Porfirio Díaz

A soldier from Oaxaca who made his name fighting the French, Porfirio Díaz seized the Mexican presidency in 1876 and, apart from one four-year gap, held it until 1911. His long rule, known as the Porfiriato, brought order, railways and foreign capital to a country worn down by decades of civil war, but at the price of rigged elections, a muzzled press and the loss of land by millions of rural Mexicans. Its collapse opened the Mexican Revolution.

Díaz was baptised in Oaxaca City on 15 September 1830; his exact birth date is not known. His father, an innkeeper, died of cholera when the boy was three. He entered the seminary to train as a priest but in 1849 switched to law, coming under the influence of liberal teachers and of Benito Juárez, then governor of the state. He backed the 1854 revolt against Santa Anna and fought for the liberals in the Reform War of 1857–61, rising to colonel.

When France invaded to install a monarchy, Díaz, by then a general, helped defeat the French at Puebla on 5 May 1862. He was captured when the city fell after a second siege in 1863, escaped, and built up a resistance base in the south. Oaxaca City fell to a French army under Marshal Bazaine in February 1865 and Díaz was taken prisoner again, but after seven months he escaped once more. As French troops withdrew he retook Oaxaca and Puebla, and in June 1867, the day after Emperor Maximilian was executed, the imperial garrison of Mexico City surrendered to his besieging army.

Díaz ran against Juárez for the presidency and lost in 1867 and again in 1871. He rose in revolt after the second defeat under the banner of no re-election, but the rising failed after Juárez's death in 1872. In 1876 he led a new rebellion, the Plan of Tuxtepec, against President Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada, defeated government troops at Tecoac in November and entered the capital. Elections in 1877 confirmed him in office. He stepped aside in 1880 for his ally Manuel González, then returned to the presidency in 1884 and had the constitution amended to allow unlimited re-election.

Díaz governed through patronage and force, a choice captured in the slogan "pan o palo", bread or the club. Opposition parties were suppressed, governors and Congress answered to him, and the courts and newspapers were brought under control. He tamed regional military chiefs and expanded the rural police. A circle of technocrats around the finance minister José Yves Limantour, the científicos, stabilised public finances, while foreign investors built railways and developed mines, oil and export farming. Land surveys and the break-up of communal holdings transferred huge areas to large estates and foreign companies, leaving many villagers landless, and the regime fought long wars against the Yaqui and the Maya.

In a 1908 interview with the American journalist James Creelman, Díaz said Mexico was ready for democracy and that he would retire. He then stood again in 1910, had his challenger Francisco Madero jailed, and was declared re-elected by an implausible margin. Madero called for armed revolt, rebellions spread across the country, and Díaz resigned on 25 May 1911. He left for Spain within days and died in Paris on 2 July 1915, aged 84, and was buried in Montparnasse cemetery.

For most of the twentieth century Díaz was remembered in Mexico as the tyrant the revolution overthrew. Since the 1990s some historians and commentators have offered a more favourable view stressing the stability and growth of his years, though this revision remains contested.

Our 1878, 1880 and 1900 maps show Mexico during the Porfiriato; the 1914 map shows the country in the midst of the revolution that ended it.