A little politics, but a lot of administration. The defining click of this high Porfariato, the guys who became the most visible and ultimately hated symbol of the regime, were the Scientificos. The Scientificos were a small group of Mexico City intellectuals who got really into Herbert Spencer and the philosophy of positivism. They believe that all knowledge could be rooted in empirical, natural, and scientific observation and investigation.

This scientific method was meant to apply to all social, political, and economic interactions, and it promised to free humanity from the shackles of mere superstition and sentiment. In terms of politics, it was meant to free humanity from the grubby business of politics, and they prescribed a scientific method for solving all economic and political issues, hence their name the Scientificos. They appealed to Dias immensely, and he was more than happy to play their patron and support their approach to politics, especially because the niceties of elections and participatory government apparently had no place in the scientific natural order of things.

With the patronage and support of Dias, the Scientifico sought to modernize the economy and solve all manner of social ills. Education, morality, health, drunkenness, you name it, they thought they could solve it. Everyone else came to pretty much hate their guts because the Scientificos got awfully rich telling everyone else how dumb and backwards they were. The chief Scientifico, the leader of the group, was the long-term Minister of Finance, Jose Liancivil. Limentor. Appointed to this office in 1892, Lemauntur was both incredibly successful at what he set out to do, but ultimately a failure, because instead of ensuring permanent peace and prosperity, he was taken down by a revolution that erupted in part in opposition to his life's work. But Lemauntur's accomplishments are obvious. He came into the Ministry of Finance in 1892 with a

couple of basic goals. First, balance the budget. Second, manage the mostly foreign-owned public debt. And third, abolish all internal barriers to trade to create a unified domestic national market. And he did all that. Through a mix of budget cuts and tax measures, in 1896, Le Mansour delivered the first balanced budget in Mexican history. And then every year after that, through 1910, he produced budget surpluses. The government was now taking in more than it was. spending. This helped to manage the national debt, which, though it exploded from 52 million pesos in 1884 to 441 million pesos in 1910, this was a mark not of profligate irresponsibility, but shrewd responsibility, because the Mexicans were being entrusted with far more money than ever.

Now, as late as 1896, fully 36% of the national budget was taken up with interest payments. By 1910, Lehman Tour had gotten that down to just 5%. But the problem with all this budget hawkery and hyper-focused on managing the foreign debt is that there was not much place in it for the vast majority of Mexican citizens, who were becoming increasingly aware that the national government worked for a small group of rich guys in Mexico City, their foreign financial backers, and, well, nobody else. Lehmantor also represented a shift in the Porfariato's foreign policy and who those foreign backers were. Lehmantour was a Europhile who was skeptical to the point of hostility to the Americans. For the relatively weak Mexico to maintain its sovereignty and independence, other great powers were going to have to be brought in to check the Americans. Now, we saw this already with the presence of French capital that was financing the National Bank. that was good. But there was also a strong push inside the Scientifico circles to promote British

railroad and mining interests so that Mexico's infrastructure and national resources were not monopolized by the Americans. This was especially important towards the end of the 1890s as the United States was clearly moving towards the big stick phase of hemispheric diplomacy. The Spanish American War saw the United States seize the last vestiges of the Spanish Empire and the Americas. The United States also clearly planned to control a canal that would link the Atlantic to the Pacific somewhere in Central America. They didn't know where yet, but they planned to control it. Then President Roosevelt came along and announced the Roosevelt corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. What said that the United States saw it as its responsibility to intervene in the internal affairs of Latin American countries,

to, yeah, sure, secure the peace, but mostly to ensure the repayment of foreign debt. The increasingly aggressive and ambitious United States led Dias and Leman Tour to turn to Europe for help and support. In 1902, they granted a concession to the British Pearson Trust to construct a railroad linking the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific, which enraged American investors who had assumed that they were going to get the deal. But this was only the beginning. Over the next few years, Lehman Tour initiated a program of slowly but surely buying and controlling stock, and various railroads to give the Mexican government a controlling interest. And by 1907, he had succeeded in bringing about two-thirds of Mexico's railroads under voting

control of the Mexican government. This Mexicanization project enraged American investors who felt betrayed. But the really big kicker came with the discovery of oil. It goes without saying that when oil was discovered in Mexico, that American companies practically took it as their birthright to go exploit it. And there was a lot of oil in Mexico. At the time, many believed that it was possibly the largest reserves in the world. But just as companies, like Standard Oil and Texaco, were making their plays to enter Mexico, the Mexican government granted enormous geographic, economic, and political concessions to the British Pearson Trust,

all but cutting the Americans out of the oil business entirely. Porphyrio Diaz had come to power in 1876 in part because he was seen as the champion of American business in Mexico. And he had been. But by 1910, he was no longer the man that they wanted him to be. So to sum all of this up, the Porfuriato was as autocratic as it was capitalist. Mountains of foreign capital came into the country during these years. Foreign investment increased tenfold between 1880 and 1910. Foreigners now owned huge chunks of the Mexican economy, mining, oil, commerce, public utilities, cattle, railroads. So while the economy boomed and modernized, it was hard for the average American to see what the benefit was.

By the end of the Porfirriato, there was a massive new infrastructure and technological upgrades, but the profits of all this were held in the hands of just a few, and the rapid transformation of the country disrupted traditional ways of life. Now, the prevailing liberal economic theory was that a rising tide would lift all boats, and so the government never did much to address the economic or social needs of its citizens, always the mother to foreigners and the stepmother to Mexicans. Now, this, as I've said, is not the whole story, and it does underestimate just how much the government was trying to move in a more nationalist and protectionist direction by the end of the Perfriotto. But by then it was kind of already too late. and when the revolution came, foreign companies and their property would become the principal targets for the local wrath of local revolutionaries. But we'll talk more about the swirling forces of revolutionary opposition at the end of the Porfariato next week.

The rural peasants who had been driven from their land, the mine workers who were treated as shabby slaves by foreign managers, middle-class intellectuals who were no longer satisfied with mere material comfort. They wanted a political voice to go along with it. And at the center of all this swirling revolutionary energy was an aging Porfirio Dias, who everyone knew was going to die eventually, and that when he did, everything would be up for grabs. And that his death would likely spark nothing less than a war for the future of Mexico.