If our Independence movement cut the ties that bound us to Spain, the Reform movement denied that the Mexican nation as a historical project should perpetuate the colonial tradition.
Octavio Paz, 19851
Santa Anna’s overthrow in 1855 ended the alternation between liberal and conservative governments that dominated the first years of Mexico’s independence. A liberal juggernaut that soon linked its fortunes to the rapidly increasing export of minerals and agricultural products overwhelmed the conservatives, who still looked back to the Spanish colonial model. Even though they had vanquished the conservatives, uniting their country provided liberals with a formidable challenge. During the middle of the century, the trip from Mexico City to the capital of Sonora required two weeks, and the trip to Yucatan, which included a voyage by sea, required a similar time. Moving an army required much more time.2
As their power grew, the liberals sought to dismantle the system based on the Church, the army, and regional strongmen (caudillos). In its place, they hoped to modernize U. S. style, establish civil liberties, build railroads, break down barriers to internal commerce, and put the immense land holdings of the Church and Indian villages on the market. Liberals saw themselves as nation-builders, feeling Mexicans’ principal allegiance should not be to villages, communities, or corporate bodies, including the ecclesiastical estate, but to the nation. For the liberals, allowing males to vote without income restrictions was the sine qua non of democracy. The liberal ideal was a Jeffersonian agrarian democracy where large numbers of smallholders formed a stable citizenry. The liberal program, as well as that of the conservatives, lacked any measure to address extreme inequalities of wealth.3
While liberals did share core beliefs, they differed on application and emphasis. Sub-factions of the liberal movement included the puros (pure ones) and the moderados (moderates). The puros sought the participation of the rural poor in the political process, especially at the local level. In contrast, the moderados shared the conservatives’ reluctance to grant significant power to the lower classes. Rather than being a true political party, liberals were associates brought together more by friendships, acquaintances, and affiliations than by an agreed program.4
When the 1824 constitution was promulgated, the burning issue was the degree of federalism Mexico was to enjoy. By 1857, the role of the Church had become the most controversial issue.5 For example, liberal Melchor Ocampo, the former governor of Michoacan, wrote:
What is the purpose of so many churches in a village which can barely support one? Why are there so many festivals? . . . Why force villagers to bear the cost of these festivals, sucking up what little money they may have amassed. Their wealth goes up in the smoke of candles, censers, and fireworks!6
Ocampo felt that oppressive clerical fees served to entrench debt servitude. This belief stemmed from priests charging agricultural workers fees for sacraments. The employer would pay the priest for administering the sacraments to his employees and then add the amount paid to their debts.7
An anonymous priest from Michoacan responded to Ocampo:
Michoacan, beware of where Mr. Ocampo is unwittingly leading us—to freedom of religion and freedom of conscience. These two notions, as ungodly as they are lamentable, currently serve as
Rallying points for European socialism. If God decides to punish us by spreading them among
Us, our total destruction will certainly follow.8
Most liberals were not as anti-clerical as Ocampo and would have preferred a harmonious coexistence with the Church. However, they did feel that the sacred should return to the intimacy of one’s conscience and the interior of church buildings.9
After the liberal army overthrew Santa Anna, a group of radical liberals met in Cuernavaca and, on October 4, 1855, chose Juan Alvarez, the leader of the revolt against Santa Anna, to be Mexico’s next president. This selection pre-empted the efforts of more moderate liberals to gain the presidency and set the stage for political and religious conflict with conservatives.10
In November 1855, Alvarez finally entered Mexico City. His ragged troops, with their swarthy complexions, alarmed the elite. Many were shoeless and poor, including the officers. From the elite point of view, this was the most dangerous force to enter Mexico City since Guerrero’s arrival twenty-five years earlier.11
As a life-long resident of rural, southern Mexico, Alvarez, who had only three years of formal schooling, never felt at home in the capital. Even after he assumed the presidency, the Mexico City elite denigrated him and his indigenous backers. A moderate politician of the time, Manuel Siliceo, described Alvarez’s followers as “wretched and indecent rabble. . . a horde of savages,” words similar to those that would be used to describe Emiliano Zapata’s forces when they entered Mexico City some sixty years later. To complicate Alvarez’s position, moderate and puro liberals in his own cabinet constantly differed on whether they should compromise with conservatives or impose change.12
In December 1855, Alvarez, who had no ideological axe to grind, realized that fighting suited him better than governance and resigned. He turned the presidency over to Ignacio Comonfort, a moderate liberal who, as a Puebla hacendado and retired militia colonel, functioned more effectively in Mexico City than Alvarez.13
The month before he resigned, Alvarez implemented by decree the Juarez Law (Ley Juarez), named for his appointee as secretary of justice, ecclesiastical affairs, and public instruction, Benito Juarez. This law abolished the special courts established for clergy and the military. After the law went into effect, priests and the military charged with common crimes or facing civil suits were tried in ordinary courts.14
Strong opposition developed to ending the clergy’s special legal status, known as the ecclesiastical fuero. The notion that priests could be jailed along with common criminals offended many rural people. When the bishop of Michoacan requested that the application of the law be suspended until the pope’s opinion was known, Juarez responded that it was not becoming to the dignity of government to discuss with its subjects the compliance or disobedience of the law.15
The next major enactment, the Lerdo Law (Ley Lerdo), also affected the Church, which owned roughly a fifth of national property, including half the houses in Mexico City. This law, named for Miguel Lerdo de Tejada, the secretary of development who drafted it, prohibited both the Church and Indian villages from owning land. The law did not affect Church property used for strictly religious purposes, such as monasteries, convents, and church buildings. Liberals felt both indigenous communities and the Church stymied development and curbed individual initiative by removing land from commerce. The Lerdo Law provided that tenants could buy Church land they were renting. The government auctioned Church property the tenant could not or would not buy and turned the proceeds over to the Church, after collecting a 5 percent tax. Many of the Church’s tenants refused to buy the land they were legally entitled to purchase because they felt such a purchase would be a betrayal of their religious faith.16
The Lerdo Law did undercut the power base of the Church. However, most sales failed to benefit the small farmer and rancher, whom the liberals proclaimed to be the basis of the ideal society. Wealthy landowners, including some of the liberal legislators who voted for the law, acquired most of the large tracts that were auctioned.17 As journalist Anselmo de la Portilla noted in 1858:
The number of landowners did not increase. Some speculators took advantage of the law to engage in unethical practices, some of the rich increased their fortunes, and none of the poor ceased being poor.18
Even though the law failed to convert community-based peasants into yeoman farmers, it did meet two other liberal policy goals— generating tax revenue and placing more land on the market.19
Within a generation, many Indian villages that had lost their land also lost their indigenous identity.20 Liberals felt the abolition of communal land tenure would enable these Indians to improve their standard of living. It never occurred to the liberals that they should consult the indigenous population on whose behalf they claimed to act. However, they soon received a response on the matter. In September 1856, Interior Minister Jose Maria Lafragua sent a letter to governors that reported:
In the states of Michoacan, Queretaro, Veracruz, and Puebla there have been uprisings in Indian towns. Their residents mistakenly feel the principles of liberty and progress, which the current administration proclaims, destroy the social order. They not only question property titles, but destroy them and divide the lands of others. . .
The government, which feels its greatest duty is the defense of property, can in no way tolerate these disorders, which besides being serious crimes, cause the government severe problems. . .21
The government avoided still more serious conflict with villages owning communal land by delaying implementation of the law.22
Young liberal ideologues who assumed leadership of the revolution against Santa Anna implemented these reforms. The revolution had began as a non-ideological insurrection. However, the new generation that gained control after its triumph used the revolution to impose its political beliefs. These young liberals, many of whom were unemployed or underemployed lawyers, had strong ties to the middle class and provincial leaders. However, few had links to the majority of the population—the rural poor.23
In February 1856, 157 deputies, mostly young liberal lawyers, met to draft a new constitution. Despite their being considered anti-Catholic by many, all but one (a deist) were professing Catholics. Since conservatives had opposed the coalition toppling Santa Anna, they were largely unrepresented in the constitutional Congress. The new charter, drafted by some of the best liberal minds of the period, was promulgated on February 5, 1857. It created a state that claimed power based on popular will, not on divine right or the pope’s blessing. Since only half of the political spectrum drafted it, not surprisingly, the document did not produce political consensus.24
Mexico’s new constitution removed the prohibition against religions other than Roman Catholicism, which had been included in the 1824 constitution. Liberals felt that it would be politically unwise to openly declare freedom of religion in a nation comprised largely of traditional rural Catholics. As a result, they simply omitted a declaration that Catholicism was to be the religion of the land. The constitution also guaranteed freedom of press, of association, and of travel, and protected the right to bear arms.25
To prevent another Santa Anna-like dictator from assuming power, Convention members deliberately weakened the presidency by denying the executive veto power over legislation. They viewed a bicameral legislative branch as an opportunity for the executive to divide and weaken Congress, so they created a unicameral body, which they felt would maintain legislative supremacy over the executive.26
By 1857, as a result of Mexico’s loss in the Mexican—American War and rebellions in Texas and Yucatan, many liberals had accepted the need for a strong central government. They also wanted to recoup for the federal government powers assumed by state governors after the collapse of the Santa Anna dictatorship. Finally, they felt a strong federal government would be necessary to strip the Church of its temporal power. To accomplish these goals, the 1857 constitution increased the power of the central government at the expense of states and municipalities. The liberals’ use of state power to force the sale of Church - and Indian-owned land clearly violated their declared belief in local autonomy.27
The constitution’s lofty ideals and its provision for the separation of powers never had much to do with reality. Despite its positive provisions, such as civil liberties and voting rights for males without regard to land ownership or wealth, it failed to deal with Mexico’s single greatest problem—the grossly inequitable distribution of land. Liberals felt that a constitution alone would reform a society composed of people who for the most part could not read and whose life was governed by tradition, not by legislators seated comfortably in Mexico City.28
The delegates debated the land question. Liberal Ponciano Arriaga stated that society had granted the right of land ownership and could withdraw this right. He advocated government action to subdivide haciendas, declaring:
A few individuals have immense uncultivated tracts of land, which could support many millions of men. This leaves the overwhelming majority of the citizens to languish in the worst squalor, without property, home, or job.29
The liberals, given their respect for private property, took no action, hoping market forces would eventually lead to the subdivision of the hacienda.
Conservatives felt liberal measures, such as abolishing the clerical fuero and the forced sale of Church property, were attacks on religion. They wanted a strong role in society not only for the Church but for the army. They felt the constitution should have imposed wealth restrictions on suffrage. Governance was best accomplished, they felt, by a strong executive, just as it had been in colonial times.30
At the time of its promulgation, many viewed the 1857 constitution as just one more document in a series of failed attempts to effectively govern Mexico. However, during the liberals’ subsequent struggles against both conservatives and foreign intervention, it became a symbol of Mexican nationalism. Mexican historian Daniel Cosio Villegas looked back to the drafting of the 1857 Constitution:
Mexican history has its dark, shameful pages which we wish could be erased. It has heroic pages that we would like to see highlighted. However, our history has a single page in which Mexico appears as a mature nation rising to the democratic standards and liberalism of modern western Europe. That page is the 1856 Constitutional Convention.31
World History
