Porfirio Diaz

Paul Garner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317887058
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

The fall of Porfirio Diaz has traditionally been presented as a watershed between old and new: an old style repressive and conservative government, and the more democratic and representative system that flowered in the wake of the Mexican Revolution. Now this view is being challenged by a new generation of historians, who point out that Diaz originally rose to power in alliance with anti-conservative forces and was a modernising force as well as a dictator. Drawing together the threads of this revisionist reading of the Porfiriato, Garner reassesses a political career that spanned more than forty years, and examines the claims that post-revolutionary Mexico was not the break with the past that the revolutionary inheritors claimed.

Chapter 1

PORFIRIO DÍAZ AND MEXICAN HISTORIOGRAPHY: PORFIRISMO, ANTI-PORFIRISMO AND NEO-PORFIRISMO

History is history. There can be no ‘patriotic history’, in the same way that there can be no patriotic chemistry, patriotic astronomy, nor anything scientific which is not governed by laws based upon the truth. (Francisco Bulnes, ‘Rectificaciones y Aclaraciones a las Memorias del General Díaz’, 1922)¹

Few dictators in the history of Latin America are better known than Porfirio Díaz. It is one of the premises of this book that, until very recently, few have been more misunderstood or maligned. It is therefore crucial to any survey or analysis of the career of such an important but controversial figure to examine some of the ways in which the image of Díaz has been fashioned, denigrated and, above all, appropriated over the last century. This is a topic of intrinsic interest to any political biography, but it is of special interest in Mexico, where political mythology has been particularly powerful over the last three generations since the Mexican Revolution of 1910.

While this pervasive revolutionary mythology has made an important contribution to Mexican political stability in the twentieth century – for example, by promoting Mexico’s identity as a mestizo nation and by linking post-Revolutionary nationalism to the nineteenth-century liberal state-building project – this has been achieved at the cost of distorting the analysis of Mexican history. This chapter argues that those distortions have been particularly acute in the case of the regime of Porfirio Díaz. At the same time, however, the contemporary (i.e. late nineteenth-century) interpretations of the Díaz regime before 1910 were no less distorted. In effect, the different representations of the Díaz era can be seen as a clear example of changes in both historiographical fashion and in national politics over the course of the twentienth century.² These conflicting interpretations have made it very difficult to find a balanced interpretation of either the man or his regime.

Porfirian historiography falls into one of three broad categories, each of which has a specific chronology and approach to its subject: these are, in turn, Porfirismo, anti-Porfirismo and neo-Porfirismo. The favourable portrayal of Díaz (Porfirismo) dominates the historiography of the period before the Revolution of 1910, although some notable contributions to Porfirismo were made during and after the Revolution. Porfirismo emphasises, above all, the longevity of the regime, especially in contrast to its predecessors in nineteenth-century Mexico, and its success in achieving political peace and stability for a period of nearly 35 years. Porfirismo also stresses the personal qualities which justified Díaz’s monopolisation of political office for over 30 years: inter alia, his patriotism, heroism, dedication, self-sacrifice, tenacity and courage.

The typical frontispiece of the numerous biographies of Díaz which were published during the latter years of the regime was chosen with the specific purpose of portraying an image of the austere but benign patriarch, the military hero, the nation-builder and the elder statesman fully in control of the destiny of the nation: in short, a hero in the classical republican mould. This deliberate cult of personality was actively promoted throughout the lifetime of the regime, especially after Díaz’s third re-election in 1892, and saw its apotheosis in the lavish celebrations in September 1910 which marked the centenary of Mexican independence from Spain.³ With supreme irony, the celebrations of 1910 also represented the regime’s nemesis. Less than two months later, in November 1910, the Revolution which would remove Díaz from power was launched. Six months later, Díaz had resigned and had been forced into exile, from which he would never return.

One of the many consequences of the Mexican Revolution was the destruction of the cult of Porfirismo and its replacement by an equally powerful anti-Porfirismo. Anti-Porfirismo was not, however, exclusively a product of the Revolution, although it was most forcefully expressed after 1911 in what became the standard, orthodox, pro-Revolutionary interpretation. According to anti-Porfirismo, the Díaz regime was the supreme example of tyranny, dictatorship and oppression, and Díaz himself was condemned for his corruption, his authoritarianism and his betrayal of national interests.

Anti-Porfirismo dominated Mexican historiography for almost two generations after the Revolution. However, over the course of the 1990s there have been strong indications that the image of Díaz and the interpretation of his regime have undergone a distinct transformation. The Díaz era has, as a result, been interpreted in a much more positive light. Indeed, it could be argued that neo-Porfirismo now constitutes the latest form of historiographical orthodoxy. An important stimulus to this profound re-evaluation has been the scope and sophistication of recent research carried out by the current generation of both Mexican and non-Mexican historians. As a consequence, new trends in social, regional and cultural history have profoundly altered the traditional depiction of Porfirian Mexico. Equally important has been the transformation of national politics since the 1980s.

In this wider political context, the change in public and official attitudes towards the Díaz regime in contemporary Mexico is clearly a reflection of the radical restructuring of Mexico’s political economy which took place in the wake of the devastating impact of the debt crisis during the 1980s.⁴ It is obviously no coincidence that the recent positive re-evaluation of Porfirian economic strategy, for example, coincides with the neo-liberal strategy of successive administrations after 1982. Neo-liberal economics in Mexico and Latin America have been characterised by a return to the positive endorsement of foreign investment, a renewed stimulus to export-oriented development and the drive towards de-regulation and privatisation – the hallmarks of Porfirian policy before 1910 – in stark contrast to the post-Revolutionary orthodoxy of state intervention, nationalisation and import-substitution.

There is abundant anecdotal evidence of the shift in perceptions within Mexico over the 1990s. In August 1992, for example, the influential Mexico City political journal Proceso published a benign, avuncular portrait of Díaz on its cover, accompanied by a feature article titled ‘The Return of Porfirio Díaz’. Even more striking was the decision by President Salinas de Gortari in the same year to grant permission to the television company Televisa to film part of a new historical soap opera on the life of Díaz, in the National Palace. This constituted clear evidence of official endorsement of neo-Porfirismo. The series, which ran to over 100 episodes at an estimated cost of 30 million pesos, was finally shown in 1994 under the enigmatic title El Vuelo del Aguila (The Flight of the Eagle). While it received a mixed critical response, the extensive publicity which it received and generated, and the award of a prime daily broadcasting slot, were farther indications of a profound revision of previous prejudice.⁵

Also in the summer of 1992, considerable public debate and controversy was stimulated by the proposed publication of new compulsory primary and secondary school history textbooks. The new texts substantially revised the ‘official’ view of the Díaz era and portrayed it not as a negative period of tyrannical and oppressive dictatorship, but as a positive and constructive period of modernisation and economic development. The controversial text was withdrawn by Minister of Education Ernesto Zedillo prior to his election as President in 1994. It must be emphasised, however, that this act of official censorship was not carried out primarily because of the neo-porfirista interpretation of the Díaz era. Rather, it sought to suppress criticism in the new textbook of the ruling Partido Revolucionario Institutional (PRI, Institutional Revolutionary Party), which had won all presidential elections in Mexico since its creation in 1946, and of the army, especially for its role in the massacre of hundreds of student demonstrators in the Plaza de Tlatelolco in Mexico City in 1968.

Throughout the 1990s there has been a pervasive sense of imminent and profound transformation in Mexico, to which the events during the term of office of President Ernesto Zedillo (1994–2000) have clearly contributed. During that time, Mexico has seen the direct challenge posed by the EZLN (The Zapatista Army of National Liberation) to the PRI’s rhetoric of social redistribution. In addition, the country has suffered the resurgence of economic crisis and a series of political assassinations and scandals. It has also been the period in which the remarkable electoral domination of the PRI has finally been broken, with the loss of the presidential elections in July 2000. These significant shifts have been identified for some time. In the prophetic words of two of Mexico’s leading contemporary historians and political commentators, Lorenzo Meyer and Hector Aguilar Camín, in the preface to their survey of post-Revolutionary history, In the Shadow of the Mexican Revolution, published in 1993:

we have – as many Mexicans do – the impression that Mexico is moving forward to a new historical period, which will dispel some of the most cherished traditions and the most intolerable vices of the historical legacy that we know as the Mexican Revolution.⁶

It is the contention of this profile that one of those most cherished traditions, and one of the most intolerable vices of the historical legacy of the Revolution, has undoubtedly been the vilification and satanisation of the figure who was removed from power in its wake. The portrayal of Porfirio Díaz as brutal dictator followed a very clear logic, a logic di...