Upon Diaz’s resignation, Madero left Ciudad Juarez for Mexico City. He made a triumphal march to the capital, cheered by enthusiastic crowds along the way. An estimated 200,000 witnessed his Mexico City arrival in a coach complete with bewigged, liveried, and powdered footmen.20
As agreed in the Treaty of Ciudad Juarez, Francisco Leon de la Barra assumed the presidency. During his short time in office, he implemented reforms in education and labor relations.
To adjudicate land disputes and return land unjustly taken, he created the National Agrarian Commission. Elections carried out under De la Barra, while not perfect, were far more honest than those under Diaz and sometimes selected candidates not favored by either De la Barra or Madero. De la Barra ended subsidies to pro-government newspapers and allowed the press to publish freely. Finally, he rapidly demobilized the revolutionary forces that had toppled Diaz.21
In August 1911, Madero, who was campaigning for the October presidential elections called for in the Treaty of Ciudad Juarez, went to Morelos to negotiate with Emiliano Zapata. There, Zapata agreed to demobilize his forces in exchange for Madero’s promise of land reform. However, as the Zapatistas were turning in their arms, De la Barra declared that he would not negotiate with “bandits” and ordered troops under General Victoriano Huerta to move into Morelos and disarm remaining Zapatistas.
Fighting broke out between the Zapatistas and Huerta’s force. Despite further negotiation with Madero, Zapata said no more guns would be turned in until land reform became a reality. Huerta attempted to wrest Morelos from Zapatista control, but was unable to suppress Zapata’s forces. De la Barra’s heavy-handed response to the Zapatistas left Madero with a problem that he would be unable to resolve during his fifteen-month-long presidency.22
In October 1911, voters selected electors to choose a president. These electors then chose Madero and Jose Maria Pino Suarez to be president and vice-president, respectively. Pro-Madero sentiment was overwhelming. While the elections were free, they served only to ratify what had been achieved earlier by force of arms. De la Barra resisted pressure to become a candidate, since he felt the tradition of reelection should be broken. It would be another eighty-nine years before an election actually selected a president, rather than ratifying a military victory or the choice of an incumbent.
By the time Madero assumed the presidency in November 1911, popular enthusiasm had already waned. As president, rather than dismantling the old Porfirian bureaucracy, Madero merely changed the personnel at the top. He neglected sound politics, leaving former foes in office, while failing to reward those who had fought for him. At the same time, millions of peasants continued stoop labor on the haciendas of the Terrazas, the Creels, and other hacendados, just as they had under Diaz.23
Madero never realized his slogans “effective suffrage” and “no re-election” meant little to the impoverished, illiterate majority of the population. Even when offered the opportunity, few voted. Less than 10 percent of the eligible voters outside Mexico City cast a ballot in the 1912 congressional elections.24
The National Agrarian Commission continued to study the land issue. The Commission concluded that only through buying hacienda land and then distributing it could land be provided for the landless. However, money was never appropriated for such purchases. Madero felt that large holdings provided the best route to agricultural modernization and thus did not feel it was in Mexico’s best interest to subdivide large estates to provide peasants with subsistence plots. In June 1912, he stated that it was “one thing to create small property by dint of hard work and another to redistribute large landholdings, something I have never thought of doing or offered in any of my speeches or programs.”25
Madero’s mere mention of the land issue turned members of the elite against him. They correctly felt that any consideration of land distribution would legitimize the concept and lead to future problems for them. Madero soon found himself in the same position as Maximilian, clinging to the middle of the road and lacking a strong base of support.26
Madero’s experience with the press illustrated his problematic position. In keeping with his liberal beliefs, he allowed the press, which remained almost exclusively in the hands of wealthy conservatives, to flourish without restraint. With few exceptions, publishers used their freedom to undermine his administration. A typical remark, from El Heraldo, referred to Madero as “a reptile which should be stepped upon.” Political cartoonists joined in the Madero-bashing, discrediting the president even with illiterates. They frequently played upon Madero’s small stature by portraying him as a child. President Madero’s brother Gustavo commented that the press “bit the hand which had removed its muzzle.”27
Given Madero’s failure to initiate land reform, in late November 1911, Zapata issued his Plan of Ayala, which withdrew recognition from the President and called for his overthrow. The Plan charged Madero with abandoning the Revolution and siding with the hacendados. It called for action since:
The immense majority of Mexican pueblos and citizens are owners of no more than the land they walk on, suffering the horrors of poverty without being able to improve their social condition in any way or to dedicate themselves to Industry or Agriculture, because land, timber, and water are monopolized in a few hands. . ..28
The Plan reflected the enormous gulf between the elite, literate, legalistic Madero and the parochial, egalitarian, and largely illiterate Zapatista movement.29
The Plan of Ayala declared that peasants should take the initiative to reclaim stolen lands and defend them with armed force. Dispossessed hacendados could take matters to court after the Revolution if they wished. In addition, one-third of each legally owned hacienda was to be purchased for the landless. Lands of those opposing the Plan were to be confiscated, thus depriving them of an economic base. Income from such confiscated lands was to support widows and orphans of revolutionaries. The Plan did not demand political power for Zapata’s followers. Rather, it called for elections to select a new government after Madero’s overthrow.
With the Plan of Ayala as its standard, by early 1912, the Zapatista rebellion had spread into nearby states, despite a constant shortage of money, guns, and ammunition. General Juvencio Robles, Madero’s commander in Morelos, responded by forcing rural residents to move to government-controlled resettlement camps.30
In addition to the Zapatistas, Madero faced other challengers. In December 1911, former governor of Nuevo Leon Bernardo Reyes launched a rebellion. In March 1912, his former supporter Pascual Orozco, rebelled in Chihuahua, charging him with having betrayed the principles of the Plan of San Luis Potosi. In October 1912, Porfirio Diaz’s nephew Felix Diaz rebelled in Veracruz. Together these rebellions sapped government resources and undermined Madero’s credibility.31
To add to Madero’s woes, peasant-initiated violence, which had never stopped after the Treaty of Ciudad Juarez, continued to sweep the country. Armed peasants seized land and fought with local authorities in several states. Diaz’s many-layered repressive apparatus was too damaged and overextended to respond to these peasant initiatives. In the countryside, the revolution had mutated and taken root among people with no patience for parliamentary procedure, little interest in candidates and ballots, and scant faith in politicians. In Durango, peons of the Santa Catarina Hacienda, which had been ruled by an iron hand, began an unprecedented strike. They demanded a pay increase from thirty-seven centavos to one peso, the abolition of the company store, a shorter working day, and payment in cash instead of kind. A Veracruz landowner complained that about 150 Indians had invaded his finca “with the depraved idea of making changes in my property.”32 Deep crisis gripped the Madero government at the end of 1912. Madero could not satisfy the aspirations of peasants and industrial workers without betraying his closest associates. Throughout rural Mexico, strikes and spontaneous land seizures challenged his administration. The failure of the old repressive mechanisms that had allowed Madero to seize power also meant that his administration was incapable of maintaining law and order in the countryside. Industrialists, landowners, and foreign investors felt their property was unprotected. Army officers considered Madero a non-military upstart.33
Madero also failed to live up to the traditional macho stereotype of a leader. He was a small man with a squeaky voice, a vegetarian, and a spiritualist, and he did not womanize. He abstained from alcohol and tobacco and had a childless marriage. This added to the impression that a power vacuum existed around him.
On February 9, 1913, military officers responded to what they felt to be Madero’s inability to govern. They initiated a coup and released from jail Felix Diaz and Bernardo Reyes, whom they planned to install as president. Reyes was killed as he approached the National Palace on horseback, thinking it was in rebel hands. It was actually held by Madero loyalists, and he was cut down by a burst of machine-gun fire.
With their anticipated leader slain and in the face of unexpected resistance, Felix Diaz and his fellow rebels took refuge in the Ciudadela, a stoutly built Mexico City fortress that contained most of the local supply of artillery shells. Madero appointed General Huerta to crush the rebels. However Huerta had little sympathy for Madero and deliberately protracted a military stalemate. The rebels remained in the Ciudadela for ten days, a period known in Mexican history as “La Decena Tragica” (“The Ten Tragic Days”). During this period, the two forces engaged in artillery duels in downtown Mexico City, carefully avoiding the cannons of the “enemy” and creating a climate in which the population would welcome any settlement. Huerta neutralized troops loyal to Madero by ordering hopeless frontal assaults into Diaz’s machine-gun fire. Despite receiving repeated warnings of Huerta’s disloyalty from family and advisors, Madero failed to revoke Huerta’s command.34
Finally, Huerta and Felix Diaz formally agreed to join forces. Huerta was to be the interim president until elections could be held to elect the younger Diaz as president. Madero and Pino Suarez were arrested and were promised that their lives would be spared if they resigned their offices.
On February 22, while being taken from the National Palace to prison, Madero and Pino Suarez were killed, although it remains unclear just who gave the orders to kill them. The government claimed they died when Madero supporters attempted to free him. The car in which Madero was riding was riddled with bullets to support the story. Few accepted the official version.35
During his brief administration, Madero permitted the formation of political and labor organizations, shortened the work day, and outlawed punishment by factory owners. He instituted Mexico’s first taxes on producing and exporting oil and made Spanish the official language of the Mexican railway system, replacing English. Finally, as he had promised, he democratized Mexico by introducing universal male suffrage. Bringing the middle class into the political process via honest elections was Madero’s major break with cientifico practices.36
Madero expected Mexicans to put down their guns, join political parties, and elect local, state, and national leaders who would legislate reform programs. He never moved beyond the view that his movement had been purely political and that all that was needed was to set aside the fraudulent 1910 presidential elections and hold new democratic elections.37
Madero failed to solve Mexico’s social problems due to his sharing with the cientificos the belief that the existing socioeconomic system was the only rational one and that it should be preserved. This system relied on a continual inflow of foreign capital to modernize Mexico. In addition, it relied on large estates for agricultural production. Preservation of the system required suppressing radical peasant movements that demanded immediate land reform. To accomplish this he left the federal army intact.38
Madero failed to use the masses as a power base. He was not interested in them, and soon after he took office, they lost interest in him. He failed to allow his rural supporters to freely participate in local politics and to manage their own community affairs. Furthermore, his short regime was marred by nepotism and the placing of his associates in office. Madero was never able to go beyond the ideas acquired during his privileged nineteenth-century upbringing.39
Madero’s accomplishments include ending the Porfiriato, initiating direct elections for public office, opening the door for the massive reforms of the twentieth century, and launching a generation of Mexican leaders into the political arena. Unlike so many movers and shakers of Mexican history, Madero is still remembered favorably. Historian Stanley Ross wrote of Madero, “His martyrdom accomplished, at least for a time, what he had been unable to do while alive: unite all the revolutionists under one banner.”40
World History
