Porfirio Diaz: Oaxaca’s 2nd Native Son June 23, 2022
When Mexico’s most heralded president died in 1872, a mourning nation wasted no time in renaming his birthplace, Oaxaca de Juárez. He was subsequently christened Mexico’s first son, dark-skinned, rooted in the indigenous bloodline, and distinctly different from the white-skinned elite of Spanish descent, the Criollos, as he was fearless in his reproach of the hacenderos and the Church that enabled them. Indeed, his image, like that of Washington and Lincoln al Norte, forms the common currency and provides the national identity, and Oaxaca City is the keeper of his memory. Benito Juarez remains the favorite son.
But Oaxaca gave birth to another president, the metaphorical bastard, Porfirio Diaz. In many respects, Diaz’s long tenure in office had a more lasting impact on the country, but his reputation is so controversial that Porfirio’s likeness is hard to find, even in his own hometown. In Oaxaca de Juarez, where the favored Benito has a beautiful park, adoring murals, and a spacious boulevard, Diaz gets just one street named after him, although, in his defense, it is proving to be one of my select streets for shopping and dining. Nevertheless, to ever reform-minded Mexicans, Porfirio Diaz, the militaristic Criollo, was an anti-democratic tyrant and his story is a cautionary tale. One glaring irony is that Porfirio’s initial opposition to Benito is that the elder audaciously dared to seek re-election, a principled position the younger son proved unwilling to ever apply to himself.
The man epitomized the ambivalent dichotomies of the Mexican experiment. After first making his reputation as supreme military commander in the civil war to liberate the country from French colonial occupation in the 1860’s, Diaz later embraced the European model of scientism, modernization, and bureaucratic authority. On the one hand, he famously opposed the Americans’ hegemonic Monroe Doctrine of foreign intervention—with his most famous utterance, “Poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States;” whereas, on the other hand, his laissez-faire corporatism allowed the northern neighbor to control much of the nation’s mineral resources. Like the Napoleonic Emperor Maximillian he helped to oust, he was a ruthless autocrat who crushed all political dissent, but at least it can be said that he made the trains run on time. And when he was finally removed from power in 1911, he chose France as his final place of exile, with certain regret but not a shred of remorse.
Even his aphorisms smacked of contradiction and the starkest of choices. “Pan o Palo,” alliteratively translated to “bread or the bludgeon,” was one favorite of his, as was “5 fingers or 5 bullets,” which later would become the axiomatic “take the silver or take the lead”—Plata o Plomo. He put these conflicting sentiments to good use during his long reign in office, filling states governments with his well-paid cronies. He was corrupt to the core, but he effectively transformed Mexico into a robust 20th-century economy. The poor became poorer, the Church and landowners became stronger, and they loved him for it.
Diaz came to the presidency by coup in 1876, financed allegedly, and again ironically, by investors from Texas and New Orleans. In 1880, his successor, Manuel Gonzalez, was constitutionally elected, unlike his predecessor, and ruled for 4 years, while Diaz returned to Oaxaca to become governor, but the regime of Gonzalez was generally believed to be a puppet of the ascendant Porfirio. To demonstrate the point, Diaz was voted into the presidency in 1884 by a well-funded campaign, and he never again relinquished control, at least until his ultimate destruction in the Mexican Revolution, for which he is still held mostly responsible.
Porfiriato, the period of his 3-decade rule, is generally perceived as the dark time when democracy lost its way, eventually giving rise to the likes of Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata. Unlike Juarez, who became a mythic hero in the minds of his countryman, Diaz has no myth to shield him. His legacy is forever tainted by the cold light of reality. Never mind that Benito himself was not actually elected to office, nor did his indigenous roots keep him from waging brutal war against the native cultures in order to homogenize Mexico into one people ruled under law—his legend is too great to accommodate his sins.
But for Porfirio Diaz, the man who ultimately protected the Catholics against Benito’s secular reforms, and who railed publicly against the Gringos but cashed their checks anyway, the sins came to define the man. If the famous dictator left Mexico with one enduring legacy, one final irony, it may be this: No president is able to hold office for more than one term of six years. No one wants another Porfirio.