by Frank McLynn
Yet underneath the placid surface of Diaz's Mexico the magma of a future volcano was taking shape. Diaz could effectively cow the villagers and the peons with his rurales, but his crash programme of modern capitalism and foreign investment was having unintended effects, the most important of which was the rise of an urban working class, not so easily dealt with as the peasantry. The first group to trouble the dictator was the textile workers, mainly clustered around the area between Puebla and Veracruz. Thirty-two thousand strong according to the 191 o census, textile workers made up the biggest group among the urban proletariat properly so-called, and they were the first to be hit by economic recession. Already working under a very paternalistic form of capitalism, with company stores and housing - some scholars indeed have referred to the Mexican textile industry as the `urban hacienda' - they were further demoralised after 1900 as the industry, facing threats of overproduction, cut back on output, slashed wages and shed workers. In response the textile workers became increasingly unionised; in 19o6 there was a general strike in the industry, with 30,000 idle hands. The unions asked Diaz to arbitrate and he did so, marking the first entry of the Mexican state into industrial relations.
Perhaps Diaz realised that the intransigence of the employers rather than the excessive demands of the workers was to blame, for his arbitration award was not as harsh on the workers as expected. However, he soon proved the truth of the old saw that one swallow does not make a summer. In subsequent troubles at the Rio Blanco textile plant, he sent in police and the Army; they left more than seventy workers dead, effectively cowing the workforce. Yet there were no calls for revolution. Mexican unions were reformist organisations and the proletariat arrested at the stage Lenin called `trade union consciousness' where the working class makes simple demands on the existing system instead of trying to destroy it root and branch. Even when real wages declined in the last years of the Porfiriato, Mexican workers did not dream of armed struggle.
Unintended consequences were more severe in the mining industry, mainly located in Mexico's northern states, and in 19o6 these led to real trouble in the Cananea copper mine. The wages of miners had risen while those of the textile workers had declined and there had been halcyon days until 19o6, when the veins started to get played out. Unfortunately, aspirations had been aroused which could not simply be extinguished like turning off a water tap. The Cananea mine had hitherto looked like a textbook triumph for `rugged individualism'. The American owner was William Greene, one-time gambler, Indian fighter and miner. With bravado, bluff and brio he had carved himself a cattle and mining empire in Sonora. The Cananea mine employed 5,360 Mexicans as miners and 2,300 foreigners, most of them Americans in managerial or administrative positions. The North American ethos itself had spawned a high level of unionisation, and Cananea was, on paper, an `organic' community, with friendly relations between management and labour, Mexican and gringo.
The snag was that it all depended on a buoyant copper industry. Faced with falling production, management unilaterally changed wage scales and conditions of service. The workers went on strike and demonstrated in the streets of Cananea. Feelings ran high: seeking to persuade the carpenters in the workshop to come out in solidarity with them, the strikers marched on the carpentry shop, where the American manager turned the hoses on them. Matters escalated rapidly: demonstrators rushed the building; armed Americans inside fired on them and killed two men; in retaliation the enraged strikers then burned down the building, killing four Americans in the blaze. As the violence spiralled out of control, the strikers acquired firearms and gunfights took place between management and labour in which there were a further thirteen deaths.
Greene browbeat the governor of Sonora into allowing American irregulars across the border and summoned the Arizona Rangers at Bisbee. The governor was in an impossible position, having to balance this insult to Mexican sovereignty against Diaz's well-known complaisance towards the yanquis; he solved his dilemma by the legal fiction of swearing in the Rangers as soldiers of Sonora. A furious shoot-out now developed between armed strikers and a combined force of Arizona Rangers, local police and the rurales; even so, the rebellion was quelled only when the veteran Sonoran oligarch Luis Torres arrived with a regiment of federal troops to garrison the town. The upshot was that Greene removed three unpopular foremen but the strike leaders were sentenced to fifteen years in jail (they were released in May 1911, after the Revolution broke out).
Diaz lost much caste through the bloody repression of this outburst. Needless to say both the dictator and the Americans blamed this clear-cut case of spontaneous combustion on unidentified `outside agitators'. The use of the Arizona Rangers particularly angered Mexicans, but the importance of this incident can be overstated. In no sense did it `lead to' or trigger the Mexican Revolution. By igio copper production was back to the levels of the halcyon days, mainly because of new management and improved technology and efficiency. Greene, suffering liquidity problems in his empire, sold out to another American consortium, and the incoming Colle-Ryan group handled its labour relations tactfully. Although Cananea was built up in revolutionary mythology after igio as a precursor of the Revolution, its main significance was to reveal some less palatable possible consequences to Diaz's industrial revolution and to show that the Mexican economy was less solid than the more complacent cientificos thought. If final proof were needed that industrial relations, even strikes, inhabited a different universe from revolution, one might cite the curious case of Manuel Dieguez. Leader of the miners at Cananea in 1916, ten years later he was the federal military commander in Sonora, in which capacity he acted like the formerly radical John Wilkes towards the Gordon Riots in the London of 1780.
Although worsening economic conditions did not cause a revolution in Mexico - they had deteriorated before in the Diaz years without causing an explosion - rising prices and declining real wages in the years 1907-10 meant that if ever Diaz did come under serious threat, fewer and fewer hands would be raised to save him; and after 1907 there could be no doubting that, looked at structurally, instead of in a narrow balance-ofpayments way, the Mexican economy was in trouble. A crisis on Wall Street in 1907 had a ripple effect in Mexico, where Limantour restricted credit and followed deflationary policies. Wages failed to keep pace with rising prices, the cost of staples doubled between 189o and 1910, and the fall in living standards was exacerbated by bad harvests, particularly in 1909 when there was famine in some rural areas, and campesinos died of hunger. After 1907, even the relatively privileged miners, who had always done better than industrial workers, were hit by lay-offs and mine closures.
Diaz could hope to ride out a short-term financial and economic crisis, relying on the inevitable upturn in the business cycle, but he never looked like solving Mexico's root problem: the disharmony between the backward hacienda system and his aspirations for a modernised capitalist nation. Superimposing capitalism on the hacienda mode of production simply did not work: after all, even the mighty United States had been torn apart by a civil war in 1861-5, fought to correct the disequilibrium between an industrial north and a plantation economy in the south. Diaz's attempt to impose a capitalist revolution `from above' was impossible because the power of the landlord and hacendado class, its labour-repressive agricultural methods and in particular the institution of a semi-servile peonage all worked to impair the efficiency of the market. Diaz was not a stupid man and he was aware of the problem, but to attempt to extirpate the hacienda in favour of the capitalist mode would mean curtailing the privileges of the very people on whom he relied to stay in power. The political imperatives of the Porfiriato pointed in one direction, and the economic ones in exactly the opposite direction.
By igio even the political system of repression was beginning to look frayed around the edges. His jefes politicos had become complacent and filed reassuring reports to Diaz, containing only what he wanted to hear. His network of spies and agents became impossibly swollen in size, full of corrupt and timeserving dr
ones who regarded `intelligence' as a sinecure. In Merida in Yucatan, far from the most rebellious state in the country, the governor employed 700 paid agents in a city with a population of 50,000. Most corrupt and incompetent of all Diaz's agents, however, were the rurales. Used to meting out summary justice by shooting prisoners `while trying to escape' (the leyfuga) or beating them black and blue with a bull's penis (the bastinado), the rurales grew lazy, and the calibre of their recruitment declined. Nepotism was rife, discipline lax, and the officers were usually illiterate oafs who behaved as petty despots. Supposed to sniff out all opposition to don Porfirio, they utterly failed to do so, largely because they were too busy handing worthless sons and nephews into sinecures, padding payrolls, and arranging for kickbacks, sweeteners and payola from protection rackets. The rurules were a fitting symbol of a lazy, corrupt and unpopular regime, and the general impression of superannuated senescence was reinforced by the governors of the various states, who in themselves formed a gerontocracy: Queretaro's governor was sixty-eight, Guanajuato's was seventy, Aguascalientes's seventy-two, Puebla's seventy-five, Tlaxcala's seventy-seven and Tabasco's seventyeight.
If there were signs that Diaz was losing his grip both economically and politically, even clearer evidence was provided by his disastrous new bearing in foreign policy in the first decade of the century. It is axiomatic in Latin America (and especially in Central America and the Caribbean) that only a nation wholly behind its leader can hope to resist the awesome power of the `colossus of the North'. Yet in the igoos Diaz seemed deliberately to set out to alienate the United States. Alarmed by the stranglehold American capital seemed to have on Mexico, he made particularly generous grants of public lands to the Pearson company, favouring Lord Cowdray over Standard Oil and the Doheny interests.
That might have been construed as sound national self-interest, but other anti-American attitudes seemed gratuitous. When President Zelaya of Nicaragua was overthrown by a pro-American coup, Diaz gave him sanctuary. In 1907 Washington, worried by the rising power of Japan across the Pacific, asked for a permanent lease of Magdalena Bay in Baja California as a naval base. Diaz dithered, then granted a lease for three years only, on severely restricted conditions. A meeting in 1909 with William Taft, the US president, on the international bridge linking Ciudad Juarcz with El Paso, Texas, did not go well either and Diaz compounded the offence he had given over Magdalena Bay by offering an ostentatiously friendly welcome to a party of Japanese marines visiting Mexico. To Washington Diaz now seemed like an ingrate: where previously they had cooperated with him and even deported his political enemies back to Mexico, now they made it clear that Diaz's enemies were free to use American soil as a base for their activities.
All these factors indicated Diaz's weakening political grasp but, even in combination, they were not sufficient to trigger the social earthquake in igio. Revolution broke out late that year principally because the 8o-year- old Diaz could not decide what to do about the succession; in this respect he was Mexico's Elizabeth I. General Bernardo Reyes, governor of Nuevo Leon and military commander of the north-east, had long considered himself the heir apparent, but the cientificos favoured Limantour. Diaz played his old game of favouring first one side, then the other. He built up Reyes, making him minister for war, then dismissed him abruptly and seemed to incline towards Limantour. Then, in 1904, he extended the presidential term from four to six years, agreed to establish a vicepresidency, and nominated a nonentity, Ramon Corral, as his vicepresident and successor, thus casting down Limantour. Diaz was again playing games, for he knew that the mediocre Corral was dying of cancer and that anyway nobody would want such a man in the presidential office. It was an abiding fear of Diaz's that if he appointed a credible figure - whether Reyes or Limantour or some third party - as his vicepresident and successor, he would then fall victim to assassination.
Having eliminated all viable presidential hopefuls, Diaz then overplayed his hand. In 1908 he gave a long interview to the US journalist James Creelman, which was largely a self-serving puff for his achievements, real and alleged. When Creelman gently taxed him with repression and severity, Diaz replied that he was much more severe on the rulers of Mexico than the ruled. He admitted that there was no mercy for anyone caught cutting telegraph wires and that anyone so apprehended had to be executed within hours of being taken, and with no appeal. On the other hand, owners of all haciendas along which the wires ran were themselves liable to the death penalty if the wires were cut, as were all magistrates who did not catch the wire-cutters. Having thus, in his own mind at least, established himself as a figure of Solomonic impartiality, Diaz tried to prove himself a figure of consummate statesmanship: he said that he would like to see the emergence of an opposition party now that he had guided Mexico into an era when it was ready for democracy. To prove his seriousness, he was ready to state here and now that he would not be a candidate in the 1910 presidential election.
The announcement caused a sensation and proved to be the biggest mistake of Diaz's career. Naturally he had no intention of keeping his word and duly had himself re-elected when 1910 came round, but the opposition immediately manifested itself, all the way from the revolutionary socialism of the exiled Magon brothers to a newly formed Democratic Party, a front for the political ambitions of Bernardo Reyes. The Reyists at first made merely the `innocuous' demand that their man should succeed Corral as vice-president in 1910, but everyone knew what that meant. In alarm at the growing popularity of the Democratic Party, Diaz banished Reyes to exile in Europe. Reyes, lacking the stomach for rebellion and in any case alarmed that the Democratic Party was acquiring a real life of its own which he could no longer control, went quietly. There now seemed no possible obstacle to Diaz's peaceful reelection in 1yio. The Creelman interview, it turned out, was a blind and commentators were left to ponder the reason for Diaz's promise. Was it simply a sop to liberal opinion in the USA, to palliate Diaz's recent antiAmericanism? Had the old man simply lost his political senses? Or was it, as most suspected, a stratagem to lure the unwary from their bolt-holes, so that the dictator could learn exactly who the opposition was and how great its strength?
This was the context in which Diaz was suddenly challenged from the most unexpected quarter. The man who launched the Mexican Revolution was surely the most unlikely revolutionary of all time. Insignificant to look at, only 5 feet 3 inches tall, with a neatly trimmed goatee beard - allegedly grown to mask a chin that was as weak as the rest of his physique - Francisco Madero was a vegetarian and teetotaller, with a nervous tic and a high-pitched voice that would become falsetto at moments of excitement. Widely regarded as a crank because of his enthusiasm for spiritualism and theosophy, Madero had no social or economic programme; his opposition to Diaz was purely political and, had Mexico really been the democracy Diaz mendaciously claimed it was, he would simply have functioned as the leader of a parliamentary opposition. However, as the usual threats from Diaz failed to burn off this new challenger, diplomats and journalists increasingly asked: who is Francisco Madero?
Aged thirty-seven in igio, Madero was in line to inherit the fortune of the fifth richest family in Mexico. In the northern state of Coahuila, Madero's grandfather Evaristo founded the dynasty through shrewd entrepreneurship and speculation. In his Compania Industrial de Parras he at first specialised in vineyards, cotton and textiles, but soon diversified into guayule plantations, silver mines, rubber plantations, cattle, coal, foundries and banks. Evaristo's business empire extended its tentacles into virtually every state in Mexico: his cotton mills alone stretched from Sonora in the extreme north-west to Yucatan in the extreme south-east. The cream of the northern landed elite, the Maderos were, from the 188os, the wire-pullers who supplied the state governors of Coahuila.
The patriarch Evaristo married twice and both times produced a large family. Francisco, his eldest son by his first wife married an oligarch woman named Mercedes, who bore him a son, also called Francisco, on 30 October 1873. The full name of the
child, the eldest of fifteen, was Francisco Ignacio; he was named for St Francis of Assisi and Ignatius Loyola, though more fanciful biographers have suggested that his surname (madera is Spanish for wood) carried connotations of the wooden cross of Calvary. At the age of twelve he entered the Jesuit school of San Jose de Saltillo. He was impressed by the Jesuits' capacity for selfdiscipline, but the fathers had got him too late (not by the legendary age of seven) so that he always received the religion inculcated into him with a silent question mark. After further schooling in Baltimore, he spent five years in Europe (mainly in Paris), then studied English and agriculture for a year at the University of California, Berkeley, where he dabbled in theosophy and tried to work out a general theory fusing Madame Blavatsky and spiritualism. His critics say that in all his travels, and especially his time in Europe, the only thing that really impressed him was spiritualism. Blind or indifferent to the art and culture of France and Italy, he came back to Mexico obsessed by the dreariest mania of the Victorian age: the belief in a world of spirits `on the other side'.
In late 1893, aged twenty, he returned to Mexico to begin his real training as a businessman. His first job was to administer one of the family haciendas, San Pedro de las Colonias, and he acquitted himself well. In his youth he was a weedy specimen, often in poor health, but he had worked hard to acquire physical strength and was now an excellent swimmer and dancer. A workaholic and radical `improver', he was full of bright ideas and new schemes: for a soap factory, for importing new strains of cotton from the USA, for a meteorological observatory, for an ice factory. He made his name as an entrepreneur in cotton and an expert on irrigation; his pamphlet on water rights on the Rio Nazas was praised by Diaz himself. A good businessman and manager, he built up his purely personal capital to 500,000 pesos by the turn of the century.