The Porfiriato or Porfirismo (, ), coined by Mexican historian Daniel Cosío Villegas, is a term given to the period when General Porfirio Díaz ruled Mexico first as a president within a constitutional framework, and later, after 1884 (especially following the purging of the Congress into a rubber stamp in 1886 after the dissent on the English debt crisis), under an authoritarian military dictatorship in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.Camp, Roderic Ai, "Porfiriato" in Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture, vol. 4, p. 440. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons 1996 Seizing power in a coup in 1876, Díaz pursued a policy of "order and progress", inviting foreign investment in Mexico and maintaining social and political order, by force if necessary. There were significant economic, technological, social, and cultural changes during this period.
As Díaz approached his 80th birthday in 1910, having been continuously elected since 1884, he still had not put in place a plan for his succession. The fraudulent 1910 elections are usually seen as the end of the Porfiriato. Violence broke out, Díaz was forced to resign and go into exile, and Mexico experienced a decade of regional civil war, the Mexican Revolution.
Porfiriato as a historical period Historians have investigated the era of Díaz's presidency as a cohesive historical period based on political transitions.Stevens, D.F. "Porfirio Díaz" in Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture, vol. 2, p. 378. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons 1996. In particular, this means separating the period of "order and progress" after 1884 from the tumultuous decade of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) and post-Revolution developments, but increasingly the Porfiriato is seen as laying the basis for post-revolutionary Mexico.Bunker, Steven B. and William H. Beezley. "Porfiriato: Interpretations" in Encyclopedia of Mexico. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn 1997, pp. 1169–1173 Under Díaz, Mexico was able to centralize authority, manage political infighting, tamp down banditry, and shift tendencies of economic nationalism to embrace foreign investment. That major economic shift allowed rapid economic and technological change, an openness to cultural innovation, increasing urbanization, and shifts in societal attitudes of elites. The benefits of economic growth were unevenly distributed and social ills increased, including debt peonage of the peasantry and child labor in new industrial enterprises.Camp, "Porfiriato", p. 440 The defeat of Mexican conservatives in the War of the Reform and the French intervention in Mexico cleared a path for liberals to implement their vision of Mexico.
Díaz, after whom the period is named, was a liberal Mexican army general who had distinguished himself during the War of Reform and the French intervention. He had aspirations to be president of Mexico, which came to fruition when he rebelled against Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada under the Plan of Tuxtepec. He initially ruled from 1876 until 1880. Díaz's first term is sometimes treated separately, as he consolidated power and sought the U.S. government's recognition of his regime. The Plan of Tuxtepec explicitly called for no reelection of the president, so at the end of Díaz's term, a political ally from the Federal Army, General Manuel González, became president for one term. In 1884, Díaz abandoned the principle of no reelection and returned to the presidency, not relinquishing it until 1911. Francisco I. Madero challenged Díaz in 1910, campaigning under the slogan "Effective suffrage, no reelection".Katz, Friedich, "The Liberal Republic and the Porfiriato, 1867-1910" in Mexico Since Independence, Leslie Bethell, ed. New York: Cambridge University Press 1991, pp. 49–124Coever, Don M. The Porfirian Interregnum: The Presidency of Manuel González of Mexico, 1880-1884. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press 1981.
Political order
Starting with Díaz's second term (1884–1888), following the interregnum of President González, the regime has been characterized as a dictatorship, with no opponents of Díaz elected to Congress and Díaz staying in office with undemocratic elections. Congress was Díaz's rubber stamp for legislation since the rigged 1886 midterms caused by earlier parliamentary dissent against Díaz during the 1884–1885 English debt crisis when rival parliamentary deputies backed the protesting student groups, turning a country from a competitive anocracy with many democratic remnants from the Juárez era into a personal autocracy, which manifested into later parliament's submission to an amendment to the constitution allowing for re-election in 1887 and 1890. Internal stability, sometimes called the Pax Porfiriana, was coupled with the increasing strength of the Mexican state, fueled by increased revenues from an expanding economy. Díaz replaced a number of independent regional leaders with men loyal to himself, and quelled discontent by coopting political "outs" by making them intermediaries with foreign investors, allowing their personal enrichment. To further consolidate state power, Díaz appointed jefes políticos ("political bosses") answerable to central government, who commanded local forces. The policies of conciliation, cooptation and repression allowed the regime to maintain order for decades.Katz, "The Liberal Republic and the Porfiriato", pp. 81-83.
In central Mexico, indigenous communities that had exercised political and economic control over their lands and populations were undermined by the Díaz regime through expropriation of lands and weakening or absence of indigenous leadership. Expropriation of village lands occurred as landed estates (haciendas), often owned by foreign investors, expanded. Díaz used coercion to repress democratic power, using pan o palo or "bread or bludgeon" policy. This allowed him to appoint state governors who could do what they wanted to local populations, so long as they did not interfere with Díaz's operations. This process is known for the state of Morelos before the Mexican Revolution when Emiliano Zapata emerged as a leader in Anenecuilco to defend village lands and rights. Since the Díaz regime aimed to reconcile foreign investors and large estate owners, foreign and domestic, indigenous villages suffered politically and economically.Katz, "The Liberal Republic and the Porfiriato", pp. 95–98Womack, John Jr. Zapata and the Mexican Revolution. New York: Vintage 1968.
When Díaz came to power in 1876, the northern border of Mexico with the U.S. became a region of tension and conflict, which had to be resolved in order for Díaz's regime to be recognized as the sovereign government of Mexico. Indigenous groups and cattle thieves marauded in the border region. The Apache did not recognize the sovereignty of either the U.S. or Mexico over their territories, but used the international division to their advantage, raiding on one side of the border and seeking sanctuary on the other. Thieves stole cattle and likewise used the border to escape authorities. The U.S. used the border issue as a reason to withhold recognition of Díaz's regime and a low-level international conflict continued. The issue of recognition was finally resolved when Díaz's government granted generous concessions to prominent U.S. promoters of investment in Mexico, who pressured President Rutherford B. Hayes to grant recognition in 1878. It was clear to Díaz that order was to be maintained over all other considerations.Katz, "The Liberal Republic and the Porfiriato", pp. 67–68
The turmoil of over a decade of war (1857–1867) and economic disruption gave rise to banditry. To combat this, during the administration of civilian president Benito Juárez, a small, efficient rural police force under his control, known as the Rurales, was a tool to impose order. When Díaz became president, he expanded the size and scope of the Rurales; they were under his command and control in a way the Mexican army was not. The slogan of the Porfiriato, "order and progress," affirmed that without political order, economic development and growth—progress—was impossible. Investors would be unwilling to risk their capital if political conditions were unstable.Vanderwood, Paul J. Disorder and Progress: Bandits, Police, and Mexican Development. Revised edition. Wilmington DL: Scholarly Resources 1992.Coatsworth, John H. "Obstacles to Economic Growth in Nineteenth-Century Mexico," American Historical Review vol. 83, No. 1 (Feb. 1978), pp. 80–100
The construction of railways gave the government more effective control of many regions of Mexico that had maintained a level of independence due to their distance from the capital. The construction of telegraph lines alongside railroad tracks further facilitated the government's control, so that orders from Mexico City were instantly transmitted to officials elsewhere. The government could respond quickly to regional revolts by loading armed Rurales and their horses on trains to quell disturbances. By the end of the 19th century, violence had almost completely disappeared.
Philosophy Díaz himself was a pragmatic politician, but Mexican intellectuals sought to articulate a rationale for their form of liberalism. The advocates were called Científicos, "men of science."Priego, Natalia. Positivism, Science, and 'The Scientists' in Porfirian Mexico. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press 2016. They found a basis for such a philosophy by grafting to Mexico French philosopher Auguste Comte's Positivism and Herbert Spencer's social Darwinism. Positivism sought to ground knowledge on observation and empirically based knowledge rather than metaphysics or religious belief. In Mexico, liberal intellectuals believed that Mexico's stability under Díaz was due to his strong government. In Social Darwinism and Positivism intellectuals saw the justification of their rule due to their superiority over a largely rural, largely indigenous and mixed-race (mestizo) Mexican population.Hale, Charles A. The Transformation of Liberalism in Late Nineteenth-Century Mexico. Princeton: Princeton University Press 1989. Liberals sought to develop Mexico economically and sought to implement progress by an ideology promoting attitudes that were "nationalist, pro-capitalist, and moral tenets of thrift, hard work, entrepreneurialism, proper hygiene, and temperance."Bunker and Beezley, "Porfiriato: Interpretations", p. 1170.Knight, Alan, The Mexican Revolution, vol. 2. Cambridge University Press 1986.
Economy
Mexico at the beginning of the Porfiriato was a predominantly rural nation, with large estate owners controlling agricultural production for the local and regional food market. The largest groups of Mexicans involved in agriculture were small-scale ranchers and subsistence agriculturalists along with landless peasants tilling lands they did not own. Patterns of land ownership were shifting in the nineteenth century. The Liberal Reform had sought to eliminate corporate ownership of land, targeting estates owned by the Roman Catholic Church and indigenous communities, forcing them to be broken up into parcels and sold. Despite liberals’ hopes, this did not result in the creation of a class of yeoman farmers, but it did undermine the integrity of indigenous communities and undermine the economic power of the Church. These landholdings were deemed "vacant," even if others were living on them. Their ownership would be invalidated in the government courts to make room for Díaz's allies. Rurales would be utilized to dispose of peasants, and the peasant effort to reclaim native land would be severely weakened given that they were often illiterate and could not hire lawyers.