Porfirio Díaz, Mexico 1876-1911

1. Porfirio Díaz, Mexico 1876-1911 Political stability the highest priority dissidents arrested; rebellions put down loyal politicians granted autonomy Vision of “economic miracle” via • railroad expansion • land acquisition by speculators • increased foreign trade & investment

2. social costs of porfiriato • loss of constitutional liberties • government corruption & expense • increased landlessness (90% rural pop) • diminished domestic food cultivation • foreign debt, inflation Little local entrepreneurship or capital • Roots of Mexican Revolution, 1910s

3. Diaz in U.S. press, 1908 “I received this government at a time when the people were divided and unprepared for the exercise of the extreme principles of democratic government. To have thrown up on the masses the whole responsibility of government at once would have produced conditions that might have discredited the cause of free government. I have tried to leave the Presidency several times, but it has been pressed upon me. I remained in office for the sake of the nation which trusted me.”

4. U.S. magazine reporter, 1908 “Such is Porfirio Díaz, the foremost man of the American hemisphere. What he has done, almost alone and in such a few years, for a people disorganized and degraded by war, lawlessness and comic-opera politics is the great inspiration of Pan-Americanism, the hope of the Latin American republics.”

5. Argentina, c. 1890“order & progress” State as mechanism for enriching oligarchy • 1880 Conquest of Desert invention of refrigerated beef transport • Immigrants offered little access to farmland • National industry funded & managed by foreigners, esp. British

6. social cost of Argentine positivism • immigrants confined to city tenements • trade imbalances & rising foreign debt inflation, which hurt wage workers most 1890 failed attempt to overthrow oligarchy rising middle class frustration with elite 1912 Sáenz Peña Law (president) • universal adult male suffrage • secret ballot elections To win back bourgeois support

7. Buenos Aires, “Paris of S. America”

8. Growth w/o development Railroads foreign-funded; expanded estate monoculture peasants displaced as land values increased rural tenancy & urban slums food crops replaced with export crops Neocolonial cycle trade imbalance, foreign debt, inflation, hurt wage earners the most countries dependent on foreign capital & trade

9. Progress & poverty “The heritage of modernization was proving to be increased concentration of land in the hands of ever fewer owners, falling per capita food production with the corollary rising food imports, greater improvement, less to eat, more vulnerability to the whims of an impersonal international market, uneven growth, increased unemployment and underemployment, social, economic, and political marginalization, and greater power in the hands of the privileged few.” (E. B. Burns, 1980)

10. Peruvian historian, 1912 “The caudillo receded into the background, replaced by the captains of industry, the merchants, and the bankers. Wealth replaced courage as primary virtue. Education, foresight, and common sense determined success in an industrial democracy. Those who succeeded in industry and commerce began to replace members of the old patrician class, and as that happened class rigidities and religious issues faded. Slowly, conflicts diminished and modernity emerged.”

11. Cuban nationalist José Martí, 1891Nuestra America “The Americas suffer from the effort of trying to reconcile the discordant and hostile elements which they inherited from a despotic and greedy colonizer. Imported ideas & institutions with scant relationship to local realities have retarded the development of logical & useful governments. Our continent, disoriented for three centuries by governance that denied people the right to exercise reason, began its independence by ignoring the humble who had contributed so much in the effort to redeem it.”

12. Nuestra America continued “The problem with our independence is that we changed political formulas without altering our colonial spirit. The colonies continue to survive in the guise of republics. Our America struggles to save itself from the monstrous errors of the past—its haughty capital cities, the blind triumph over the disdained masses, the excessive reliance on foreign ideas, and unjust, impolitic hatred of the native races. If these republics do not include all their populations and benefit all of them, then they will fail.”