Revolutions - 9.05- The Creelman Interview

Episode Date: September 10, 2018

Just as Mexico was being kicked around by an economic crisis, Porfirio Diaz dropped a political bombshell.  Sponsor: casper.com/revolutions

Hello and welcome to revolutions. Episode 9.5, the Creelman interview. Before we get going today, I need to launch back into publicity mode. Because guess what? The storm before the storm, the beginning of the end of the Roman Republic, did well enough in its hardcover phase that it is now coming out in paperback. Specifically, it is being released on October the 16th, 2018 for the low-low, $15.99. It is right now available for pre-order, and so if you've been waiting for the paperback,

it will be here in about five weeks. This is perfect timing heading into the Saturnalia buying season. But wait, there's more. To support the release of the paperback, I get to go back out on a little mini book tour. So I will be flying back across the Atlantic for four North American appearances at the following cities. Toronto, New York, Nashville, and Atlantic. The details will be at Revolutionspodcast.com and The History of Rome.com and the Storm Before The Storm.com. But for the record, it will go like this. On October the 15th, I will be at Ben McNally's in Toronto. Then October the 16th at The Strand in New York City. October the 17th at Parnassas Books in Nashville. And then finally on October the 18th, an event at the Carter Library

in Atlanta hosted by Acapella Books. I will be plugging all of this again. I will be plugging all of this over the next few weeks, but please remember, the paperback for the storm before the storm comes out on October the 16th, and it will make a perfect gift for someone you love. Then I will be in Toronto, New York, Nashville, and Atlanta. I'm very excited and can't wait to see you all there. Okay, so getting back to the Mexican Revolution, we can sort of divide the 35-odd years of the Porfariato into two big phases. The first lasted from Porfirio Dias' first ascension to the presidency in 1876 to about 1900. During this phase, Diaz definitely managed both national and state politics to create a stable political order while the country underwent dramatic economic

modernization. Order and progress is what he was aiming for, and order and progress is what he delivered. But in the second phase, which got going around 1900, Diaz's political instincts began to desert him, and the economy became more erratic. Order and progress gave way to disorder and recession. By 1908, there were a lot of grievances floating around out there, political, economic, social, and everyone started looking ahead to what life would be like once old Don Porfirio, who was now approaching his 80th birthday, finally passed from the scene. So as we have seen roughly a thousand times between the history of Rome and revolution's podcast, succession in an autocratic regime is an event always, always, always fraught with danger,

especially when there is no clear air. Civil wars are made in such times, revolutions are made in such times. The issue of succession in the Porfirio had been simmering since the 1890 amendment to the Constitution that first allowed for unlimited re-election. In fact, the Scientifico click we talked about last week first coalesced around the idea of creating a vice presidency to ensure that there would be no break in continuity when Diaz either retired or died. Now, this matter almost came to a head in 1900, an election that Dias won on his 70th birthday, and concerns about him dying in office now started to become very acute. There is, in fact, later commentary from various sources that after winning in 1900, Dias really

did have in mind that it would be his last election, that he would pass power to a successor, with two men emerging as the leading candidates. First, finance minister Jose Liemontour, who I introduced last week, he was the leader of the Scientifico clique. He was well connected to European financiers and obsessed with delivering balanced budgets. But he was also a civilian, an intellectual, and he didn't really have a popular following, and he had no experience in military affairs. So the other name that kept getting floated around out there is a man who I will now tell you all about, and that is Bernardo Reyes, who had both a popular following and a lot of experience in military affairs.

Bernardo Reyes was a young man by the standards of the Porfirian ruling elite. Born in 1850, he was just a kid while Diaz and the old guard were waging the reform war at the war against the French. The Reyeses, though, were a strong liberal family and did very well for themselves after the final victory of the liberals and the expulsion of the French. Reyes himself decided to make a career in the army. But remember, we talked last week about how Diaz curbed the power of the army in part by prising political loyalty over merits when it came to the promotion of senior officers. Reyes was one of the very few officers to combine both. He was bright, he was talented, he was a good officer, and he was absolutely loyal to Don Porfirio. Dias came to trust and rely on Reyes, and

starting in the early 1880s, wherever trouble started up, Reyes was dispatched to handle it. He fought wars against the Yaqui tribes in Sonora, and then later put down revolts by a couple of would-be Caudillo generals up in the north. As a reward for all this good work, Reyes was made governor of the state of Nuevo Leone in 1885. Upon taking up this office in the growing metropolis of Monterey, Reyes embraced the Porfarian policy of order and progress. He proactively tried to spur economic investment and development in his state, while also keeping a tight lid on any potential political opposition.

But Reyes also had a more expansive view of what progress. meant, and he combined economic modernization with progressive social reforms meant to make the lives of his people better, so he started schools and hospitals, all that good stuff. And though a few scattered local enemies resented him, all of this made Reyes broadly popular. His military exploits, administrative abilities, and unfailing loyalty to the regime made Bernardo Reyes an obvious candidate for the presidency if and when old Don Porfirio decided to step down. This expectation grew a bit more when Diaz made Reyes Minister of War in 1900, putting him inside the cabinet, alongside Minister of Finance Lehman Tour, who was fast becoming Reyes' rival.

Once in office, new Minister of War Reyes took his job seriously, a little too seriously, as it turned out. As a career army officer, Reyes had seen firsthand that the service had slowly turned towards being an inadequate force to deal with a real emergency. So Reyes undertook a large project to create a National Reserve Corps that was dubbed the Second Reserve. It was slated to be composed of 30,000 men who would enroll, then be trained and drilled, and be ready to be called up in case of some national emergency.

Meanwhile, Lehman Tour and the Scientificos did not like Reyes at all, and they feared a loss of influence if he came to power. So they looked to undercut him. And it was not hard to convince President Diaz that the Second Reserve was not about professionalism or national security. It was about Reyes plotting to overthrow the regime. Now, by this point, Diaz himself was already getting nervous about how popular Reyes was, and he did not like the looks of this personal army one bit. So he removed Reyes from the post-war minister and dissolved the nascent Second Reserve.

Reyes was sent back to be governor of Nuevo Leon, and scrupulously loyal, Reyes accepted this without a peep, and he returned to Monterey. But the rivalry and conflict between Reyes and the Scientificos was not over by a long shot. Now, this was all occurring in the heart of the Porfirian ruling elite. Outside that elite were other men also looking to the future who were chafing under the increasing authoritarian style of the regime. As we discussed last week, when Diaz first came to power, he set up a sort of quasi-futal personalist regime that, negotiated with powerful families in the several states to create broad national stability. As some of these families, like in his home state of La Haca, were intensely loyal to Dias, but others wound up reconciling with the president by way of sort of mutual toleration. But though this had been Dias's pragmatic strategy in the early going,

whenever the power of one of those older and more independent families started to fade or die out, Don Porfirio would make sure to replace them with new men, more directly loyal to him personally. So as the years passed, the negotiated feudal system gave way to more autocratic centralism, and this did not pass without notice. The most visible and hated symbol of the more centralized, more corrupt, more tyrannical, and more arrogant style of government were the hefe politicos. Hefe politico just means like political boss, and they were sort of the intendants of the Porfuriato. They were appointed directly by the president and represented the central government at the local level.

On the eve of the revolution, there were about 300 of these guys scattered throughout various municipalities in Mexico, and their word was local law. Basically, they were judge, jury, and executioner. And to preclude any unnecessary empathy or sympathy with the communities they lorded over, FAPoliticos were always imported from another state. As a class, these guys were not exactly the living. embodiment of good government. They saw their job as keeping order and getting paid. They protected the hossendados or commercial enterprises that might be in their area of jurisdiction, usually in exchange for bribes and kickbacks. They also provided intelligence for

the central regime, and then they spearheaded crackdowns if and when they were ordered by the president. When the revolution came, the revolution was launched as much against the Hefe Politico's as old Don Porfirio far away in Mexico City. But the Hefe Politicos were not just hated by poor workers and peasants. They were also hated by more educated urban professionals who could only gripe helplessly about the total lack of political liberty or any kind of representative government. The petty tyranny of the Hefe Politico's was a humiliation for these guys. And these types we have seen all over the Revolution's podcast lately.

We're talking about lawyers, teachers, doctors, journalists, professors, merchants, engineers, students, junior army officers, guys with education, maybe a bit of material success, and a desire to participate in government. And they had to watch year after year with frustrated annoyance as elections came and went and were such obviously staged shams. So no less than Reyes or the Scientificos, this group was also looking beyond the reign of Don Porphyria. But instead of wanting to inherit the regime, they wanted to reform it. To return it to the principles of the Constitution of 1857, which was technically still in effect. Around 1900, liberal clubs started sprouting up, and in February of 1901, these clubs sent

delegates to the first liberal Congress, which was organized by a guy named Camillo Ariaga, the son of an old rich liberal family. This first Congress was pretty tame in their program. They were focused on rooting out corruption, reestablishing real democratic elections, and most especially ending unlimited re-election. Perpetual re-election of regime favorites had left an entire generation with frustrated ambitions. Now, even though these guys were pretty cautious and conservative, they still posed a threat. And while the first Congress was allowed to convene, when a second one was planned to come along in February of 1902, the hefe politicos and police stepped in.

They closed the various clubs and did not allow the second Congress to convene. leaders either bowed out of politics, were arrested, or fled into exile in the United States. Among those who were present at this first liberal Congress and who were arrested and who would then ultimately flee to the United States were a trio of brothers who were moving rapidly from liberal to radical and ultimately to full-blown anarcho-communism. And if you know your radical Mexican revolutionary history, you know that I am of course now talking about the fabulous Flores Magone brothers, Ricardo, Enrique, and Jesus. Born into a mostly indigenous family in Wohaca, the brothers at various points went off to school in Mexico City and

became interested in radical student politics. Ricardo, for example, who became the most prominent of the three brothers, had to spend about three months on the lamp after the staff of a student newspaper he was working for got shut down. He was later expelled from a graduate school program specifically for his political activism. In 1900, the brothers started up a periodical called Regenation, which means regeneration, and I'm just going to call it regeneration now, so I don't have to keep calling it Regenation. Mostly, the magazine took liberal shots at the Porfarian regime, but it was still tolerated in these early years. The brothers then participated in the first liberal Congress and were arrested when the second liberal Congress was

about to get going. But it was while in jail that Ricardo and Enriquez discovered radical socialist and anarchist literature and they devoured it, and they emerged from their stint in jail, ready to go in a much more radical and dangerous direction. They continued their self-education in Prudon and Bakunin, and especially Kropotkin's The Conquest of Bread, which Ricardo treated as a sort of anarchist Bible, as it clearly enunciated and staked out a theory of left-wing anarcho-communism as opposed to some of the more indecutive. individualist anarcho-capitalist libertarian branches. Regeneration was finally banned in 1904, and the brothers went into exile in the United States,

first joining an exile radical community in St. Louis, where they re-founded Regeneration, and then in September of 1905 founded the Mexican Liberal Party in exile, known by its initials, PLM. Now more radical and advocating direct revolutionary action. They were eventually not just exiles, but actively hunted men, as the United States authorities tended to agree with the Mexican authorities that the fabulous Flores Magone brothers were very bad news. Ricardo wound up living under an assumed name in Los Angeles, where he worked with migrant laborers and the IWW. The plan was to hopefully stage some kind of anarcho-communist revolution back in Mexico if he didn't get arrested first. Meanwhile, back down in Mexico, Diaz continued to.

to string everyone along and keep his would-be successors divided. Reyes and some of his allies helped orchestrate a press campaign against Leman Tour that attacked Leman Tour's character and highlighted the fact that though the finance minister had been born in Mexico City, his parents were actually French immigrants, and thus he ought to be ineligible for the presidency. Leman Tour endured these barrages knowing full well that they would not be going on if Dias chose to put a stop to it and Don Porfrio did not. He was happy to live. let these factions keep each other in check. Then Reyes gave his enemies more fodder. In the lead up to the elections of 1904, demonstrators turned out in Monterey. Benevolent, but not infinitely so,

Reyes ordered the demonstration broken up by force, and in the ensuing chaos, dead bodies fell to the ground. In the aftermath of this, Dias allowed Congress to call Reyes in for a prosecutorial investigation into his conduct. Now, Dias did not let Reyes get convicted of any. But he was, but it's pretty clear that he's more than happy to let the golden boy's name get dragged through the mud a bit. Now, skipping ahead just a little bit, in 1906, Dias finally allowed for the creation of a vice presidency, and so this all finally came to a head. Who would he choose?

Leman tour or Reyes, Reyes or Leman tour. Dias decided to go with, neither one. Instead, he picked a guy named Ramon Corral. Why? No joke, because nobody liked Corral, and he had no popular support, which is exactly what Diaz wanted in a vice president. But this is part of Diaz's political instincts deserting him. He was so focused on the narrow threat posed by a too popular vice president that he missed the wider threat that was going to be posed by a very unpopular vice president. So with these new political frictions heating up, both inside the regime and outside the regime. We have to transition now into the slow-moving economic and social crisis that

began to grip Mexico after about 1905. All of that is going to give a lot of popular weight to what had heretofore been mostly elite squabbling and middle-class grumbling over succession and democratic rights. The first big shock to the social and economic system came in March of 1905 when Minister of Finance, Lehman Tour, carried through his plan to put Mexico on the gold. standard. Now, I know that this is going to be the snooze-inducing bit of the program, but it is important, and I'll try to make it quick. Given that Mexico was one of the largest silver producers in world history, obviously the peso, the currency of the realm, was backed by silver. And what you may not remember from your history classes is that all through the last half of the 19th century, there was a

running battle among global financial and political elites about whether to adopt a single gold standard for all their currencies, that is, fixing the convertibility of the currency to a specific set amount of gold, or allow a freer monetary system that would allow for like silver-backed currencies, or crazy, crazy, just paper currency that wasn't backed by anything. And this was a huge deal in the United States and would thus become a huge deal in Mexico. Thanks to the Sherman Silver Purchase Act of 1890, the United States government had been buying a lot of Mexican silver, and American investors were putting a lot of investment and infrastructure into mining Mexican silver. But after the great financial crash of 1893 and subsequent recession,

the battle between those who wanted a single gold standard and those who wanted a buy metal, that is gold and silver standard, locked themselves in a huge political battle. This is where William Jennings-Bryan comes from. The cross of gold speech? That was a metaphor, sure, but it was also literally about gold. But when gold standard supporting William McKinley won the presidential election of 1896, along comes the Currency Act of 1900, which put the United States on the gold standard. Now, finance minister Lehman Tour was watching all this from Mexico City, and he could see the global winds shifting towards a uniform gold standard. And so he devised a plan to peg the value of the peso to gold. On March the 25th, 1905, the Ministry of Finance unveiled

a new currency system for Mexico that pegged one silver peso to 75 centigrams of gold or the equivalent of 50 U.S. cents. Then he ordered his agents in New York to start buying and hoarding as much gold as possible. But the new gold-peg currency system had an immediate impact. Without getting too deep into the underlying financial causes, Lehman Tour thought that the gold standard would put some deflationary pressures on the economy, but the opposite, in fact, turned out to be true. And the value of the peso dropped immediately. And it is sometimes said to have fallen in value 50% overnight. And while that is probably an exaggeration, the value of the

peso did drop. And as a result, stronger U.S. dollars could suddenly pick up all kinds of Mexican exports on the cheap. But more importantly, they could pick up Mexican land on the cheap. So the devaluation of the peso in 1905 led to a two-year prolonged surge of foreign investment in the gobbling up of even more Mexican land. And while this was going to be a problem, what would ultimately be an even bigger problem was that until the revision to the currency system in 1905, Mexico lived under a free coinage system where the silver-backed monetary supply could more or less expand and contract as needed. But after 1905, free coinage was ended, and the Mexican economy became far more tied to the booms and bust of the larger global economy, which is going

to become very important here in a second when the global economy goes bust. But as I said, initially the adoption of the gold standard led to another bonanza of U.S. investment in Mexico. Adding to already existing holdings, by the time the revolution came along, Americans owned something like a quarter of the total surface area of Mexico, including huge, swaths of its most fertile soil and mineral deposits. Along with well-connected Mexican Hasandados, the Americans had been taking massive advantage of the long-standing Porfarian goal of surveying every square inch of land in Mexico and selling it off as private property.

Before the Porfirio, lots of Mexican land was just vacant and did not have any kind of deed or title attached to it whatsoever. So what the government would do is hire a surveying company to go out, mark down what was what, and give one-third of the land as profit to the surveying company, and hold the other two-thirds to then sell at auction. But these were not divided into small plots for like mass land reform and land redistribution, like the Homestead Act in the United States. Instead, the plots always went to well-connected Hossendados and foreign speculators who acquired most of it, and it became these large, huge, sprawling estates. Once they bought the land, the owners went out and claimed what had been since the dawn of time just open country and common land.

They started waving around deeds and laying barbed wire. Access to water, access to grazing land. It was enclosed. It was cut off. And once acquired by speculation, the land was then converted to produce the most profitable produce the owner could think of, usually cash crops of one variety or another meant for foreign markets. And in the north, there was an added problem because water was scarce. and the water was now being directed towards these export cash crop estates and away from the free villages and any area that was gauged in just basic domestic food production.

And there was also a racial angle to all of this as most of the now divided up property had either been inhabited by or claimed by or simply used by indigenous tribes. And they were now suddenly facing these guys waving around pieces of paper and laying barbed wire. The Yaqui Nation in particular, who had long dominated the Yaqui River Valley in so, and Nora, suddenly found everything that had once been theirs declared legally vacant, therefore open for sale, and just sold right out from under them. When they resisted, the Yaqui wound up fighting a long series of war that continued right up to the revolution to take back what they claimed God had given them whole. As a partial result of all this, many enclosed and squeezed villagers became migrant workers

and wage laborers, either working the nearby cash crop estates or moving to the cities to find factory jobs or to the mining camps to dig up and export Mexico's mineral wealth. The resulting labor surpluses tended to drive down wages for everyone, especially as the economy became more recessive and erratic after 1900. This led to the very beginnings of working class organization, and famously there were two big labor clashes prior to the Mexican revolution. The first was in June of 1906 and occurred at the American Unable, and occurred at the American owned Cananea Copper Mine, which was located in Sonora right on the Mexican-American border. The main complaint was that American workers were being paid way more than their Mexican

counterparts for the same work, and those Mexican counterparts now had socialist, anarchist, and Maganista PLM literature to fuel their demands for labor justice. Eventually, a strike led to a violent confrontation, which led 23 dead, 22 injured, and another 50 arrested. It also led a posse of Arizona Rangers to answer a call for help from the owner of the mine. They crossed the border without authorization to help put down the workers. This was a scandalous violation of Mexican sovereignty and gave further fuel to the critics of the Porfarian regime that foreigners ran the shell while Mexicans suffered. The other big incident was the Rio Blanco textile workers' strike of January 1907, which was again partly fueled.

by literature distributed by PLM activists spreading their version of anarcho-communism. Tensions came to a head around Christmas of 1906, but a lockout by the French owners of the mill forced a settlement. But more militant workers refused to accept this deal, and on January 7th, 1907, an angry mob attack company property. It was not until federal troops intervened violently the next day that order was restored. In the end, more than 50 lay dead and hundreds more wounded. The principal leaders of this little uprising were identified and executed. Now, these incidents are a bit isolated, and the Mexican Revolution is never really going to be driven by, like, the industrial workers. But the conflicts at Caninea and Rio Blanco

saw authorities use deadly force to support foreign owners over suffering citizens. It was not a great look for the regime. And I should also mention before we move on from this that in the wake of these actions, Ricardo Flores Magone was finally tracked down by a private detective and arrested in Los Angeles in 1907 for allegedly violating U.S. neutrality laws. He would be thrown in prison and then released in 1910, just in time. So that then brings us to the next great shock to the Mexican economy, because the wider North American economy is about to endure a financial panic, a stock market crash, and then a widespread recession that would do, major damage to the precarious and oh so heavily dependent on American investment, Mexican economy. And the sort of details of all this you can Google, just Google the panic of 1907, but it hit in mid-October of 1907 when a bunch of rich jerk wads got together and

decided to try to corner the market on copper with some aggressive and illegal buying shenanigans backed by the deep pockets of some other rich jerk wads. The attempt failed, however, and when it did, Stock of the company these rich jerk wads had been trying to corner collapsed, which led to the collapse of various banks and trusts that were connected to the scheme. Bank runs then started up, which spread to other banks and trusts because all these guys were in each other's pockets. The upshot of all this, though, was that nobody would lend money to anybody else for fear of being hit with a run and winding up totally insolvent. Stockbrokers, for example, could get no money to make purchases, trading activity plummeted, and the New York Stock Exchange collapsed. In fact, the whole financial system nearly collapsed. Famously, or infamously, depending on your point of view, J.P. Morgan then strides into the scene and all but forces settlements on unwilling participants to get the system going again. He went so far as to lock, like a hundred of the most prominent financiers in New York in his library, until they agreed to a solution, which they did, and eventually the system did get going again. But I should add before we move on that the creation, that the creation, of the Federal Reserve was a direct result of the panic of 1907, and therefore the panic of 1907

is the subject of many conspiracy theories, or just regular theories, that it had been contrived or concocted to bring the Fed into existence. But, hey, we're here to talk about Mexico, and the impact of the panic of 1907 should be obvious. With everyone now on shaky financial footing, investment in Mexico ground to a halt. No one could get a loan, and the recent decision to go on the gold standard and link, Mexico's monetary system to the American system, was now starting to look like a very bad idea. With no more money coming into Mexico, operations started shutting down. They started failing outright. Jobs and wages were cut and slashed. It was a mess. So of course, you just know that coinciding with the panic of 1907, Mexico is also going to endure

an agricultural disaster. That's right, an agricultural disaster, particularly in the north. drought conditions combined with root rot and locus infestations to lead to multiple crop failures come harvest time 1907. The Mexican agrarian economy had become badly out of balance, and it made the failures almost catastrophic. Most of the land that had been acquired by the large Hasandados and the Americans and other foreign interests had, as I just talked about, developed their land for export cash crops. This was true Porfurian profit, and the best land was pumping out lucrative, rubber,

sugar, timber, and cotton, while basic food crops were driven to the worst land with worse irrigation. Pretty soon hunger and even famine was beginning to set in, and the government was forced to make emergency purchases of corn from the United States, from Argentina, South America, even as far away as Australia, to try to keep the people fed. All of this combined to double the price of corn. And naturally, this sharp increase in the price of food was arriving just in the midst of labor gluts that were forcing wages down, to say nothing of the fact that everyone's disposable income was now being spent on basic survival. And so you have a collapse of the domestic consumer market, which led to further factory layoffs and wage cuts, just as the wider implications of the panic

of 1907 and resulting recession were also setting in. These are not the best of times. And it hit everyone hard, not just peasants or people who were living their lives on the margins, but also rich and powerful landowners who were locked now in battles with neighboring, often foreign-owned estates for access to water and access to loans. Unfortunately, the government's response to the crash, the recession, and the spreading agricultural crisis was inadequate to say the least. They prioritized the fiscal sovereignty of the national government above all of their considerations. Now, this is not too hard to understand.

Jose Liemintour had built his entire career and reputation around delivering a balanced budget and responsibly managing the national debt. He wasn't very well going to abandon that all now. And as for Diaz, well, he was from the bad old days when the government was chronically running huge deficits could never get a loan without paying crippling interest rates. Diaz considered the end of this chronic bankruptcy one of the greatest gifts he had given Mexico.

So as unemployment rose and droughts caused crop failures, there was no effort by the government to intervene. They made emergency purchases of foreign grain, But they did not even use all the money that had been allotted to them by Congress, preferring to save the money as a hedge against deficits and bankruptcy. But you say, what could they have done? Well, there are two things. The biggest would have been investment in large-scale irrigation for the fields that were producing the food for domestic consumption

and for the poor villages that were literally drying up. Now, large private cash crop estates could get properly irrigated because they could get the financing to do it and had the will to make it happen. Had the government stepped in and covered the expenses required to irrigate areas where it was not immediately profitable to irrigate, maybe the resulting social and political crisis could have been avoided. The other thing the government could have done was to lend money and inject some liquid capital into an economy that was grinding to a dry and frictionless halt

after the panic of 1907. I mean, after 1907, investment capital disappeared for all but the largest landowners and the most lucrative exporters of crops. Everyone else was left with an empty wallet. With things in Mexico tottering precariously on the brink, Perferio Diaz's ambassador to Washington, D.C., arranged for the old president to give an interview to James Creelman for publication in Pearson's magazine.

The interview was obviously meant to be a sort of puff-piece bit of PR, a way for Diaz to speak to the long-standing forefront, friendship and alliance of Mexican and American interests that had been fostered for as long as he had been president, and also to assure everyone that the political and economic situation in Mexico was well in hand and that investment could keep going. But in the midst of all this, Diaz dropped a legendary bombshell. And I will read now from the poll quote in Paul Garner's biography of Porfirio Diaz that I have here, see if you can spot the bombshell. He said, it is a mistake to believe that the future of democracy in Mexico has been endangered by the permanence

in power of one president over a long period of time. Democracy is the only principle of just and true government, although in practice it is only possible for nations with a sufficient degree of development. I have waited patiently for the day when the people of the Mexican Republic are ready to choose and to change their government at every election, without the danger of armed revolution and without doing harm to national credit and progress. I believe that this day has now arrived. Whatever the opinions of my friends and supporters, I shall stand down from power at the end of the current term of office, and I shall not serve again. I would welcome a party of opposition in the Mexican Republic and the happy inauguration of a completely democratic government in my country.

I do not have the least desire to continue in the presidency. This nation is, at last, ready for a life of liberty. Now, what on earth Diaz was thinking when he just sort of casually dropped that he wasn't going to run for re-election in 1910 has provoked endless speculation, and I have cobbled together at least five different theories to explain what he was thinking. The first is that Diaz was giving this interview in English for an American audience. He wanted to present himself as a friend of freedom and democracy to gain some goodwill without ever thinking that he would hear about it back home. Second, he knew he would hear about it back home, that it would trigger waves, and he was using the interview to flush out potential opponents, because despite the happy words,

Mexico was not actually very happy and stable, and this hint at retirement might lure possible enemies into the open. Third, he was looking to gauge who among his possible successors might garner the most popular support, so that Diaz himself could then back the winning horse. Fourth, and lots of people say this one, they say, Dias is 78 years old. He has lost his edge, and when he gave the interview, he made a mistake. It was just some unguarded loose talk that never would have slipped out of his mouth in former days. Finally, the interview was just another data point in a consistent pattern of pre-election behavior going back 35 years, where Dias says he doesn't want the job so that he can justify another re-election by saying he's just answering a call to do. where everybody says, oh, no, you can't leave us. Now, personally, I think it's a mix of theories one and five, that he was hoping to be able to present himself as a benevolent Democrat to an American audience, while knowing full well that he would once again be called to duty, despite quote-unquote not expecting to run again in 1910. He was going to run in 1910, and he was going to win.

But this little snowball that Diaz rolled so harmlessly, so carelessly down the hill in 1908, would wind up growing into a massive avalanche that would see Porfirio Diaz, not ultimately dying peacefully in the presidential palace, as I'm sure he always expected, but instead boarding a boat out of the country just three years later. Bernardo Reyes and Jose Liemann Tour still have their supporters, and they now started sharpening the long knives in the inner circle of Porfurian power. Meanwhile, Diaz's open invitation for an opposition party to start up meant that those liberal clubs that had gotten going earlier in the decade now felt like they were being given an opportunity to be heard out in the open, this especially set in the middle-class egghead set. And then out in the real world, the citizens of Mexico were being battered economically and getting awfully fed up with autocratic fat cats getting rich while all of them struggled to put food on the table.

They were more than willing to listen to someone preaching reform and change. And we will begin next week with the man who virtually came out of nowhere to become the figurehead of the popular opposition. A man considered by most to be such a ridiculous figure that he was not even worth worrying about. He's one of the most unlikely and accidental revolutionaries in history. Francisco Madero.