Online Encyclopedia
Mexican Revolution
The Mexican Revolution was a violent social and cultural movement, colored by socialist, nationalist, and anarchist tendencies beginning with popular rejection of dictator Porfirio Díaz in 1910 and culminating in the promulgation of a new constitution seven years later. Violence continued until the late 1920s, ending only with the Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional, PRI) monopoly on political power after 1928.
This revolution impacted those associated with labor, agriculture, and anarchism at the international level as the Mexican Constitution of 1917 was the first in the world to recognize social guarantees and collective labor rights; moreover, it produced international leftist icons such as the painter Diego Rivera, the rebel Emiliano Zapata, and the journalist Ricardo Flores Magón.
The armed conflict began over alleged election fraud perpetrated by General Porfirio Díaz Mori in 1910; Díaz had been president virtually uninterruptedly since 1876. While his presidency was characterized by promotion of industry and pacification of the country, it came at the expense of the exploitation of the working and farmer classes. As a result, wealth, political power, and access to education was concentrated in just a handful of families with large estates as well as some companies of foreign origin (mostly English, French, and American).
His opponent in that election was Francisco Madero of the Liberal Party , a foreign-educated industrialist who sympathized with the social reforms that had been promoted by such intellectuals as Antonio Horcasitas or the Flores Magon brothers. In order to ensure his reelection, Diaz ordered Madero seized, but Madero took advantage of the prevailing discontent and after a brief period of exile in the United States promulgated the San Luis Plan, whic declared the election to be null and void and called for an armed uprising by the populace agains the Díaz government, to begin at 6:00 p.m. on November 20, 1910.
Assorted rebels and popular leaders, such as Zapata and Aquiles Serdán, responded to the clarion call, but they were never able to form a unified movement nor did they even possess the same ideals. Farmers led by Zapata fought to reclaim their ancestral lands, while the troops of the guerilla Francisco Villa fought all the way up to the border of the United States.
The fight against the federal army lasted for only a short time as Díaz resigned and went into exile five months later; after his fall, however, infighting between rebels and ideologies cost a million Mexican lives, or ten percent of the entire population at the time.
A provisional government headed by Francisco León de la Barra was then formed, which gave the presidency to Madero in 1911. Madero enjoyed neither support from his former allies, who claimed the revolution's goals hadn't been met, nor from the members of the old regime; in 1913, he was was overthrown and killed, along with his vice president, in a coup d'etat headed by general Victoriano Huerta.
Local leaders redirected their efforts, this time fighting against the new government and accusing Huerta of plotting Madero's murder in cahoots with the United States ambassador. In an attempt to restrain the slaughter, the governor of the northern state of Coahuila, Venustiano Carranza, formed the Constitutional Army with an eye towards bringing peace via adoption of the majority of the rebel social demands into a new constitution. He managed to incorporate most of the demands into the Constitution of 1917, but his desire for peace proved to be stronger than his ability to actually fix the problems that had given rise to the violence in the first place. One by one the rebels were assassinated.
The Carranza government also did not last. General Álvaro Obregón, who had served as Minister of War and of the Navy, revolted against him when he saw that his own presidential campaign was suffering at Carranza's hands. He had Carranza assassinated on May 21, 1920; Carranza had already had Zapata killed in an ambush. Obregón assumed power and by bringing peace to the country proved himself to be not only a capable military man, but also an able politician. He fomented the creation of — and subsequently headed — a number of unions. He was succeeed by the extremely anticlerical general Plutarco Elías Calles who would later promote anti-religious laws that provoked the Cristero War. He also started the PRI (initially known as the Nationalist Mexican Party — Partido Nacionalista Mexicano, PNM), which would hold the presidency for the next seventy years. The PNM succeeded in convincing most of the remaining generals to dissolve their personal armies and create a single Mexican Army.
Obregón sought reelection in 1928, an illegal act under the Constitution of 1917, and was in fact reelected, but was assassinated by a Catholic extremist before taking office.
The triumph of the PNM/PRI marked the beginning of a political tradition of loyalty (some claim submission) to the current President, a tradition that lasted approximately sixty years, as each president distributed patronage and effectively chose the state governors and named his successor, through a PRI monopoly on power.