Mexico
| —Porfirio Díaz |
Mexico, officially the United Mexican States, is a fairly big country in North America. It borders the United States (which has a state named after Mexico, by the way) in the North and Guatemala and Belize in the South. Its capitol is Mexico City, which is one of the biggest cities in the world, and like the American capital it is in a separate part of the country (in this case, the Federal District) instead of a state.
Once the site of Native American civilizations such as the Toltecs, the Maya, the Aztecs (who gave the country its name, from "Mexica", the ruling tribe of the Aztec empire), the Mixtecs, and the Zapotecs, the country was conquered by Spanish conquistadores in the 16th century. The conquistadores, all Catholic, killed and looted the "inferior" peoples of the southern Americas, always in the name of their savior: [3]
“”In one day in 1521, in the Battle for Tenochtitlan, the Spaniards and their allies killed or captured 40,000 indigenous peoples. Justification? The conquistadors claimed that the principal reason for the war against the native Mexicans was to preach of Jesus Christ.
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After 300 years of Spanish rule, Mexico became independent from Spain. After a good 11 years of civil warring the county decided to settle on a monarchy to prevent the Cádiz Constitution (a very liberal constitution) being put in practice. A year later, the country decided to become a federal republic.
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[edit] Independent Mexico
In the 1830s, General Antonio López de Santa Anna decided to make Mexico a central republic instead. This, among other things, led to the Texan war of independence. Then, a French baker complained that his bakery was broken into and this in turn, caused yet another war, this time with France. After finally agreeing to pay the baker (and France), the U.S.A. annexed Texas, which in the eyes of Mexico was a declaration of war. 7 million dollars (out of a promised 15 million), a war, a genocide, and a treaty later, the country entered into a state of imbalance. After the liberals won the election, Mexico returned to a federal republic by the 1860s. Since then the country has been decidedly secular, throwing the Roman Catholic Church into a fit now and then.
[edit] The Three Years' War, Second French Intervention and Second Mexican Empire
Their debt was still high, and England, France and Spain invaded Mexico to make the president pay. Being in the middle of a civil war, president Benito Juárez agreed to pay until the war was over. England and Spain left, but France decided to stay and make Mexico into an Empire which France could control. This resulted in the second French intervention of Mexico, also known as the Franco-Mexican War. The Mexicans were losing the war, but the end of the American Civil War (the American government supported Juarez, and threatened to intervene once the Civil War was over) and the unification of France's rival, Germany, caused France to reconsider their little adventure and they pulled out their troops. The republicans began winning battles and eventually captured the French-imposed emperor Maximilian von Habsburg, who was actually very liberal- but he had come to power with the assistance of conservatives, who he had since alienated with his liberal policies; and liberals were unwilling to accept a monarch. After Maximilian's execution, Juárez became a dictator (only he was good enough, hence why no one remembers it) until he died. This made way for general Porfirio Díaz. After a poor administration by Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada, Diaz won the next election and was a good president. Then, he had his friend Manuel Gonzalez Flores win the next election, and he had a poor reign. The wildly popular Diaz was able to use this to ignore his previous pledge to never run for reelection, and he then changed the constitution so he could be dictator.
[edit] Revolution
After 36 years of rule, Díaz said the country was ready for democracy, and elections were to be held. Diaz was an old man, and had hoped to win one last election so that he could arrange for a successor to take over and he would retire. A man named Francisco Madero ran against him and was able to gain a lot of support by promising to help poorer people. Diaz tried to manipulate the elections, as he had done many times in the past. At the last minute, he had Madero thrown in jail, and when the election was held, the results showed that Diaz won almost 100% of the vote, which was a big surprise to all the people who had not, in fact, voted for him. So Madero, who was still in jail, called for a popular revolt against Diaz and made more promises to help poor people. This kicked off the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920, where several anti-Diaz leaders raised armies and began fighting against Diaz. Eventually Diaz went into exile in Europe, and Madero was able to claim the presidency. But then Madero was betrayed by a general named Victoriano Huerta and killed, and Huerta became the new dictator president. Those rebel leaders who had helped Madero continued fighting, now against Huerta, who eventually went into exile too.
Then Venustiano Carranza, one of the rebel leaders, took the presidency and some of the other rebels began fighting against him too. One of these rebels, known as Pancho Villa, needed suppplies got sick of the US supporting Carranza and attacked a small in New Mexico; the US then sent an army to march around northern Mexico, chasing him in vain. The other major rebel leader, Emiliano Zapata, along with Villa, are still considered folk heroes in Mexico.
With Carranza now in charge, the revolutionary fighting began to wind down, and a new constitution was drafted. This constitution was at the time one of the most socially progressive in the world, but also led to the imposition of an increasingly inflexible one-party system. By 1929, a short Catholic uprising broke out, but was quickly put down. In the early 1930s, three presidents ruled Mexico on the orders of Plutarco Elías Calles (the Man Behind the Man). After Lázaro Cárdenas won the next election, he was exiled. Cárdenas nationalized Mexican oil after the American companies refused to obey Mexican law on Mexican land. He also welcomed Soviet politician and communist Leon Trotsky into Mexico. The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) ruled the country from 1929 to 2000; at the time Mexico was known as the 'perfect dictatorship', since the country still held elections every six years and was spared the political instability and civil wars that marred much of Latin America. In the mid 1910s and early 1920s, the revolutionary leaders were struggling to put their ideals into the presidency and started killing each other.
[edit] Post-Revolution and Modern Mexico
In 1940, after Germany sank two ships, Mexico entered WWII and for the first and only time in its history fought on foreign shores when it sent the Escuadrón 201 to the Philippines. After the war, the Mexican economy grew exponentially. In the 1950s the urban population started to grow. By 1960 Mexico was actually quite well off for a "Third World Country". However, the presidents didn't rule as well as they thought, and popular movements began to emerge. One such case was the Movement of 1968. Students were beaten up by the police and they protested against that. After a set of demands and months of protests, students were massacred in the Plaza of the Three Cultures on the Tlatelolco neighborhood of Mexico City on October 2, 1968, 10 days before the 1968 Summer Olympic Games started. Three years later, a student demonstration was repressed by a paramilitary group called "Los Halcones".
These events marked the beginning of the "Dirty War", in which political dissidents "disappeared". After 3 corrupt presidents, in the 1980s Mexico had some change and opened up the political spectrum a bit. After an earthquake on September 19, 1985, Mexicans realized that the current party was not as effective as it claimed to be. After some controversial elections in the late 80s, the PRI saw itself forced to open the political system in the 1990s and lost power to the conservative National Action Party in 2000.
Ten years later, Mexico is gripped by a massive war against local crime lords, and the Mexican people noticed the conservatives turned out to not be as good as they thought. As a result, now the PRI is slowly but steadily regaining political ground.
[edit] Mexico today
Currently, Mexico involuntarily plays the part of a conservative boogeyman for Republicans in the United States. If one were to listen to the average conservative blowhard, one would think that Mexico and Mexicans are solely responsible for problems related to immigration and drugs—never mind the American demand for cheap, under-the-table labor and marijuana that Mexicans, through two very different means of provision, are quite willing to sate.
Mexico and the United States are partnered in the War on Drugs—however, as one of the lower-scoring nations on the corruption perceptions index[2], it is widely believed that Mexico propagates the expensive war, which is raging on forty years after its declaration, due to drug cartels bribing and giving kickbacks to officials at every level of government, particularly in the states at both the northern and southern borders.
[edit] Footnotes
- ↑ Oh no, it's a PDF!
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 http://www.transparency.org/country/#MEX
- ↑ Paulkovich, Michael (2012). No Meek Messiah (1st ed.). Spillix Publishing. pp. 117. ISBN 0988216116.