The Early Mexican Revolution: Instability Under Diaz, Madero, and Huerta

2075 Words9 Pages
The Mexican Revolution of 1910 was a chaotic time of class warfare, gruella battles, and presidential chaos, but three consecutive presidents set and maintained an atmosphere of instability and revoltion. Porfirio Díaz was an awful tyrant whose oligarchal reign first caused thoughts of revolution. Next, Franciso I. Madero tried to fix Díaz’s mistakes, but he found himself caught between two radical groups, and his struggles to strike a balance made his administration unstable. Finally, it was Victoriano Huerta whose Porfirian policies incensed the rebels so much that they rose up and caused massive civil war. The man who started it all was Porfirio Díaz. Díaz seemed promising at the time of his election in 1877, but he quickly turned into a power hungry dictator that would defy the constitution and refuse to relinquish his presidential power for seven terms. Alan Knight wrote in his article entitled THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION, “Like many of Mexico’s nineteenth-century rulers, Díaz was an army officer who had come to power by a coup. Unlike his predecessors, however, he established a stable political system, in which the formally representative Constitution of 1857 was bypassed, local political bosses (caciques) controlled elections, political opposition, and public order, while a handful of powerful families and their clients monopolized economic and political provinces. The whole system was fuelled and lubricated by the new money pumped into the economy by rising foreign trade and investment.” (p.29) Because only a small group controlled the government and elections, Díaz was able to imprison or disempower political opponents, and fabricate election results. Also, because of the volume of foreign investments, the majority of Mexico’s land and capital was owned by a small group of people, many of who were not Mexican at all. The Porfiriato was quite happy with
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