by Frank McLynn
Mexico has always been an artificial creation as a nation-state. In twentieth-century Africa the artificiality of nation-states is a legacy of the colonial powers who drew boundaries across tribal lines instead of creating homogeneous units corresponding with tribalism. In Mexico the problem was God-given or geographical. The eighth largest country in the world, with an area of 761,ooo square miles, Mexico is a curious melange of tropics, plateaux and mountains. One quarter of Mexico's area is made up of the various cordilleras of the Sierra Madre. The western Sierra Madre is in geological terms a continuation of the North American Rockies, while the eastern Sierra Madre runs from Nuevo Leon in the north-east to the coast. Broad in the north, with a 2,000-mile frontier with the USA, Mexico narrows rapidly towards the isthmus, where the two Sierra ranges merge in a tangle of peaks and valleys - the heartland of the old Aztec empire. In this central plateau, at an average altitude of around 4,000 feet, in one-fifteenth of the country's total area, one-third of the population lived, including most of the whites. Here were located the large cities: in 1910 Mexico City was not far short of a half-million in population, and the second city, Guadalajara, had 120,000 inhabitants.
The southern tropical areas bordering the Pacific and the Gulf of Mexico were overwhelmingly Indian. Here temperatures were excessive, rainfall exiguous and disease - especially malaria and yellow fever - rampant. It takes an effort of imagination to appreciate that the steamy jungles and foetid swamps of the south were in the same country as the lofty peaks of the cold, mountainous country of the Sierra Madre, but whereas about a third of the national area was below i,6oo feet, more than a half was above 3,000 feet, with the altitude of Mexico City itself at 7,350 feet. Above this level towered the great peaks of the Sierra Madre, including the permanently snowcapped Orizaba (18,700 feet), Popocatepetl (17,887 feet) and Ixtaccihuatl (17,343 feet).
The very different nature of the landscape in the thirty-seven different states meant that Mexico's economy, even at the pre-industrial level, was bewilderingly heterogeneous. In the mountainous and plateau areas mining, especially of gold, silver, lead, copper and zinc was important; in the northern states cattle and other livestock, hides, corn and chickpeas were dominant; and in the tropics coffee, sugar, vanilla, rubber, chicle and henequen - the agave plant native to Yucatan, whose fibre was used to make rope and string - were the principal moneymakers. All these products were grown for export and, additionally, maize, beans and chilli were produced for domestic consumption.
Mexico's agricultural sector was particularly complex, being centred on the two very different institutions of the village and the hacienda. Five million people, mainly Indians, lived in villages which before 1857 had been free and held communal lands; another four and a half million worked on the haciendas. The hacienda, a primitive colonial institution geared to local consumption of foodstuffs rather than production for the market, in theory had a strict hierarchy of owner/master, manager/ overseer and peons who did the backbreaking labour. The haciendas were generally inefficient, their working methods had not changed over three centuries, and most of their owners and managers were incompetent. The whole issue of water rights was a legal mess, soil erosion was an endemic problem about which nothing was done, and most of the hacendados refused to cultivate more than a small portion of their lands. Hence the paradox that a country where three-quarters of the population lived off the land could not feed itself and had to import food even at the height of Diaz's `economic miracle'.
However, it is one of the infuriating aspects of Mexican economic history that almost no generalisation about the hacienda can be hazarded. It was unique, one of a kind, sui generis. By Diaz's time some hacendados had overcome the traditional creole contempt for business and were producing for the market; looked at from that point of view, one could align the haciendas with a capitalist mode of production, but there were other aspects of the system that looked classically feudal: peonage, serfdom, service in kind, the corvee, and so on. Any attempt to classify the hacienda in terms of the classic Marxian modes of production leads merely to the how-many-angels-on-the-point-of-a-needle quasi-theological debate of the sort beloved of a certain kind of academic sociologist. The only safe general statement, banal as it is, is that agriculture gradually became more commercialised in the nineteenth century.
In any case, the term hacienda covered so much ground: conditions varied from state to state and from locality to locality. There were haciendas in northern Mexico as well as in the south; some were backward, some progressive; even within the same area different estates would use different types of workers or a mixture of resident labourers, seasonal employees amd sharecroppers; some gave up on peonage altogether and paid wage-labour. It is easier to discuss the hacienda in terms of the lifestyle of the hacendados. Many were absentee landlords, living in Mexico City or Paris - for France, despite Louis Napoleon and Maximilian, enjoyed a remarkable cachet during the Porfiriato. Louche, hedonistic, decadent and courteous in that unworldly way only the very rich can manage, the hacendados and their families have been the subject of many Latin American novels. Devoutly Catholic in ideology, if not in practice and behaviour, they gave their children a European education; more than one social historian has remarked on the penchant for sending boys to the Jesuit school of Stonyhurst in England.
It was difficult for Diaz to prod the lazy, reactionary, reluctant hacendados into becoming modern capitalists without losing their support, so the hacienda system always remained an obstacle to his plans. The problem of the Indian villages seemed easier to solve. Indian titles to their lands dated from the Conquest and many had never been formally registered; on paper it seemed a simple matter to use the law to deprive the Indian owners of their patrimony. Juarez, by the ley Lerdo, aimed to abolish the traditional lands held in common (the ejido) as part of his project for turning Mexico into a nation of property-owners, and this was why the Indians had overwhelmingly fought for Maximilian in the wars of the 186os. Stripping the Indians of their lands provided a bonanza for speculators, many operating through proxies to preserve the myth of small landholding. Foreign real estate corporations were particularly predatory when it came to buying up or simply stealing land that formerly belonged to Indians; how many legal niceties were observed depended on local power politics, the relative strength of the villages and the rurales and the degree of corruption in the courts.
The result of the assaults on Indian land by Diaz and his realtor cronies, both domestic and foreign, was spectacular. More and more Mexican land, whether former Indian ejido, confiscated Church land or public lands in the north put up for auction, was concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, especially after 1894, when the legal limits on ownership by any one individual were lifted. Domestic real estate corporations were given one-third of all lands they surveyed, and public lands in this era made up 125 million acres, or a quarter of the national territory. In Baja California four plutocrats owned thirty million acres; in Chihuahua the Terrazas family acquired seventeen million acres; just 3,000 families owned almost half of Mexico, and one-fifth of the country (that is, an area as large as the whole of Japan) was in the hands of seventeen individuals. One result was the rise in the north of rancheros as a class, grazing vast herds of cattle on otherwise empty grasslands.
By rewarding his loyal followers with so much land Diaz hoped both to keep them loyal and to encourage their `improving' tendencies, for, under the influence of the cientificos, he aimed to provide Mexico with modern industry and infrastructure. The age of Diaz was also the age of the railways. When he came to power in 1876 there were just 400 miles of track, completed in 1873, linking Mexico City with Queretaro and Veracruz. By the 188os 1,250 miles of track were being laid each year so that by 1910 Mexico had about 12,000 miles of railway. Such was the mania for railway building that the prodigal and extravagant puppet government of Manuel Gonzalez (188o-4) actually promised to pay American railroad builders 6-9,ooo pesos for every kilometre of track completed; the inevitable resul
t was that Mexico had a skewed railway system. One of Limantour's undoubted scoops was his taking the railways into public ownership. Nationalisation of these vital communication arteries reduced Diaz's dependence on the United States at a time when he was becoming seriously concerned about the inroads of the colossus of the North.
The coming of the `iron horse' was a necessary if not sufficient condition for the Mexican Revolution. By igio there were no lines south of Mexico City, but three different railways linked it with the United States border. From Mexico City one line ran west through Guadalajara, Tepic and Mazatlan then up the Pacific coast to Hermosillo and Nogales. The central line ran from the capital up to Leon and Zacatecas, then threaded its way north via Torreon and Jimenez to Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso in Texas. The eastern railroad snaked up to Nuevo Laredo, across the border from Laredo, Texas, after following a track that took it through San Luis Potosi, Saltillo and Monterrey. All this meant that the great landowners could increase their harvests and take advantage of economies of scale, since they could now produce for a national market, not just a local one.
Hand in hand with the railways went a hard-driven programme of industrialisation. Iron and steel works were constructed in Nuevo Leon, textile mills in Veracruz, and there was a massive mining boom, especially of lead and copper, stimulated by new technologies for refining precious metals. Most of all there was oil, the black gold of the twentieth century. The first geological discoveries and drillings took place on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico at the turn of the century, making Tampico the new boom town. Oilwells were spudded in and production began in 1901. By 1910 Mexico was one of the world's leading producers and by 1918 was second only to the United States. Such was Diaz's myopia, however, that his 1884 mining code vested the ownership of subsoil rights in the proprietor of the surface land. Those who had acquired public lands at a giveaway price now found they had a second and much more lucrative bite of the cherry when petroleum was found on their territories.
This was the context in which foreign capital, already a leech on the Mexican economy, became a veritable octopus. It is doubtful if Diaz ever did say: `Poor Mexico, so far from God, so near to the United States' - it sounds too witty for him - but he was aware of the truth contained in the remark. Viewing the Mexico stabilised at gunpoint by Diaz as an investment cornucopia, American capitalists flooded across the border. Among the famous names with substantial holdings south of the Rio Grande were Hearst, Guggenheim, McCormick and Doheny; Mexicans became familiar with the corporate identities of Standard Oil, Anaconda, United States Steel, and many others. Soon the Americans owned threequarters of the mines and more than half the oil fields and they also diversified into sugar, coffee, cotton, rubber, orchilla, maguey and, in the northern provinces of Sonora and Chihuahua, cattle. Out of a total foreign investment of nearly three billion dollars in Mexico by 191o, the American share was 38 per cent, or over one billion dollars, more than the total capital owned by native Mexicans. In 1900 Edward L. Doheny acquired huge swathes of oil-rich Tamaulipas, near Tampico, complete with subsoil rights, for less than a dollar an acre. Once oilwells were installed, Doheny's plant could literally suck Mexican national treasure out of the ground, to the tune of 50,000 barrels a day, all completely taxfree except for an infinitesimal stamp duty.
The Americans were not the only economic predators. The British (who still held 55 per cent of all foreign investment in Latin America as a whole), were well represented with 29 per cent of foreign investment in Mexico, mainly in mines, banks and oilwells. The great English entrepreneur in Mexico was Weetman Pearson, later Lord Cowdray, whose construction firm, Pearson & Son, had built the Blackwall Tunnel in London, the East River tunnel in New York and a number of railway bridges in Mexico. As a personal friend of Diaz, Pearson was able to cash in on the oil bonanza and obtained the rights to the Tuxpan fields in i 909; Diaz thought it a good idea to build up Pearson's oil company, Mexican Eagle, as a counterweight to Doheny and Rockefeller's Standard Oil. Eventually, Lord Cowdray (as he became in i9io) extended his business ambitions into Ecuador, Colombia and Costa Rica, exacerbating pre-existing Anglo-American tensions in Latin America and leading Washington to invoke the Monroe Doctrine.
The Anglo-Saxon nations, though by far the biggest foreign investors, were not the only ones. The French, forgiven for their sins of the i86os, were allowed to control the textile industry while the widely hated Spanish or gachupines dominated the retail trade and the tobacco plantations. All foreign capitalists were secretly resented to greater or lesser degrees - the Spanish sometimes openly - but Diaz rigged his judiciary so that in any dispute involving foreign companies and Mexican nationals, the foreigners would always get a favourable judgement. It was a standing joke that only gringos and bullfighters (another of Diaz's favourite groups) could get justice from a Mexican court. Nor did the foreigners endear themselves to the locals by their lifestyle and obvious contempt for Mexico and Mexicans. Disdaining to acquire Mexican citizenship, the expatriate community lived in splendid and luxurious isolation, repatriating profits and making sure their own nationals rode the privileged managerial gravy-trains. To all complaints about the exploiters in their midst Diaz returned the same answer: the foreigners were needed to make Mexico a modern nation, since the Mexicans themselves lacked the know-how.
By the time of his eightieth birthday in i9io Diaz was feeling relaxed, not to say complacent, about the achievements of his seemingly perpetual presidency. The revenues of the federal government stood at I io million, an almost threefold increase in fifteen years, and of the individual states at sixty-four million. Used to running a budgetary surplus every year since 1894, the government had accumulated a total of 136 million in the fiscal black, much of which was held as a cash reserve in the treasury. Mexico's credit was more than just good on the foreign exchanges, and Diaz could argue that thirty-four years of `stability' had produced this healthy economic situation; in the old days of Santa Anna, Juarez and even Manuel Gonzalez, it was always deficit, deficit, deficit. It was, after all, a deficit which led Juarez to suspend payment on the national debt, which in turn had brought in Maximilian and the French.
Seeing only the superficial prosperity and being themselves the major beneficiaries of the Porfiriato, foreigners had long been used to showering accolades on Diaz, so that his eightieth birthday was simply an occasion for tributes more hyperbolic than usual. Diaz now expected such treatment as his right, for had not the greatest and the best uttered accordingly? Andrew Carnegie's tribute to the `Moses and Joshua of his people' was well known, Cecil Rhodes thought him a beacon of civilisation, Theodore Roosevelt pronounced him `bully' and even Tolstoy, whose sympathy for peasants should have alerted him to the plight of the Mexican peon, extolled him as a political genius whose government was unique. Elihu Root, US Secretary of State from 1905-9 and a future Nobel Prize winner, went right over the top in a muchquoted encomium, in which he described Diaz as `one of the greatest men to be held up for the hero-worship of mankind'. The American journalist James Creelman, who had a famous interview with Diaz in 19o8 on the heights of Chapultepec Castle indited the following: `There is no figure in the whole world who is more romantic and heroic than that soldierstatesman whose adventurous youth outshines the pages of Dumas and whose iron hand has transformed the warlike, ignorant, superstitious and impoverished Mexican masses, after centuries of cruel oppression by the greedy Spaniards, into a strong, progressive, pacifist and prosperous nation that honours its debts.'
Creelman saw only the glittering surface of don Porfirio. Those few who got close to Diaz noted many psychological peculiarities. Like Francisco Franco, the dictator he most resembled, in personality as well as political longevity, Diaz was an intellectual mediocrity of no sophistication and little imagination, who none the less possessed a peasant cunning (Diaz's state of Oaxaca is in this sense a good mirror for Franco's Galicia), a peerless talent for political manipulation and an intuitive sense of men's weak points. Like so m
any autocrats, he knew the price of everything and the value of nothing. Extremely reserved, he liked to refer to himself, even in private conversation, in the third person and thus to use indirect speech as if reporting the words of another person. This psychological peculiarity of many despots, sometimes excused as the `Caesarean third person' (after Julius Caesar's usage in his book on the Gallic war) is in fact more indicative of a fragmenting personality in an uneasy relationship with outer reality.
Many people at the time (it was, after all, a `politically incorrect' era) liked to explain Diaz's personality in terms of his Indian blood; there is an old Mexican saying: `When the Spaniard wanes, the Indian waxes.' Certainly the closer one got to Diaz, the more one discerned the savage under the veneer of cultivation; some interviewers even claimed that Diaz's white skin seemed to darken the more you looked at it. Many idiomatic expressions, to say nothing of his intonation and pronunciation, revealed his Mixtec origins. He believed that true leadership meant constructing a godlike cult of oneself, for in Indian culture godhead was the one true sign of authority. Diaz was proud of his cult and even more so of the rude health that never seemed to fail him, and which he boasted he would not swap for all the millions of the American robber barons. Even in his seventies he rose at dawn, did exercises and weightlifting in the gym at the military academy, took cold baths and rode tall horses. His athletic bearing was much commented on: well-built, ramrod-straight, broad-shouldered and barrel-chested, he seemed as solid and monolithic as a great oak. However, he lacked the immobility of a tree; instead, his restless energy, his prowling intensity and the swift flashes from his eyes suggested a panther or some other big cat.