FOUR |
Free Traders and Capitalists |
The nineteenth century, celebrated as the glorious age of independence and the Reforma, and the bellwether of the Liberal Party, handed over the National Palace to exuberant disciples of José María Luis Mora, a dyed-in-the-wool free trader, and the English ideologues Adam Smith and David Ricardo. For the victors, talk of a national industry took a backseat to the prevailing doctrines of Western Europe. Capitalists and free traders, more and more of them mestizos, sat the helm of the ship of state. Their ascendancy set the stage for the thirty-year rule of Porfirio Díaz, an era of neocolonialism, social Darwinism, and pomposity. How did the glory of independence settle into this lamentable scene? The explanation starts with the character of independence, a triumph largely for the status quo.
In 1808, the French legions of Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Spain, forced King Ferdinand, contrite and cowardly, to abdicate, and put Joseph, the Frenchman’s brother, known as Pepe Botella because of his insatiable fondness for wine, on the throne. Most criollos, having endured years under the tutelage of peninsulares, had no desire to grovel at Napoleon’s feet. Before long, their clandestine societies honeycombed New Spain, debating what should be done. The club in Querétaro included influential criollos from as far away as Guanajuato. One was Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, a criollo priest. History remembers him as the father of Mexican independence.
From Mexico City, it was a four-day ride by horseback to the Bajío, a fertile plain that stretched from Celaya to León and embraced Guanajuato. The Bajío was dotted with ranchos, homes of mestizos, but nearly half of its inhabitants were Indians, though rapidly losing their identity, many of the pueblos having lost their lands to rapacious hacendados. In this heartland, one of the most progressive of New Spain, Hidalgo unfurled the banner of rebellion in 1810.1 As in much of the colony, population growth had outstripped the harvests of corn and beans, driving up the prices of the basic staples of the popular diet. At the same time, everywhere in New Spain the real wages of campesinos and urban laborers had stayed stagnant or had taken a precipitous drop, exacerbating the plight of the poor. Unemployment and rural flight to cities and towns had taken on a life of their own. Silver production, especially important in the Bajío, had its ups and downs, fluctuating between poor and terrible periods. Inequality of wealth and income had gone from bad to worse, an ill exacerbated by droughts, famines, inflationary spirals, and embargos on exports imposed by the British navy.2 An economic downturn, dating from the last years of the eighteenth century, lingered on.3 For New Spain, the last decades of the century were hardly memorable for their largesse; for the poor, whether Indian or not, it was a time of hunger. This sheds light on why so many of them joined the battle to usurp Spanish authority, even though it was led by criollo exploiters.
The prosperity of the criollos best explains why they severed the umbilical cord. A majority of them were well off, but they were denied a political voice at the higher echelons of power. Many of them, merchants especially, had chafed under tight restrictions on trade with Europe imposed by crown reforms. During the heyday of smuggling, they had stuffed their pockets with lucrative profits that came their way from trade with English, Dutch, and French merchants. They had outgrown the need for the crown; on things that mattered the criollos and the crown were at loggerheads. The criollos believed that trade with Europe, as well as domestic questions, could be better handled by them. Whatever doubts they had about their relationship with Spain were exacerbated during the interlude of European wars, when Spain joined France to fight England and then embraced John Bull to expel Napoleon. While the fighting lingered on, many criollos fared well despite the blockade of the colony by English frigates that relegated Spanish trade restrictions to the dustbin. Hacendados wanted the freedom to trade with the outside world, while merchants, earlier agents of Spanish houses, looked to transfer their allegiance to English firms. These criollo merchants and landowners who headed the independence struggle represented not new social forces but a prolongation of the old economic order.4
The Hidalgo insurrection, the unexpected harbinger of class warfare, unlocked for all to see the social and racist cancer of New Spain. In 1810, out of a population of just over 6 million, no more than 20 percent of New Spain’s inhabitants were white, either Spaniards or criollos. When Hidalgo marched out of the town of Dolores, his motley mob of Indians and mestizos of the lower class doubled and then tripled. Wherever he went, lamented Lucas Alamán, a criollo intellectual, he picked up disciples; he had merely to appear to win them over.5 After easily capturing San Miguel de Allende, Hidalgo’s hordes pillaged and burned it. Celaya succumbed next and, like San Miguel, suffered the rage of the mob. By now, wrote a pale Alamán, Hidalgo had eighty thousand followers who resembled “savage tribal hordes.” Guanajuato, the capital of the province, lay next on the line of march. When Hidalgo’s men came upon its gates, the governor, Juan Antonio Riaño, gave the order to fire; his artillery killed hundreds. Infuriated, the attackers killed Riaño, and, braving the fire of the Spanish artillery, they set aflame the wooden gates of the Alhóndiga, the town’s granary. When the gates collapsed, the army of the poor rushed in, slaying most of the Spaniards. For a day and half, pillaging took over as Hidalgo’s allies sought revenge, not just against the gachupines (Spaniards) but against the criollos too. After that, fewer criollos thought independence a good idea.
These episodes in Guanajuato, particularly the massacre at the Alhóndiga, revealed the chasms that split a racist colonial society. Hidalgo had unleashed pent-up fury against Spaniards, peninsulares, criollos, and, not to forget, well-off mestizos, usually fair of skin. The swarthy, Indians almost always, their plight made worse by the hard times, hungered for revenge for centuries of humiliation and exploitation. As these conflicts amply documented, colonial society was split asunder by class, caste, and color. These social and racial chasms survived independence to plague the Republic of Mexico for years to come.
The triumph of the criollos in 1821 hardly altered the life of most inhabitants, especially of Indians and campesinos. The economy stood still, hampered by a drop in the volume of domestic and international trade. Foreign earnings, a pivotal source of federal funds, declined. Investors of every stripe took their money out of Mexico. Worse still, the exchequer was empty, plagued by a ballooning public debt.
Independence opened wide the door to provincial rivalries. Province after province began to assert itself against Mexico City, igniting the deadly sin of federalism, regional autonomy, which eventually divided the former colony into semifeudal states, each asserting its prerogatives. The result was the weakening of the economy and the emergence of a cast of military chieftains, the first being Agustín de Iturbide, a populist charlatan who was proclaimed Emperor of Mexico in 1821. A criollo, he was the son of Spaniards who, in the one year of his rule, managed to alienate nearly everyone in his kingdom. Once out of office, and a republic proclaimed, only one president, the tubercular Guadalupe Victoria, managed to stay in office for the years he was elected during this turbulent era of nearly four decades.
The criollo fathers of independence did not champion any substantial change, aside from replacing the Spaniards with themselves. As Mexicans say, “It was get out so that I can come in.” The structure of the economy, however, was up for debate. The old model fitted nicely with domestic reality because its architects left the Republic in the hands of the property-owning class.6 Spain had departed, and now the criollo elite, free to decide the shape of the future for itself, had taken over. The economy rested primarily on silver exports, which fattened the pockets of the merchant elite. Never ones to embrace duties on foreign imports, these merchants resold the imports at a handsome profit.
Though born in the New World, the new rulers were fixated on foreign ways.7 What was good for Western Europe, or the United States, suited them fine. Economists call it “internal colonialism” when native rulers supplant European masters but keep intact the old system. The barons of mining, agriculture, and commerce stood ready to enjoy the fruits of free trade.8 Others were provincial merchants, shut off from the lucrative commerce with European houses by their rivals in Mexico City. They were strong in the port city of Veracruz and in time would become part of the backbone of the Liberal Party, a voice for free trade.
This state of affairs was made possible by the nature of the European economy, then in the throes of the Industrial Revolution. English merchants and manufacturers hungered for raw materials and new markets. Mexico’s underdevelopment and its neglect of industry did not arise just because of its isolation but, to the contrary, because its economy responded to outside forces, subordinate to the export-import trade controlled mostly by foreigners. The economic structure was not simply inherited from Spain but arose in response to the needs of the industrial powers. As Lord Canning supposedly said in 1824, “Spanish America is free, and if we do not mismanage our affairs, she is ours.”9 We can speak of Mexican capitalism, but one shaped by outside forces, not Western style.
The Spanish merchants were sent home and then replaced by the English and French, who were eager to keep alive the Republic’s dependency. As Mariano Otero, an intellectual of that time, wrote, “Trade was merely the tool of foreign industry and commerce.” Local merchants had little interest in altering Mexico’s “present condition,” Otero went on; the cabals in office “are completely committed to mercantile interests and deeply interested in keeping us in a state of wretched backwardness from which foreign commerce derives all the advantages.”10 Under this formula, economic growth depended on exports, and accepted implicitly was a two-tiered world, with Mexico a supplier of raw materials and the buyer of manufactured goods.11
Mexico was not yet a nation.12 Nationhood awaited future years. In 1821, Mexico, as historical events testify, was a theater of the absurd and grotesque. Political incompetence had a field day, as egotistical and greedy generals and politicos clawed their way to the presidential chair. Colonial ills survived, exacerbated by the chaos and destruction of the wars for independence. The fighting that raged, especially between 1810 and 1815, savaged the economy and destroyed a good part of the physical infrastructure, ravaging mines and haciendas and shutting down obrajes. Not until 1870 did the production of silver and gold reach the levels of the late colonial years.13
For all intents and purposes, independent Mexico was bankrupt. No national market existed. According to George Ward, the English consul in Mexico, the absence of roads stifled commerce, making it cheaper to import wheat flour from Kentucky or Ohio than to transport it from Puebla.14 Textiles from Puebla lost customers in the northern states because of the prohibitive cost of transportation. The Republic’s fate continued to rest on exports of silver, which, in a catch-22 dilemma, determined the volume of imports and coincidentally the amount of duties collected at the ports, a chief source of revenue. On more than one occasion, Mexico simply declared a moratorium on the payment of debts—or repudiated them. The government was in hock to unscrupulous money lenders, usually greedy and wealthy merchants who extracted exorbitant rates of interest. Until the 1850s, some twenty to fifty commercial establishments controlled the country’s financial market, their chief client being the government.15 Lending by wealthy merchants became a common practice, in return for making their imports of foreign goods less costly. The ouster of Iturbide gave birth to a byzantine comedy. Presidents followed presidents, a few after just a month or two in office. The Constitution of 1824, a copy of the North American one, and at loggerheads with the centralized rule of three centuries, established a federal republic of nineteen states and four territories, a bicameral congress and a president. Provincial interests had emerged victorious, leaving the Republic more a confederation than a federal union.16 Every state had a governor and a legislature, each bent on going it own way. The national Congress became the hobbyhorse of lawyers, journalists, and priests, the only ones whose schooling met the requirements for service. They, of course, shut their eyes and ears to the needs of the lower classes.17
Starting in 1823, politicos in Mexico City began the nefarious practice of borrowing abroad, convinced that once recovery came obligations would be paid off. Victoria’s administration asserted that foreign capital was the panacea for Mexico’s difficulties, since European capitalists would revive the moribund economy, either by lending money or investing in it. English speculators, thinking Mexico rich in minerals, were the first to invest. But, to cite Justo Sierra, a noted Mexican historian and politician, much of that money was wasted on “bad ships, bad guns, and war supplies.”18 So began Mexico’s troubled journey down the road to indebtedness.
No better word than chaos describes this sorry picture. History, asserted Karl Marx, appears first as tragedy and then as farce. That aptly describes the newly independent Mexico. It was the theater of the cuartelazo, or military coup, a kind of comic opera graced by the silly uniforms of incompetent generals and servile and greedy political buffoons. Cuartelazo followed on the heels of the last cuartelazo, as general after general schemed to sit in the presidential chair. The public treasury was drained, because hiring soldiers to squelch the never-ending cuartelazos, whether successful or not, cost money.
The local burguesía, or what passed for it, hardly represented an authentic national one because foreigners controlled both commerce and mining, the mainstays of the economy. Mexico City, as described by José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi in his famous Periquillo Sarniento, the abode of much of this nascent burguesía, only superficially resembled a European metropolis. Its street were littered with rubbish and rank with the smell of feces, so much so that no one ventured out at night.19 Santa Anna put it bluntly: Moneda, a cherished avenue of Mexico City, replete with horse-drawn carriages, had turned into “a manure pile and as I rode in my carriage I had to close my nose in order to endure the vile odors of the slop.” But, he went on, “that has always been the grandeur of Mexico: the marriage of sumptuousness with shit.” No wonder that lambiscones, sycophants, abounded. As soon as victory was proclaimed, confessed Santa Anna, the ambitious and servile groveled at your feet, while the poor, reported Otero, stood ready to carry politicos and generals on their backs in return for a jug of pulque or a loaf of bread.
The rush to copy Europeans enjoyed halcyon days as the criollos tripped over each other in their rush to adopt European ways, clothes particularly. Earlier, women had worn black dresses of similar cut and shape. Now, recalled an English traveler, London and Paris “do not exhibit more variety of color and shape in the dresses of both sexes.”20 But, Otero reminded his readers, we borrow the trappings of Europeans, but “we do not possess their substance.”21 Intellectuals, poets, and licenciados, anyone with literary pretensions, avidly read the French philosophes, on their lips the names of Voltaire, Mirabeau, Diderot, and Condorcet. Neglected were literary works faithful to the domestic scene, such as the novel Astucia, by Luis G. Inclán, which was replete with the sights and sounds of Michoacán—its hacendados, the peon, the smartly dressed—and told in colloquial language the story of rancheros who turned to smuggling to circumvent the tobacco monopolies of city merchants.22
Samuel Ramos, the philosopher, would later argue that the historical roots of the Mexican’s sense of “inferiority,” which he ascribed to the conquest and the colonial era, had burst forth with the advent of independence, as overnight the country sought to define “its own physiognomy.” When Mexicans sought to emulate European culture, a conflict broke out between aspirations and reality. The “vice in the system,” Ramos maintained, was none other than imitation, practiced assiduously for more than a century.23 Many thought they had discovered the kingdom of God in the United States. One such devotee was Lorenzo Zavala, a criollo politico from Yucatán. Having read the American constitution, “the most advanced in the world,” he believed he had stumbled on the holy grail. After a visit to the United States, he recalled a system that was not just new but “brilliant,” one that had cast aside ancient privileges and social distinctions, where people participated in their governance.24
As a Mexican psychiatrist would write, the “national yo” was conflicted, encouraging Mexicans to turn their backs on their roots.25 In so doing, they turned their backs on the Indians, whether the dead of the past or the alive of today. Most criollos, and not a few mestizos, held indigenous ways in contempt. As the petulant Fernández de Lizardi had his Sarniento comment, “My latest calamities came about because of Indians and I said to myself . . . If it’s true that there are birds of ill omen, the most baneful birds and the worst . . . are the Indians.”26 Or to quote Antonio López de Santa Anna, “We have failed because of our deplorable racial mixture, and the responsibility for this sad state of affairs lies with the Spanish missionaries who saved the Indian from extinction.” The way out of this unholy mess, Santa Anna proclaimed, was “to bring Europeans to Mexico and so offset the ancestral laziness of the Indian.”27 The criollos tried to solve the “Indian problem” by stealing Indian lands and exploiting them. When that didn’t work, they sought to annihilate the Indians, as in the morally bankrupt Caste Wars of Yucatán, pitting the Mexican army against the defenseless Maya Indians.
Physical unity was but a dream. Mexicans were split apart by regional barriers. It took weeks, if not a month or two, to travel from one place to another. The Spaniards were not great road builders; not even from Mexico City to the port of Veracruz, New Spain’s principal gate, did they build one, recalled José María Luis Mora, a criollo intellectual.28 They left behind mostly trails passable by foot, horse, and, once in while, wagons pulled by oxen—if it did not rain. Bandoleros (bandits), often soldiers and officers of the army who deserted after each cuartelazo, infested the roads. As Otero recalled, one could not set out on a journey and not expect to be robbed.29 The upshot was a country of autonomous localities and regions, each cut off from its neighbors by mountains, deserts, or tropical jungles. It was a world of isolated communities. A town might have a bountiful corn crop, and on the other side of a mountain neighbors faced famine. States and municipalities, strapped for cash, levied taxes (alcabalas) on merchandise that entered from outside their boundaries. Smuggling flourished at every port, especially at Veracruz, the exchequer of the Republic. The cities, particularly Mexico City, were worlds apart from the remote villages and towns of rural Mexico. Few dispute that geography, and the failure of Spaniards to deal with it, blocked change.
When Charles I asked, “What is the land like?” an envoy sent by Cortés picked up a sheet of paper and crumpled it into a ball. Then, opening his hand, he let the paper unfold in his palm, saying, “It’s like this, Sire.” That twisted and wrinkled land helped set the contours of independence. Though cast in the form of a cornucopia, it was more often than not an empty container. The Valley of Mexico sat atop the Mesa Central, or plateau. To the north lay arid expanses where cactus and thickets of mesquite thrived. Mountains occupied two-thirds of Mexico. Along both coasts rose gigantic mountain ranges, stretching to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, where they disappeared to rise again in Chiapas. Nestled between the ranges was the Mesa Central, rising from four thousand feet at Ciudad Juárez to over eight thousand feet in the south. The volcanic peaks of Popocatepetl, Ixtacihuatl, and Orizaba towered dramatically over the coastal ranges and split the central plateau into dissimilar pieces, while giant ravines swept inland for hundreds of miles from both coasts.
From Ciudad Juárez to the Guatemalan border, Tlaloc, the ancient god of rain, ruled with a grim humor. He made most of the land arid or semiarid and compelled farmers to rely on low, seasonal, and variable rainfall. Droughts were common. The north was a desert and a novelty. On the southern and coastal lowlands of the Gulf of Mexico, Tlaloc annually dumped four to ten feet of water. The rain leached the land of its plant food and turned it into a green desert. Only from Aguascalientes to Mexico City did Tlaloc give his people the water they craved. These were the facts of the water supply. Some 85 percent of the land was arid or semiarid. Two-thirds of Mexico’s arable land suffered from scarce, seasonal rainfall; crops thrived only during the rainy season. Navigable rivers were conspicuous by their absence, and only a handful of lakes dotted the landscape. Outside of the Mesa Central, generally speaking, this land was niggardly for human life.
Moreover, Mexican society had not jelled; Mexico had not yet come to know itself.30 National unity was a pipe dream. Mexico inherited from Spain a society split by class and by caste. From top to bottom of the social scale, the color of one’s skin influenced personal and class relations. Money and education “whitened” the skin but not entirely. How much this prejudice poisoned relationships between individuals and groups in society, no one really knows, but no one doubts that it did. By the 1840s, Mexico’s society had approximately 8 million inhabitants, over half of them persons of dark skin, largely owing to Indian ancestry, the large majority of them woefully poor. A small population of mulattoes further darkened the country’s complexion. Most persons of color inhabited the countryside; whites dwelt largely in the cities.31 Although an oligarchy of whites, mostly criollos, ruled the roost, a mestizo universe toiled beneath it. The shaky pyramid rested on a bronze base, with mestizos exploiting Indians, and both criollos and light-skinned mestizos of the upper strata riding herd over everyone.
At the pinnacle, an oligarchy of criollos, increasingly infiltrated by mestizos, quarreled and split into factions; some became Federalists, and others joined the Conservative camp. The day when the well-off worried about the less fortunate had yet to dawn. By their “selfishness and cowardice,” to quote Justo Sierra, the rich “were almost wholly withdrawn from public affairs, endlessly parroting in the drawing room their favorite maxim.” Just below them, “bureaucrats served those who paid them . . . and plotted with deadly, unrelenting solidarity against those who failed to pay them.”32 One discovered the true Mexican character among the whites, proclaimed immodestly by José María Luis Mora.33
Independence, clearly, was not a blessing for the Indians, the overwhelming majority of the population. Their lot worsened. They lived out their lives in the isolated pueblo, attempting to defend themselves as best they could; their enemies were the blancos. Only a minority of them spoke Spanish. Mexico, the Republic, meant nothing to them. They rose before dawn, walked from the pueblo to the field, if they had a parcel of land, and came home at nightfall. They ate corn tortillas flavored with chile sauce and beans and drank atole, a liquid corn gruel. Once in a lifetime, they ate meat, but drank themselves into stupor with pulque or aguardiente de caña, a liquor distilled from sugarcane. For Otero, little had changed the Indians’ way of life since the days of Moctezuma; so ignorant were they that three-fourths of them probably did not know that Mexico was an independent Republic. As before, the tienda de raya, the company store, kept many of them in bondage to the hacendado.34
But the outcasts of society were not just Indians. The poor were ubiquitous. Designated léperos by the snobbish, they filled Mexico City and the provincial capitals, where, hungry and destitute, they begged for alms. They squatted on their knees or lay down, “dirty and half naked,” to quote Guillermo Prieto, a contemporary intellectual. For them, home was a miserable barrio, squalid and stinking, where rats, lice, and flies infested every niche and cranny; one such barrio was Santiago Tlaltelolco, site of the famous Aztec marketplace. The squalor they lived in consisted of jacales with crumbling adobe walls, “mangy dogs, ulcerated sores, misshapen human beings, the humpbacked,” and pulque, its manufacture a source of profits for many of the wealthiest families of Mexico City. For the urban poor and the Indians, politics, the unending national charters and vows by generals to change this or that, lacked rhyme or reason.
Sandwiched between the poor and the rich was a tiny, parasitical, mostly urban “middle class,” its members largely licenciados, or lawyers, and bureaucrats, nearly all of them feeding at the public trough. These señoritos aped the well-off, despised the poor, and feared that an unfortunate accident might jeopardize their standing on the social ladder. Initially criollo, mestizos were infiltrating their ranks. A mere six thousand attended school beyond the primary grades. This ill-defined “class” dwelled in the Republic’s capital and the provincial cities. Public jobs were their staff of life; few could survive outside of the public bureaucracy, that “superb normal school for idleness and graft,” Sierra lamented, “that educated our middle class.” Mexico City was the fountain of public jobs and favors, a metropolis of 250,000 inhabitants dotted with churches and convents and graced by streets lined with poplars and elms, where the weather was lovely, the air fresh and clear, and the sky one expanse of blue. Given the nature of the economy, they could not survive outside of the public bureaucracy. Entrance into government, the key employer, kept alive hopes for a better life for self and family. Peace and order on the national scale meant that officials in Mexico City had the money to pay bureaucrats’ salaries. An aphorism held in Mexican politics: “When salaries are paid, revolutions fade.” Mora labeled it emplomanía, a hunger for public jobs.35
Corruption in public life, the bane of the early Republic, was linked intimately to this struggle to get at the national treasury. A bankrupt Mexico could rarely pay decent salaries, emboldening office holders to sell their services, magistrates among them, to the highest bidder. They did this with impunity, knowing that higher-ups behaved in an identical manner and, if honest, would not linger in office long enough to punish malfeasance. The bribe, the famous mordida, was an accepted fact of life. So widespread was the evil, believed Mora, that only an exceptional public servant rose above it. The most corrupt of the corrupt, reported the American ambassador of that day, may have been Antonio López de Santa Anna, a man who knew his people well. “Some who accuse me of corruption now,” he once lamented, “at one time or another came to me to ask for chichi [breast milk].” One-half of Mexicans, he proclaimed cynically, were born to rob the other half, and when that half comes to its senses, it sets about robbing the half that robbed it. These maladies made a mockery of public office. The cuartelazo, the visible sore of the military cancer, was linked to the aspirations of lawyers and their ilk, who, lacking firepower, could not enforce their will and so looked upon soldiers for support, a gang with similar designs on the national exchequer.
Then there was the army, its officers among the most illiterate and ignorant, according to Otero. Most of the generals and colonels were no more than bunglers and thieves. No general could be counted on to command an army, since few possessed even the most rudimentary military training. Generals became presidents, and virtually every state in the Republic had them, whether as governor or as military watchdog. The army ate up 80 percent of the Republic’s budget, money for ninety thousand men by 1855. Without firm political convictions, though more conservative than liberal, the officers of the army allowed ambition to determine their behavior, placing matters of pay and promotion over everything else. For army officers, the government was no more than “a bank for its employers, a bank guarded by armed employees called the army.” It was an army composed of leva soldiers, Indian conscripts drafted against their will, brave in battle and long-suffering. The favorite occupation of the military was the making of revolutions, with each administration brought to power by them obligated to reward the soldiers.
The worst of the lot was José Antonio López de Santa Anna, unbelievably president of Mexico eleven times, who boasted that Spanish blood ran in his veins. A lover of women and fighting cocks, he had a favorite saying: “A quien madruga, Dios lo ayuda” (God helps those who get there first). When he lost a leg in battle, he jested that the size of his penis shrank, so from that time on he could only have sex with the patria. He boasted that he had never read a big book and delegated the writing of letters, the composition of speeches, and the fashioning of public manifestos to underlings. What mattered was power. When confronted with some challenge, he left the presidential chair to a subordinate and retired to await a better day at his hacienda de Manga de Clavo, lands he acquired from neighboring Indian pueblos, and devoted his time to his cocks and cockfighting.
No less troublesome was the role of the church, now free of crown oversight. The church, paradoxically, was rich and powerful, but also weak. Bishops and canons lived handsomely off tithes and money collected on religious holidays. The archbishop of Mexico spent his days in a palatial house, but most priests fared less well. The wealth of the clergy varied. The nunneries were richer than the monasteries, being havens for the daughters of the wealthy, who brought with them large dowries. The church was the biggest property owner and the Republic’s chief banker. Virtually every hacendado had a church mortgage to pay off. Though willing to lend money, the church had no intention of divesting itself of either its wealth or its influence, dabbling in politics and wooing soldiers for support. A political as well as a religious entity, the church was no better and no worse than its times, its monopoly of education enabling it to parrot conservative doctrines no longer at the forefront of Western thought. Its clergy ranged from the saintly to the rascally, as Fernández de Lizardi testified: “I witnessed this whole scene, as well as the crooked schemes our priests came with for keeping his money box stuffed.”36
On the economic front, two schools of thought held forth: that of the Liberal José María Luis Mora, and that of the Conservative Lucas Alamán. A criollo priest, theologian, and ideologue, Mora looked to Western Europe. For him, this was an age that attributed magical powers to liberty of thought, of the individual, of the individual’s right to work, of religion, and of course, of commerce. Rigid of mind and enamored of the rugged individual, Mora wrote for the educated minority, worshiping the wisdom of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. The “right to property,” he affirmed in México y sus revoluciones, “is the foundation of political association.” He was a dyed-in-the-wool free trader who welcomed foreign investment and opposed protective tariffs, ascertaining that trade with the Western world was the answer to Mexico’s ills. He was an advocate of a “free economy,” believing that competition, the panacea of classical thought, kept prices in check, though willing to accept revenue tariffs to shore up government coffers, but not so high as to hurt trade between nations. He ridiculed the idea of industrializing Mexico: national self-sufficiency was a myth.37 Accepting the wisdom of David Ricardo, free traders such as Mora coined a phrase: “The tailor does not make his shoes, nor the shoemaker his shorts, and both buy their hats from the hat maker who relies on them for his clothes and his shoes.”38
For Mora, as with his Liberal cohorts, a capitalist Mexico required a healthy mining industry, with silver at the top of the list, as well as a commercialized agriculture for export. At that time, aside from silver, Mexico exported only small quantities of vanilla, cochineal, and tobacco, while the mining industry lay in shambles. Silver remained the Republic’s chief export. The recovery of silver mining, crippled by the wars for independence, would take time. Mora believed that the products of Mexican industry could not compete with foreign goods, because Mexican workers were neither technically prepared nor sufficiently intelligent.39
This was no time for paternalistic formulas; the Indian had to be set free, no longer the pampered child of paternalistic legislation. All Mexicans were just Mexicans, free of racial distinctions and equal before the law. Nevertheless, Mora held Indians in low esteem, implying that they were unambitious if not lazy. He asserted that, even when somewhat educated, Indians lacked imagination. Not even the dead Indians of history won his admiration; he ridiculed the myth of the grandeur and enlightenment of the Maya and Aztecs and groveled before the legend of the conquistador.40 He took for granted the superiority of some races. Mora spoke for wealthy property owners and merchants who purchased goods for home consumption and resale.41 His disciples were the founders of the Liberal Party.
On the other side of the ideological aisle stood Alamán, a patron of industry, who helped give form and substance to the Conservative Party. An architect, Alamán was the son of Spanish merchants who struck it rich in mining; his mother traced her ancestry to the sixteenth century. A fervent Catholic, he asked a priest to bless each meal, and at bedtime he recited the rosary. Alamán, who longed for the irretrievable colonial empire, was a complex man of ideas, more and more conservative ones. His Historia de México copied much from Edmund Burke, with whom he liked to compare himself. He saw property as the basis of society; without security for its owners, society could not exist.42 Religion would help extirpate the terrible habits of the poor, the unwillingness to save for a rainy day, the drunkenness, and the filth. He warned against educating Indians, because once able to read and write, they might read subversive literature and awaken their latent spirit of rebellion. Once an advocate of independence, Alamán came to see it as a tragedy. Still, judged by contemporary economic criteria, Alamán was man ahead of his times, asserting that free trade, the panacea of Mora and his Liberals, stifled development.
To spur industry, Alamán, as minister of the economy, got Congress to establish a banco de avío, a state development bank, but it was attacked almost immediately by Federalist party naysayers, among them merchants, as a sure waste of public monies. Its loans to buy looms and spindles, as well as machinery, opened doors to a new class of empresarios (entrepreneurs). The development bank was financed by customs duties and, for additional capital, by national and foreign investors. It lasted until the 1830s, when it was abolished by Santa Anna, then president, this time as a Federalist, on the grounds that funds were no longer available. But the reasons given had only partial veracity. When Santa Anna, in his latest cuartelazo, toppled the government, he had the backing of Mexican and English merchants who wanted Alamán, then the minister of industry, dismissed. English merchants looked to profit from the Mexican market for textiles, then endangered by Alamán’s tariff policies. The British had transformed Latin America into a veritable colony, first through the contraband trade and then by opposing local manufacturing.43
English exports, some two-thirds of what Mexicans purchased abroad, rapidly crushed local industry, which was technically backward and unable to compete. English manufacturers, merchants, bankers, and shippers consolidated their victory at the expense of native ones. As Henry Ward, the English minister declared, Mexico would never industrialize, then or in the future.44 It was this policy, anathema to local industry, that helped drive Mexico to look for exports to pay for imports, the trademark of dependency. This was, of course, what the import-export–oriented merchants who made their fortunes off English manufactures, along with their mining and hacendado allies, wanted; tariff protection, the panacea of Alamán, would have cost them dearly.45
Alamán and a handful of farsighted men laid the foundations for Mexican industry, confined largely to textile plants, their output cheap cotton cloth, but a first step on the road to a relatively autonomous development. The textile industry relied on water power; only two mills used steam. Machinery was imported. Even much raw cotton had to be purchased abroad, usually shipped by boat from the United States, which raised the cost of the finished product. The cloth produced was sold to urban workers and the rural poor. There were fifty-five cotton textile mills located in Puebla and Veracruz that employed some two hundred families. Not all turned a profit, and as Otero pointed out, some of their owners used their mills as fronts for the importation of foreign cloth.
From the start, the shortage of capital hampered industry.46 The local wealthy, what passed for financiers, preferred to work with foreign investors, ties that discouraged investments in risky enterprises. Most damaging to the textile industry was the size of the market. There were too few consumers, owing largely to low urban wages and, in the countryside, where 80 percent of the people lived, peonage. In his writings, Otero spoke of the abject poverty of the masses, while Fernández Lizardi recalled “crowds of vagrants who wander around meeting each other in the streets or lying drunk or . . . hanging out in pool halls, pulque stands and taverns.” Decades earlier, Alexander von Humboldt had written of the hunger of the poor. Unemployment had a foothold in city and countryside, not to mention the mining industry, then in decline. In 1845, according to official statistics, average per capita yearly income stood at about 56 pesos; in the United States it was 274 pesos, and in Great Britain 323 pesos.47 The country clearly could not count on the buying power of its inhabitants to support industry.
Tariff wars erupted with the drive for industry. No sooner was independence won, than a battle broke out between free traders and protectionists. The issue was muddled because the main source of funds for the government in Mexico City came from port duties on imports. Both free traders and protectionists, therefore, supported “revenue tariffs,” not necessarily protectionist measures but ad hoc levies on specific items. In the beginning, tariffs on behalf of woolen and cotton cloth woven by artesanos and the old obrajes had the upper hand. Smuggling drastically reduced revenue from tariffs collected at the ports, which was required to keep the ship of state afloat. Veracruz, where powerful merchants ran affairs, played a key role: most imports entered through the port, while its duties amounted to three-fourths of the income of the national exchequer. The financial stability of the government, whether Liberal or Conservative, depended on duties collected on imports and exports. Mexicans went back and forth on the matter of tariffs, adjusting tariff levels in 1829, 1837, and 1842, theoretically on behalf of a variety of articles but largely cotton cloth. As Alamán noted, absent cheap cotton and wool, capital to invest, and modern machinery, the textile industry, unless protected, could not hold its own. It was a catch-22 situation, because tariffs on behalf of the textile industry spurred the smuggling of cheaper English cloth and reduced revenue at the ports; conversely, the absence of tariffs (free trade) made industrialization, the one road to a relative independence, difficult if not impossible.
The bickering criollos, at the same time, had to confront the United States, which to gratify territorial dreams invaded Mexico “in one of the most unjust wars in the history of imperialism,” declared Octavio Paz.48 That war, which came on the heels of the earlier loss of the province of Texas to American rebels, cost Mexico half of its territory and dealt a psychological blow from which it never recovered fully. For Americans, who bask in the joys of the paradigms of success and progress, grasping the psychological dimensions of defeat at the hands of foreigners is impossible. But the Mexican collective memory is infused with such themes. The cost of the war left Mexico more bankrupt than ever and exposed the rot of the Republic: the myth of national unity; the farce of a conscript army led by bunglers; the callousness of state caudillos, who stood by as the enemy invaded the country; and the perfidy of a clergy that, only on the threat of military force, lent money to the country’s defenders. Yet, when the enemy captured Mexico City, the Catholic bishop had a Te Deum sung to celebrate its victory. Many of the wealthy, meanwhile, stood by, applauding the invaders, and some welcomed the idea of annexation to the United States. When the Americans opened Mexican ports to foreign goods, they reversed strides that had been made in establishing a national textile industry.49 The Treaty of Guadalupe of 1848 put to rest Mexican dreams of a glorious future.
Still, by the early 1860s the winds of an economic revival had begun to blow, particularly in silver mining, which had climbed again to the pinnacle of the better colonial years. A decade later, of the total value of exports, nearly three-fourths came from silver and gold.50 But this was also an era of global capitalist expansion, a time of cutthroat competition and inflationary spirals.51 Prices of raw materials—cotton, sugar, tobacco, and rice—tumbled, the result of an abrupt decline in European demand, which coincided with a worldwide increase in their production. In Mexico, only henequen, a new export crop from Yucatán, and coffee held their own.52 Prolonged droughts occurred again and again, hitting central Mexico especially hard.
To complicate life, the French, monarchists and capitalists who wanted to enlarge their empire and obtain cheap cotton for their textile mills, set out to conquer Mexico. The opening for the French was provided by traitorous Mexican conservatives smarting over their defeat in the War of the Reforma (1858–60), the culmination of the Liberal triumph. In that bloody conflict the church had lost its holdings and its conservative allies saw their dreams of regaining the national palace evaporate. They looked for allies in Europe and convinced Napoleon III, a mediocre interloper who needed little encouragement, that Mexicans awaited a European savior with open arms. The French Intervention and the ephemeral monarchy of Maximilian, an Austrian archduke, cost Mexico dearly. Speaking of this thwarted imperial enterprise, Marx would label it, with abundant justification, “one of the most monstrous in the annals of history.”53 To make matters worse, the United States intervened officiously in Mexican affairs, barely concealing its designs for more territorial conquests and demanding transit rights over the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, while Antonio López de Santa Anna, again president, had to sell the Gadsden territory, a large slice that eventually became parts of the states of Arizona and New Mexico, under threat of forcible annexation by the United States.
The Reforma and its aftermath, considered the triumph of capitalist ideas, have gone down in the annals of history as Mexico’s “bourgeois revolution.” These momentous happenings are unfailingly associated with the name of Benito Juárez, a president born of a Zapotec Indian family in a village of Oaxaca. The Liberal Party, the voice of capitalism and free trade, owes its life to this man. Much ado has been made of Benito’s Indian ancestry, although at that moment in history genetics and privilege most likely adjudicated one’s fate. Justo Sierra, one of the many adulators, wrote rhapsodies to “that Indian of porphyry and bronze,” dedicating his biography of Juárez to “the great Indian.”54
It behooves us, however, to see what Juárez stood for, else hero worship cloud our judgment. No one can deny Juárez’s indomitability, his ferocity in the face of a powerful European foe bent on subjugating Mexico. As Carl von Clausewitz wrote, he saw through the “fog of war,” to marshal his forces at precisely the time and place and in precisely the right manner to prevail over the enemy. Against huge odds, he held the Republic together, standing for a nationalism conspicuously absent when the Americans invaded Mexico. Just the same, Juárez had another side, one very much in step with the capitalist dogmas of Western Europe and the United States, most of them antithetical to the welfare of the poor. He was a man of his times. Like José María Luis Mora, he put the blame for the Republic’s maladies on the shoulders of the Spanish past, but he failed to see that free trade ideas, adherence to the doctrine of an export economy of primary goods, harked back to the dependency of New Spain.
Born poor, Juárez did not learn to speak Spanish until he was twelve years of age. He went on to become a lawyer, beginning his political climb as a regidor of an ayuntamiento and rising to become governor of his state. But, as Emilio Rabasa, a writer and politico from neighboring Chiapas, recognized, Juárez was hardly an Indian, even though he was born one and was swarthy and short of stature, with the profile of an Aztec deity.55 Juárez never took pride in his indigenous roots; he had little good to say about Indians, seeing his ancestors through the eyes of Westerners and holding village customs and traditions in contempt. Rarely did he refer to his Zapotec ancestry. If he ever had the Indians’ salvation on his mind, he thought of education, the formula of the conservative who hates to unduly rock the boat, and urged the colonization of Mexico’s empty lands by Europeans. By schooling and values and by his behavior, he was a middle-class Mexican. Speaking and writing in Spanish, and as a lawyer thinking in Spanish, he did not see himself as an “Indian.” No one recalls that he also spoke Zapotec, his ancestral tongue. When Juárez married, he chose the daughter of a family of Italian origin, one of the wealthiest of the City of Oaxaca, for whom Juárez’s sister had once served as a maid. She was, Sierra recalled, “white of skin.” The absence of a racially homogeneous ruling class had opened doors to Juárez, an ambitious, pragmatic political man.56
Not until his exile in New Orleans in the 1850s, where he met Melchor Ocampo, a Liberal Party firebrand, did Juárez fully embrace liberal ideas. He learned much from Ocampo. Known as the filósofo de la Reforma, Ocampo, who uncritically admired “European civilization,” personified the spread of Western capitalist ideology among Mexican reformers.57 Three times governor of Michoacán, he owned the biggest hacienda of the Valley of Maravatío, home to 787 inhabitants, among them family members, employees, “capataces” (field bosses), and peons, whom he reputedly treated fairly.58 He thought ill of the hacendado who employed the tienda de raya to lend money to his workers, making them peones acasillados, and he tried to persuade the hacendado to pay wages instead. This was the capitalist formula: the hacendado would get more work out of his peons, who, having money of their own, would work harder to keep their jobs.59 Ocampo was an advocate of small, private property, calling again and again for the subdivision of church lands into small farms. Not entirely free of the racial nonsense of those days, the mestizo Ocampo wanted Europeans and North Americans to settle in Mexico. He considered these to be colonists who “by mating with our races would better our habits and customs, introduce new techniques to our industry and agriculture and spur our economy.”60 He longed for “the enterprise and energy of the Anglo Saxon race” and worshiped the spirit of the economy “predicated by that good man [David] Ricardo.”61 It was “an axiom of political economy,” Ocampo asserted, “that one must not tax capital but income [renta] instead.” In 1847, he tenaciously fought the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, so costly to Mexico, asking Mexicans to fight on.62 He believed his country a cornucopia of plenty, one of the richest in the world: “God gave us everything” but, he lamented, “we have squandered nearly all of it.”63
Like José María Luis Mora, Juárez belittled the Spanish past, labeling it backward and unenlightened.64 His economic views were derived from Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill, his political faith from Jean-Jacques Rousseau and François Quesnay. In theory, laissez-faire was his credo, reserving for the state only a passive role, chiefly as a safeguard for the basic rights of the individual. He believed private property to be sacrosanct.65 He rejected high tariffs on behalf of industry, holding aloft the ideal of a free market, a key to it being a high level of international trade, the spur for national prosperity.66 Still, the number of the textile mills grew slightly under his watch, some powered not just by water but by steam. Here and there one encountered soap and candle factories.
The generation of Juárez was the first to openly break with colonial traditions, transforming a struggle to rid the country of old beliefs into a search for a national identity, albeit one based on Western values.67 For the victors, Liberalism, the visible face of capitalism, was not a system but a state of nature, thus the need to convince doubtful cohorts to embrace this apothegm. The invisible market conferred benefits on all Mexicans, or would eventually if they just believed. English and French Liberalism, it was claimed, would shower favors on Mexicans until the angel Gabriel blew his horn on Judgment Day. With Liberalism came the doctrine of secularism, by which the state would employ its resources to limit the role of Catholic clergy and religion in the public sphere.
At one tertulia (literary club) after another, poets, writers, and intellectuals met to talk and debate Western ideas, the influence of French thinkers permeating the atmosphere.68 One of them was Guillermo Prieto, later, on four occasions, head of the ministry of hacienda. A fervent apostle of Western culture, he never questioned the truth of Adam Smith’s assertions and never doubted the efficacy of the laws of supply and demand. Above all, he was an enthusiastic free trader. “The faith I have in free trade,” so goes a famous quote of his, “is the faith I have in all sublime manifestations of liberty.”69 No less important was Ignacio Ramírez, also a member of Juárez’s cabinet and, like Prieto, a disciple of Smith who had also read Malthus’s treatise on population. A free trader, Ramírez looked askance at protective tariffs and, as a delegate to the constitutional convention of 1857, he had much to say on matters dealing with international commerce.70 Another delegate, Ignacio Vallarta, a provincial lawyer, worshiped the virtues of competition, saying that they had amply validated the ineffectiveness of protective measures. For Miguel Lerdo de Tejada, successor to Juárez in the presidency, the foreign commerce of a nation was no more than the interchange of surplus merchandise. This was, of course, the old Ricardian law of comparative advantage. Lerdo justified tariffs only if they did not unduly disrupt international trade.71
Oddly, out of this mélange of free traders and mimics of the European and North American capitalist model there emerged an anomalous figure: Ignacio Manuel Altamirano, a pure-blooded Indian from Tixtla, a village in Guerrero. Altamirano was small of stature, with deeply bronze skin “the color of the Aztecs”; he had a wide, flat nose and was proud of his Mexican heritage. But he was also a free trader. He recalled in La Navidad en las montañas that he was happiest when visiting a rural hamlet, where he “forgot his troubles.” Simple virtues, he concluded, were rarely part of life in the “opulent cities,” places of a society “tormented by terrible passions.”72 But Altamirano was the upholder of European concepts of female beauty: “tall, white and thin,” as he wrote in Atenea, a novel set in Venice with scenes of Roman palaces, gorgeous Italian women, and gondolas on canals.73 Versed in the classics, Altamirano had an exalted faith in the ideals of the French Revolution. Yet he glorified his Mexican soul, chastising authors for neglecting Mexican themes, asserting that the structure of the French novel, which he found “unsuitable for our customs and manner of thinking,” had led to mediocrity. He told writers that it was not enough to want to entertain: the novel had to inculcate moral, ideological, and patriotic values, using typically Mexican themes taken from the pre-Hispanic past, three centuries of colonial rule, and the wars for independence. This free trader went on to become the father of Mexico’s national literature.74
The Republica Restaurada (1867–75), the years of Juárez’s rule, inherited an empty pantry that invited foreign meddling in Mexico’s affairs.75 Lucas Alamán, in one of his less lucid moments, had naively proclaimed that it was sound policy to borrow from Europeans, especially the English, in order to identify their economic interests with Mexico. In that manner, he explained, they would rush to Mexico’s defense if it was threatened by the United States, a country he distrusted. English bankers stood ready to oblige. In 1824, Mexico had borrowed 16 million pesos from Goldshmitt & Company, a London firm, and a few moths afterward, additional money from Barclay & Company. From these loans, the Republic received, by all accounts, only about 12 million pesos.76 Those loans, on top of the debt inherited from the wars for independence, marked the beginning of the national burden. That debt over time planted in the Mexican mind the nagging fear of national insolvency.
The Ley Lerdo of 1856, the cement and steel of the Reforma, enshrined the cardinal principle that property must be owned by private individuals.77 To achieve that goal, the Liberals legislated the desamortización (disentailment) of corporate property, which barred ecclesiastical corporations from owning it. The objective was a mishmash of liberal dogmas, resting on the wild assumption that disentailment would create yeoman farmers, a cornerstone of a healthy capitalist society. To the sorrow of apologists for the Reforma, the Ley Lerdo also took in the ejido, the communal lands of the Indian pueblos, which had to subdivide their communal lands among those who tilled them. The Indians, either because they misunderstood the intent of the legislation or, more likely, because they knew that it guaranteed the breakup of their community, did not comply. When the Indians failed to comply, rancheros and hacendados denounced the lands in order to buy them for piddling sums. True, if the Indians did not take the disentailment lying down, the Liberals backtracked a bit and declared that thenceforth ejido parcels would be given only to their tillers. That, nonetheless, failed to halt the acquisition of communal lands by greedy outsiders, who colluded with local, state, and federal authorities to circumvent the law, at times, the record shows, by giving Indians mescal. The Caste War in Yucatán, the uprising of Manuel Lozada in Nayarit, and the burning of cane fields by campesinos in Morelos persuaded the Liberals to plunge ahead with their plans to destroy the Indian community, which, they rightly assumed, was the citadel of Indian resistance.78
The soul of the Reforma was the Constitution of 1857, which included the Ley Lerdo as Article 27. No Indian, campesino, or urban worker darkened the halls of the convention that drew it up. The delegates were arch-typically representatives of the tiny, provincial “middle class,” over half of them licenciados, who found guidance in the Rights of Man of the French Revolution and, for the political organization of the Republic, in the Constitution of the United States. According to the Mexican charter, imbued with the logic of Rousseau, “man is born free” and “nature created all men equal.” With the stroke of a pen, social classes and differences of race vanished. The truth was that the charter had little meaning for a people unprepared for Western-style democracy.79 Equally certain, as Ponciano Arriaga, another influential writer and politician, noted, nothing was done to improve the lot of society, where a tiny minority monopolized the land and the country’s wealth.
The framers of the document of 1857 had simply affirmed the rights of the nascent burguesía. Nothing in the charter called for a social transformation of society. So doctrinaire were the framers of the Constitution that even Ignacio Ramírez, the radical among them, and a man troubled by social inequalities, felt no qualms, because “Mexican capitalists were not enemies of the working man.”80 The charter’s framers had not hesitated to write in guarantees for capitalists, as Ramírez explained, pointing out that nothing in the charter obligated the state to provide jobs, a principle enshrined only in Communist societies. The sole right of labor recognized by the Constitution was the “freedom of the worker to look for a job.” Articles in the Constitution called for Europeans to colonize the land, set aside lands for them, and specified that colonists be exempt from paying taxes for five to ten years. Barred was state intervention to achieve a more equitable distribution of wealth and income. The framers may as well have erected an altar to the principle of laissez-faire.81
The intent of the Constitution of 1857 was to enshrine capitalist doctrine. On one issue the framers were adamant: the principle of free trade, to cite Francisco Zarco’s passionate argument. In Western Europe, the industrial bourgeois, patrons of the liberal philosophy, had espoused protectionism, but in Mexico, the reverse held true; liberalism became free trade as the ideology of hacendados and merchants. Although not necessarily averse to industrialization, Liberals never hailed it as a panacea for Mexico’s ills. With the Liberal victory, hacendados and the commercial burguesía emerged as masters of the economic life of the Republic.82
It was believed, with almost religious fervor, that Mexico could not industrialize because it lacked risk-taking entrepreneurs, and though over time they might appear, they would never be able to stand up to their English and French rivals. Mexican capitalists, it was claimed, were few and timid, willing to gamble their money only on agricultural or urban real estate ventures.83 The ability to compete, however, was the heart and soul of the liberal formula. Nations unable to do so fell behind the vigorous and daring. Along with the need to privatize church and pueblo lands came a belief in the miracles of foreign investment, the need to court outside money to alter the face of Mexico. Spokesmen for producers of primary goods and powerful merchants, usually from Mexico City, slowly began to integrate the country into the world capitalist system.84 Mexico had gone from a Spanish colony to a semicolony of the Western nations. At this juncture, it was England, needing raw materials for its industry and markets for its manufactures, that Mexicans courted.
Given this logic, advocates of industry never had a chance, for one because of the state of manufacturing. Textiles, the one national industry, survived but did not thrive. Only textiles and one or two industries of lesser note (paper making, for one) represented industry. Manufacturing, including artesanos, employed just over two hundred thousand men and women; those in agriculture dwarfed this figure.85 The centers of industry, basically textiles, were Puebla, Guanajuato, and Veracruz, replete with antiquated machinery. Prieto even talked of the “paralysis” of industry.86 Imports of fine cotton cloth and clothes, much of them contraband goods purchased by the wealthy, had risen despite a tariff hike in 1872. Some textile magnates, moreover, had damaged their cause. In Puebla, site of the largest concentration of mills, their owners had bet on the wrong horse during the War of the Reforma and later sided with the French invaders, while church propaganda, unbelievably, equated industrialization with Communism. When the Republic enjoyed economic growth, it was thanks to the sale of silver.87
Committed to an export economy of primary goods, the Liberals did little to stimulate the growth of a consumer class.88 Nothing better documents this than their willingness to sit by and watch the growing concentration of land. Whether campesinos, the majority of Mexicans, had any purchasing power or not apparently troubled few of them. They helped fortify the latifundia of yore, and debt peonage too. Both Juárez and Lerdo de Tejada, acolytes of private property, regarded corporate ownership as the devil incarnate of economic development, a nefarious colonial vestige. So in 1863 the Liberals approved legislation declaring the terrenos baldíos, so-called unoccupied lands, open for sale. To no one’s surprise, these lands included pueblo holdings.89 Unless the Indians could prove title to them, which required documentation, anyone could lay claim to them. The result was a wild speculation in rural real estate at the expense of the pueblos. Voracious hacendados, and empresarios eager to share country life, took advantage of the legislation to enhance their holdings, blaming, incredibly as it may sound, the poverty of the disposed. For doctrinaire Liberals, privately held land, no matter what its size, led to economic development. Mexico now had a bigger gang of landowners, as well as a bigger mass of landless campesinos unable to buy much of anything.
Defenders of Juárez—and they are legion—believe that the goal had been the Jeffersonian ideal of small private property. But this grand scheme, if it truly existed, came to life only here and there, in the Bajío, for example, where some church lands were subdivided. Nor were the Liberals blind to what was going on. One had to close one’s eyes not see the thousands of landless rural families and the jobless masses in the countryside. The agrarian question, moreover, had come before the delegates at the Constitutional Convention of 1857, but they did nothing. It is impossible to believe that the Liberals did not know what was the condition of rural Mexico. Some even brought it to the attention of their companions. One of them, Ponciano Arriaga, decried how a few had “huge expanses of land lying fallow that could provide a living for millions of men,” while others dwelled in abject poverty, “without land, a place to call home, and a job.” How, he asked, can a people be free, regardless of what theories, constitutions, and laws proclaim, given society’s “heartless economic system”?90 To quote a popular Mexican saying, “The rich got richer, but no poor man became less poor.”
Nothing tells you more about the Liberal mentality than how it dealt with the ostracized Indians. At midcentury, the Indians—to state again, the poorest of the poor—made up more than half of the Republic’s inhabitants. If Mexico were to jettison the much-maligned colonial heritage, the Indian had to come along, else he be the anchor keeping the past alive. Yet, when it came to implementing their cherished capitalism, the Liberals behaved ruthlessly. Some of these Liberal gentlemen displayed outright fear and loathing toward the Indians. Guillermo Prieto, to cite one, voiced repugnance for the idolatrous religions, the “accursed offerings to the gods in the somber and melancholy world of the indigenous races.”91 In the Indian past, to quote Ignacio Ramírez, “terror made the social body tremble and people consisted of subjects and slaves.”92 “We have become the ‘gachupines’ [Spanish masters] of the Indian,” tardily confessed a chagrined Prieto.93
Closely tied to the land issue, and the jaundiced view of Indians, was the Liberal worship of European colonists. Wanting to stimulate Mexican agriculture, but not at the expense of the hacendados, the Liberals trotted out the hoary idea of inviting Europeans to settle in Mexico. Farmers especially would bring modern techniques to agriculture and, at the same time, stimulate the growth of small, private property. It was also claimed that they would improve the country’s racial stock. So in 1875, at the behest of President Lerdo de Tejada, Congress passed a resolution inviting “our European brothers” to settle in Mexico, offering them lands at low cost and easy loans. Once settled, authorities would confer Mexican citizenship on the newcomers. As one ecstatic proponent put it, “We must invite them to come and share with us a wealth that we have been unable to exploit. . . . European colonization opens the door to the development of our country.”94
The Reforma was both an epic success and a colossal failure. It separated church and state, gave Mexico the trappings of a modern capitalist republic, and conferred political power on a largely mestizo class. All the same, it worsened the iniquitous distribution of wealth and income and bestowed undeserved perks on mining moguls, merchants, and hacendados beholden to the export economy. The dysfunctional colonial heritage of an externally oriented economy closely linked to sources of demand and supply outside its control weathered the winds of independence. This reliance on exports blocked the diversification of the country’s productive structure, to cite Aldo Ferrer, the Argentine economist, and stifled the technical and cultural growth required for the development of an internal market.95