Mexico, Imperialism, and a military dictatorship
General Díaz’s "strong" regime was built around a personal military dictatorship, which was adapted to the needs of the various sectors with influence in the economic and political life of the Mexico’s posthrimes of the nineteenth century (clergy, army, landowners, national and foreign bourgeoisie). Reelection was the main political weapon that wielded a system that sought to perpetuate itself in power;The local political leaders, the state governors and the President of the Republic occupied the same positions during decades, which, above all, with the systematic repression of the opponents of their regime. The political activity was also restricted to a small group of landowners who defined “scientists”, whose participation was limited by the commercial fluctuations of the great powers to which agricultural and miners exported;The bourgeoisie of England, France, the United States, Spain, Holland and Germany.
The economic dependence of this "nationalist" bourgeoisie towards transnational capital was stated by feeling in our country acutely the effects of the world capitalist crisis (1907-1908), whose main result was the decrease in international price of copper, silverand other minerals.
The immediate consequences were swift: thousands of mining workers in the states of Hidalgo, Sonora, Chihuahua, Durango were said goodbye;Various industries in the center of the country ceased their workers and the sudden increase in essential items brought a notorious decline in the purchasing power of the real salary that the Mexican proletariat perceived
Similarly, the small urban bourgeoisie and, in some regions of the Republic the possessors of small ranches, felt nullified their capacity for social and economic ascent, due to the undertaking of the high strata of the Government of Díaz, which hindered participationof small investors in their close capitalist circles;Also relations with foreign capital were only controlled by a select group of raised characters from the Mexican State.
This situation pushed towards a small bourgeois radicalism, to broad sectors of the urban population, which found no more exits to their problem than the frontal fight with the Porfirio Díaz regime.
The Mexican peasantry did not escape the voracity of the group in power, by 1910 he suffered the effects of capitalist agricultural legislation, whose origin was the old liberal concept, which struggled to provide each farmer with a small property;The “Lerdo” law and “wastelands, in practice they became the legal instrument to carry out the systematic dispossession of their land to the Mexican peasant and force him to transform himself into a semi -relief or uprooted proletarian, who came to sell his work force toThe new estates with capitalist exploitation criteria.
During the Porfiriato, the communal lands and the small agrarian property were largely absorbed by landownership, as happened in the center of the Republic, where in a period not exceeding 20 years, 90% of the ejidos disappeared. Thus, at the end of the Diaz regime only 15% of indigenous communities in the country conserve their territorial property.
The economic situation of the haciendas suffered a qualitative change during the second half of the nineteenth century, due, above all, to the capitalist impulse that in a unitary way, led to the Porfirist regime and the transnational consortiums.
The agrarian policy of Porfiriato focused on a precise objective, to create the technical and social conditions that allow capitalist development in Mexican agriculture, so the great rural owners were openly pressed to transform their production concepts.
In addition to the above, the total lack of democratic liberties in the field contribute so that broad agricultural contingents were willing to fight with weapons in hand in order to obtain the desired plot that they had been stripped, due to the notorious conjunction of theState, the Church, the landowner and economic imperialism.
Another dispossessed sector, the incipient proletariat, despite the validity of article 925 of the Criminal Code (1-IV-1872), which imposed sentences of deprivation of liberty, which fluctuated between 8 days and 3 months, and fines of $ 25.00 to $ 500.00 To those who organized a tumult or riot to force to raise or lower the salaries, was organized during the Porfiriato stage and continuously sustained the struggle to improve their salary and life conditions. Despite the "draconian" legislative disposition of the Mexican State, the national proletariat carried out during the Porfiriato 75 strikes in the textile industry and 60 in the railway industry;They also made 35 strikes the heroic workers of the cigarrera industry, 12 strike movements were registered in mining and 12 activities of paralysis of activities developed bakers and trams.
The Mexican Liberal Party- founded in San Louis Missouri, United States, in July 1906, by tried militants of the labor movement, who were forced to establish their resistance in the neighboring country of the North, since the police prosecution unleashed against them by the“Tuxtepecano” leader regime, he had made his permanence impossible in national territory-he said extensively for his open struggle against the state approach. The postulates of this party will reflect a whole series of political attitudes aimed at ending the long life of the Porfirio Díaz regime. Among the main drivers of this political group Ricardo Flores Magón, Librado Rivera, Praxedis Guerrero, Antonio I. Villarreal, Juan Sarabia, Enrique Flores Magón and other Mexican liberals;Some of them, years later active militants of the international anarchist movement were claimed.
The leadership role of the Mexican Liberal Party in the strike movements of the railroads, miners and textile workers, gave a political and economic approach of great importance to the workers’ struggles in the Portimería del Porfiriato.
At the end of the first decade of the present century, with the penetration of imperialism, the consolidation of landownersOf the opposition ideas, the misery of the masses and the national and international economic crisis made possible the revolutionary burst of the people of Mexico.
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