Benito Juárez

Benito Juárez was a Zapotec lawyer from Oaxaca who became president of Mexico and led the country through two of its most dangerous decades, from the late 1850s until his death in 1872. He was the driving force behind the Reform, a liberal programme that separated church and state, and he led the resistance to the French-backed empire of Maximilian of Habsburg. He was the first Indigenous person to become president of Mexico and remains its most widely honoured national hero.

Juárez was born on 21 March 1806 in San Pablo Guelatao, a mountain village in Oaxaca, then part of New Spain. His parents, Zapotec peasants, both died when he was about three, and he was raised by his grandparents and then an uncle, herding sheep. He grew up speaking Zapotec and could neither read nor speak Spanish. At twelve he walked to the city of Oaxaca, where his sister worked as a cook. A Franciscan lay brother and bookbinder, Antonio Salanueva, took him in, taught him and sent him to the seminary, hoping he would become a priest.

Juárez preferred law. In 1828 he moved to the new secular Institute of Sciences and Arts in Oaxaca, a centre of liberal ideas, and qualified as a lawyer in the early 1830s. He often represented poor village communities in disputes with landowners and clergy, which gave him a lasting suspicion of the church's power over ordinary people. In 1843 he married Margarita Maza, from a well-off family of Italian descent in Oaxaca; she became an important political partner as well as his wife.

Juárez rose through local politics as a city councillor, state deputy, judge and member of the national congress. During the war with the United States in 1846 to 1848, in which Mexico lost about half its territory, he became governor of Oaxaca. His administration was known for honesty, balanced finances, and new roads and schools. He also refused the defeated general Antonio López de Santa Anna permission to take refuge in the state, an act Santa Anna did not forget.

When Santa Anna returned to power in 1853, he had Juárez arrested and deported. Juárez lived in Havana and then in New Orleans, poor and working at times in a cigar workshop, alongside other exiled liberals such as Melchor Ocampo. In 1855 he returned to join the Revolution of Ayutla, which overthrew Santa Anna for the last time.

As minister of justice in the new liberal government, Juárez issued the Ley Juárez of November 1855, which abolished the special courts that had exempted clergy and soldiers from ordinary civil justice. It was followed by the Ley Lerdo of 1856, which forced corporations, both the church and Indigenous village communities, to sell their landed property. The Constitution of 1857 wrote these principles into a federal, liberal charter with guarantees of free speech and equality before the law.

The church and conservatives rejected the constitution, and in late 1857 the moderate president Ignacio Comonfort backed a conservative coup and then fled. As president of the supreme court, Juárez was constitutionally next in line, and in January 1858 he claimed the presidency. The War of the Reform, or Three Years' War, followed. Conservatives held Mexico City; Juárez governed from the port of Veracruz. There, in 1859, he issued the Reform Laws, which nationalised church property, created civil marriage and civil registration, secularised cemeteries and separated church and state. To raise money and secure American support, his government signed the McLane–Ocampo Treaty, which would have given the United States perpetual transit rights across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec; the United States Senate never ratified it, but the deal is still criticised in Mexico. The liberals won in December 1860, and Juárez entered the capital in January 1861 and won the presidential election that year.

The war had left Mexico bankrupt, and in July 1861 Juárez suspended payments on foreign debt for two years. Britain, Spain and France sent forces to Veracruz. The British and Spanish soon withdrew, but Napoleon III of France intended to build a Catholic, monarchist ally in the Americas while the United States was absorbed by the American Civil War. A Mexican army under Ignacio Zaragoza defeated the French at Puebla on 5 May 1862, the victory commemorated as Cinco de Mayo, but French reinforcements took Puebla and then Mexico City in 1863. Mexican conservatives invited Archduke Maximilian of the Habsburg Monarchy to become emperor, and he arrived in 1864.

Juárez never surrendered his claim to be the lawful government. He retreated north with his cabinet, moving from San Luis Potosí to Monterrey, Chihuahua and at last El Paso del Norte on the American border, while republican guerrillas fought on across the country. In 1865, when his term expired, he extended it by decree for the duration of the war, which split his own party. After the Civil War ended, the United States under Abraham Lincoln's successor Andrew Johnson pressed France to leave and let arms reach the republicans. Napoleon III, facing costs at home and the rise of Prussia, withdrew his troops in 1866 and 1867. Maximilian stayed, was besieged and captured at Querétaro, and was court-martialled. Despite appeals for clemency from European monarchs, writers such as Victor Hugo and many others, Juárez refused to pardon him, and Maximilian was shot with the conservative generals Miguel Miramón and Tomás Mejía on 19 June 1867. Juárez returned to Mexico City in July.

Re-elected in 1867, Juárez cut the swollen army, promoted public schooling and began building railways, including the line from Mexico City to Veracruz. He also tried to strengthen the federal executive against congress and the states, which many liberals saw as a betrayal of the 1857 constitution. Margarita Maza died in January 1871. Juárez ran again that year against Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada and Porfirio Díaz; when no candidate won a majority, congress chose him. Díaz rebelled under the Plan of La Noria and was defeated. Juárez died of a heart attack in Mexico City on 18 July 1872, still in office, and was succeeded by Lerdo.

Juárez is remembered in Mexico as the man who defended national sovereignty against foreign invasion and established the supremacy of civil government over the church and army. His saying that among individuals as among nations, respect for the rights of others is peace, is inscribed on monuments across the country, and his birthday is a national holiday. Cities, streets and schools bear his name, including Ciudad Juárez, the former El Paso del Norte. His reputation travelled abroad as well: the Italian socialist blacksmith Alessandro Mussolini named his son Benito Mussolini after him.

Historians also point to the limits and costs of his programme. The Ley Lerdo and the Reform Laws broke up Indigenous communal landholdings as well as church estates, and much of the land passed to speculators and large owners rather than to small farmers. This concentration of land under the later dictatorship of Díaz fed the grievances that drove Emiliano Zapata and the revolution of 1910. His repeated re-elections and use of emergency powers also sit uneasily with his image as a constitutionalist, and the McLane–Ocampo Treaty remains controversial.