Mexican Revolution: Encyclopedia II - Mexican Revolution - End of the Porfiriato

Mexican Revolution - End of the Porfiriato

The armed conflict began over alleged electoral fraud perpetrated by General Porfirio Díaz in 1910; Díaz had been president virtually uninterruptedly since 1876. While his presidency was characterized by promotion of industry and the pacification of the country, it came at the expense of the working and farmer/peasant classes, which generally suffered extreme exploitation. 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 from the United Kingdom, France, and the United States).

In 1908, Díaz committed a political blunder when he told a U.S. journalist that he would like to retire and would welcome opposition parties. This article was translated and reprinted throughout Mexico. Díaz later denied his statements and decided to run for president in 1910. By this time, his opponent in that election was Francisco I. Madero of the Liberal Party. Madero was a foreign-educated industrialist who sympathized with the social reforms that had been promoted by such intellectuals as Antonio Horcasitas or the Flores Magón brothers. In order to ensure his reelection, Díaz ordered Madero and his supporters thrown in jail. The next day, Díaz declared himself the winner, claiming Madero had only received 221 votes. In the prevailing discontent and after a brief period of exile in the United States, Madero promulgated the San Luis Plan, which declared the election to be null and void and called for an armed uprising by the populace against the Díaz government, to begin at 18:00 on November 20, 1910.

Assorted rebels and popular leaders — including Emiliano Zapata, Pascual Orozco 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 in the South, while the troops of the guerrilla Francisco "Pancho" Villa fought all the way up to and across the border of the United States as well as far south as Mexico City.

The fighting 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.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "End of the Porfiriato", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki