Porfirio Diaz or José de la Cruz Porfirio Díaz Mori (Born on 15 September 1830 – Died on 2 July 1915) was a Mexican dictator and politician, who served seven terms as President of Mexico, a total of 31 years, from 1876 to 1911. Those periods, in the history of Mexico, also known as the Porfiriato.
Porfirio Diaz began life as a poor nobody before rising to become his country’s absolute dictator. Starting in 1876, Diaz ruled Mexico with an iron fist for over three and a half decades, leaving power only when swept from it by the tides of revolution. Yet the story of Diaz is more than just the story of an autocrat.
Although a strongman, Diaz oversaw one of the most sustained periods of progress in Mexican history. Under his watch, the country modernized and transformed… even as democracy was trampled into the dust. A devil to some, an angel to others, this is the life of Porfirio Diaz: Mexico’s gentleman dictator.
Facts About Porfirio Diaz
- Born: 15 September 1830, Oaxaca, Mexico
- Also Known as: José de la Cruz Porfirio Díaz Mori
- Service Years: 1848–1876
- Presidency: 1876 to 1911
- Political party: Liberal Party
- Nationality: Mexico
- Spouse(s): Delfina Ortega Díaz (m. 1867; died 1880), Carmen Romero Rubio (m. 1881)
- Children: Deodato Lucas Porfirio (1875–1946), Luz Aurora Victoria (1875–1965)
- Father: José Faustino Díaz
- Mother: María Petrona Mori
- Died: 2 July 1915 (aged 84), Paris, France
- Burial: Montparnasse Cemetery, Paris, France
Early Life of Porfirio Diaz
Porfirio Díaz was born on the night of September 15, 1830, in Oaxaca, Mexico, and was baptized by his grandfather José Agustín Domínguez that same day. He was the sixth of seven children of José Faustino Díaz and his wife María Petrona Mori.
It was to dirt-poor mestizo parents in the state of Oaxaca. If you’re not up on your terminology, “mestizo” means mixed-race. Diaz’s ancestors had been a combination of white Spaniards and indigenous Mixtec people. But while that might sound interesting today, in early Mexico it was pretty much a guarantee that you were gonna spend your life wallowing in poverty.
And wallow the Diaz did. When he was just three or five, Diaz’s carpenter father died, leaving the family penniless. The family was so poor that they couldn’t afford shoes. There are tales that, as a child, Diaz spied on a local cobbler, trying to figure out how to make shoes for his family himself. But then life wasn’t a picnic for anybody in 1830s’ Mexico.
The reason being that the country was just embarking on a solid half-century of chaos. Until only a decade before Porfirio Diaz’s birth, Mexico had been the Viceroyalty of New Spain, an outpost of the Spanish empire. But that empire had lost its jewel in 1821 when New Spain had won independence and declared itself Mexico.
The early years of Mexico had been kinda like watching a confused middle schooler, trying on various personalities to see what sticks. It had been an empire, been a republic. By the time Porfirio Diaz was old enough to be spying on shoemakers, though, it had settled into a much-less welcome form. Mexico was a mess. The trouble had begun with 1828’s disputed election.
What started as a democratic wobble soon became the norm, until Mexico was like a big plate of political Jell-o. To give you some idea just how shaky things were; between 1828 and 1857, the Mexican presidency changed hands fifty times. This chaos was helped by a number of factors, both internal and external.
Externally, there were all the European powers who kept invading, like the Spanish in 1829 or the French in 1838. Internally, there was the fact that Mexico’s liberals and conservatives would rather focus on dicking one another over than actually governing the country. Then there was Santa Anna. You might recognize Santa Anna from your American history class.
He’s the Mexican dictator who laid siege to the Alamo and lost Texas to a bunch of revolutionaries. But he was also Mexico’s great political survivor. Flitting between left and right, he tumbled in and out of the presidency all the way from 1833 to 1855, adding to the general sense of chaos.
But if the decade of Porfirio Diaz’s childhood was characterized by a Mexico constantly on the brink of crisis, it had nothing on what was gonna come next. The 1840s would see the start of a period when Mexico was more or less constantly on fire. And, when the entire country was nothing but ashes, Porfirio Diaz would be the only person left standing.
The Inferno
On 25 April 1846, a group of American soldiers deliberately wandered into the disputed zone between Mexico and the newly-annexed state of Texas. When the Mexican border guards opened fire, the US used it as a pretext to launch a full-scale war. If Mexico in 1846 was a wobbly stack of Jell-o, then the Mexican-American War was like a hurricane blowing the entire pantry away.
The American invasion caused the government to collapse, allowing Santa Anna to seize the presidency for the ninth time. Down in Oaxaca, 15-year old Porfirio Diaz abandoned the priesthood and instead enlisted in a student militia to fight for Mexico’s honor. But this wasn’t the war Diaz was destined to shine in. Heck, he wouldn’t even become the biggest name from his home in Oaxaca.
That honor would fall to Benito Juarez. Born in 1806, Juarez was from a fully indigenous family – unlike the mestizo Diaz – and hadn’t spoken Spanish until he was 12. He was, however, ferociously intelligent, and had become a lawyer and leading liberal in Oaxaca. Come 1846, Juarez had been elected state governor, just in time for the Mexican-American War.
When it became clear that Mexico was destined to lose, Juarez made a stand and refused to send any more young Oaxacan men to die in Santa Anna’s army. The result was Juarez landing a place on both Oaxaca’s unofficial list of Liberal heroes, and Santa Anna’s very official list of “Guys I’m Totally Gonna Kill.”
On February 2, 1848, the war ended, and Porfirio Diaz demobilized from his student militia. But rather than return to the priesthood, he instead returned to Oaxaca, determined to follow in Benito Juarez’s literal footsteps. Today, Diaz is associated with Mexico’s conservatives, but he started out learning at Juarez’s feet.
This gave Diaz a front-row seat for Santa Anna’s next vindictive move – and, yes, emphasis fully on the dick. In 1853, Santa Anna returned to the presidency for the first time since the war. Only this time, he styled himself “His Serene Highness,” and launched a brutal consolidation of power. A consolidation that included kicking Benito Juarez out of the country.
When Diaz heard his mentor was being forced into exile, he was livid. He marched down to the town square where a referendum was taking place on Santa Anna’s coup – watched over by Santa Anna’s armed soldiers, naturally – and openly cast a vote against the dictator.
In the chaos that followed, Diaz then managed to mount a horse, steal a gun, and shoot his way out the town and off into the mountains to foment rebellion. It was both the most-Mexican exit we’ve ever heard and a piece of excellent political timing. Santa Anna’s new regime was as unpopular as a president returning for the eleventh time tends to be.
When others took up arms against him, it was clear his time was over. In 1855, Santa Anna resigned and fled into exile. He would die in poverty in 1876, having never regained the presidency. In the aftermath of Santa Anna’s two-decade hold on politics collapsing, the Liberals took power.
Juarez came back to Mexico, Diaz came back down out the mountains, and everyone cheered. It should’ve been a moment of calm. A hard-earned bit of breathing space after decades of chaos. But this is 19th Century Mexico we’re talking about. And if there’s one thing 19th Century Mexico was all about, it was chaos.
A Warrior’s Rise
When the Liberals took power in the wake of Santa Anna’s fall, they weren’t in the mood for compromise. They promulgated a new, hyper-liberal constitution that not only guaranteed free speech and the right to bear arms but also stripped the Catholic Church of its power and property. Unfortunately for Diaz and Juarez, Mexico had a lot of Catholics.
A lot of Conservative Catholics now sure that this Liberal government was destroying their way of life. Pitting Liberals against Conservatives in a gigantic bloodletting, the Reform War – of La Reforma – sucked for just about everyone. But not for Porfirio Diaz. Well, it did physically.
In one early battle, he got shot, leaving a festering wound in his side that wouldn’t heal for two whole years. But, politically, the war paid dividends. When La Reforma ended in 1860 with a Liberal victory, Diaz was promoted for his heroism. That meant he became a general just in time for the French invasion of Mexico. Yep, it’s more war, this time courtesy of our old friend, Napoleon III.
After winning the Reform War, Benito Juarez had retaken the presidency and discovered the country was broke. So he suspended all repayments of foreign debts. However, one of those foreign debts just happened to be held by France, now under the dictatorship of Napoleon’s nephew, Louis-Napoleon.
And if Napoleon III had inherited one thing from his uncle, it was his love of invading foreign nations. We don’t have time to go into the French invasion in detail – which is a shame as it’s super interesting and involves Louis-Napoleon proclaiming a bewhiskered Austrian named Maximilian Emperor of Mexico.
By the date of the Battle of Puebla. On May 5, 1862, the Mexican Army faced the French in a battle where they were outnumbered 3 to 1. General Porfirio Diaz was technically second in command of the Mexicans. At the climax of the fighting, Diaz single-handedly led a cavalry charge against the French. So daring was his attack that the French lines broke, resulting in a Mexican victory.
The Battle of Puebla raised Porfirio Diaz from being a mere Liberal icon to a folk hero for the entire nation. It helped that Diaz followed his win-up with escapades like getting captured and breaking out of prison twice. By the time the French abandoned their Mexican adventure, Porfirio Diaz was to Mexico what Davy Crockett is to America. And he knew this.
When the post-invasion election of 1867 was held, Diaz threw his hat into the ring. He probably should’ve won. The only reason he didn’t is that Benito Juarez also-ran. While Diaz might’ve been a folk hero, Juarez was the nation’s wartime leader. It was like FDR asking the American public for his fourth term. Of course, Juarez was gonna win. So Diaz backed down.
He stepped out of the race and retired to a ranch in Oaxaca. But here’s the thing. Porfirio Diaz in 1867 wasn’t a retirement age. He wasn’t even 40. More than that, he was ambitious. More ambitious than Benito Juarez realized. In less than a decade, that ambition was gonna take him from “Mexican folk hero” to “bigger dictator than Santa Anna.”
The Porfiriato
The period of Porfirio Diaz’s rule is known today as the Porfiriato, and its unofficial slogan was pan o Palo, or “bread or stick.” The bread part was for Diaz’s old enemies or others who might have the power to challenge him. These guys got not only showered with money but guarantees they could run their power bases like personal fiefdoms, in return for not getting any ideas about being president.
The stick part… well, that was for everyone else. Peasants who objected to their crops being taken by greedy elites; indigenous villagers worried about haciendas stealing their land; workers who wanted to unionize… they all got whacked with the Porfiriato’s stick. Not that this meant they were killed. The murder wasn’t Diaz’s style, he was too refined for that.