Speech by Andrés Manuel López Obrador, President of México, on the 120 anniversary of the Mexican Revolution
My friends;
Authorities and public servants of the Armed Forces and the Government of the Republic;
Relatives of members of the military and marines promoted this day;
Mexicans:
The dates of the Mexican Revolution could never go unnoticed for those of us who are sincerely committed to upholding freedoms, equality, justice, democracy,and sovereignty.
There are several lessons that the Revolution has given us, but there are two major lessons: one is that dictatorships or oligarchies do not guarantee peace or social tranquility; and the other is that democratic governments can only succeed if they meet the demands of the majorities and, consequently, get in return, as compensation, the support of the people.
Consider this paradox. Authoritarian regimes end up being subversive. Thus, the oppressive political, economic, and social conditions of the Porfiriato sparked the Revolution. The lesson is that no economic model works if it is sustained by arms and if the prosperity of a few is underpinned by the enslavement and impoverishment of the many.
From its inception, the Porfiriato dictatorship was oriented to favor the rich and turned its back on the poor. Although Porfirio Díaz was of humble origins, he always sought to belong to those on high and to please the domestic and foreign powers-that-be.
He achieved his aristocratic pretensions when he married Carmen Romero Rubio, a 17-year-old girl who belonged to the Mexican elite, daughter of Manuel Romero Rubio, former Minister of Relations of the exiled President Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada. Daniel Cosío Villegas maintained that this ceremony, this wedding "is perhaps the first ostensible aristocratic display of Mexican life since the fall of the Empire".
With the Porfiriato began the era of big businessesunder the tutelage of public power. For example, in May 1881, a maneuver was carried out that can be considered a precursor of the influence-peddling practices and political corruption of modern-dayMexico. The Minister of Finance, Francisco de Landero y Cos, sold to Ramón Guzmán, Sebastián Camacho,and Félix Cuevas 36,000 shares of the train line fromMexico to Veracruz, inaugurated by Lerdo, which, until then, was the only railroad in the country. The government agreed to be paid 12 pounds sterling for each of the company's shares, when that same day in the London Stock Exchange they were trading at 16 pounds sterling, with an upward trend in their price. One of the buyers and beneficiaries of the fraud was Ramón Guzmán, who six months later would sign as Carmelita's witness at her wedding to Porfirio.
It is a myth, a lie encouraged by conservatives that in that dictatorship the government ruled with honesty and administrative and financial discipline. On the contrary, the policy of rescuing the companies held bythe powers-that-be from bankruptcy, a Fobaproa-type package, began back then. These decisions for the benefit of the elites were largely responsible for the country's indebtedness, which reached the equivalent of five times its annual budget. Moreover, political corruption prevailed throughout the Porfiriato period.
Private investment, despite supposedly being the main lever of growth, was meager and, obviously, of a purely lucrative, anti-social, and anti-national nature. Porfirista advocate Francisco Bulnes says that most of the public work projects carried out during that regime were financed through issuing bonds and contracting debt.
According to Bulnes’ analysis, private investment for work projects such as the Necaxa hydroelectric power plant, which cost 70 million pesos, reached a total of 286 million pesos in that period. However, the work projects financed with public debt are estimated at 667 million pesos; that is, 69 percent more than national or foreign private investment. It is worth noting that the highest amount of debt contracted by the government was earmarked to build 18,000 kilometers of railroadtracks under federal concession, since in 1908, two years before the Revolution erupted, foreign companies that owned the railroad bonds were rescued at a cost of 500 million pesos, 52 percent of all public and private investment applied during the Porfiriato in work projects and industries by domesticand foreign financiers.
This operation to rescue the foreign railroad companies was so onerous for Mexico that journalist John Kenneth Turner, author of the book México Bárbaro, explains that in the business of buying the railroads from the foreign companies "the Minister of Finance, José Yves Limantour [...] and Pablo Macedo, brother of Miguel Macedo, Deputy Minister of the Interior, [...] shared a profit of 9 million dollars in gold...". Bulnes' version is different but no less indicative of the prevailing corruption. He states that in the purchase of shares in the railroad companies, Julio Limantour, brother of the Minister of Finance, had confidential information and that with a credit from the Banco Nacional he acquired in advance shares that were trading at a low price in the New York market to later sell them "at a high price to the Mexican government, represented by the brother of the fervent speculator".
With such facts we can understand how the Porfiriatoregime thought and acted. The strong man, the caudillo or dictator, not only shared that style or form of government, but also embodied it. He admired the so-called businessmen and especially the foreignbusinessmen, while he despised the common people, the poor of his country.
In his thinking, for example, the indigenous people, the original owners of the area, were, according to him, hoarding the land and had to be forcibly dispossessed and the land handed over to private individuals, entrepreneurs, Mexicans or foreigners. The so-called "campaigns" against the Mayas, Mayos, and Yaquis were in reality a second conquest, no less brutal than that of 1521. Without even considering the repression of the Maya and other indigenous peoples, the federal government employed [...] 4,800 soldiers against the Yaquis and 3,000 against the Mayos, that is, a quarter of the army". This war of extermination, which meant the killing of 15,000 Yaquis, is not only the most infamous proof of the dictatorial character of the Porfiriato regime, but also one of the most shameful chapters of our country’s history.
Similar treatment was meted out to the workers who toiled from dawn to dusk, without the right to trade union association or protest, under penalty of dismissal and even imprisonment. In 1906, in the labor-management negotiations in the textile industry of Veracruz, Puebla, and Tlaxcala, the only point the bosses accepted from the workers' petition was that they would only toil from "... six in the morning to eight at night, minus two 45 minute intervals for lunch and dinner". And how can we forget the brutality employedin the massacres and imprisonment of workers and leaders of the strikes of Cananea, in Sonora, and Rio Blanco, in Veracruz.
But in the end, neither authoritarianism, nor slavery, nor the much-vaunted progress could prevent the Revolution from arising. Turner, the previously mentioned U.S. journalist, in his book written on the eve of the Porfiriato festivities marking the centennial of Independence, was correct when he said: "In Mexico today there is a national movement to abolish slavery and the autocracy of Diaz". And he added: "Under the present barbaric Mexican government, there is no hope of reform except by means of armed revolution".
And so it was. A landowner with libertarian ideas and full of kindness, Francisco I. Madero, on November 20, 1910 called on the people to take up arms against the Porfiriato dictatorship; on February 14, 1911, Madero entered the country, placed himself at the head of the revolutionaries and after failing at Casas Grandes, he mounted the siege for the capture of Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, with the military support of Pascual Orozco and Francisco Villa.
The victory in Ciudad Juarez sparked an intensification of the revolution in the country. Almost all the state capitals and important cities were occupied by diverse groups adhering to Maderismo. On May 21, at night, in front of the customs office of Ciudad Juarez, the peace agreement was signed, which included Porfirio Diaz’s commitment to resign; the appointment of Francisco Leon de la Barra, Minister of Relations, as interim president, and the issuing of the call for general elections under the terms established in the Constitution, among other agreements.
On May 25, 1911, Porfirio Díaz resigned from the presidency he had occupied legally, formally, and de facto for 34 years. The old dictator, now as ex-president, left Mexico City the same day at night heading toward the port of Veracruz; protected by an escort under the command of General Victoriano Huerta, and on the May 27th he embarked on the steamship Ipiranga in route to Europe. Meanwhile, Madero traveled from Ciudad Juarez to the capital and throughout the journey he was acclaimed by the population, but not as much as on June 1, 1911, when he made his triumphant entrance here, in Mexico City, where he was received by around 100,000 people.
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The behavior of the opposition during the democratic, legal, and legitimate government of President Madero is very instructive of how those at the top, the oligarchs, the majority of the press, the accommodating intellectuals and corrupt politicians, tend to be friends of lies and enemies of truth.
As a revolutionary and later as president, Madero acted with integrity, consistency, and respect for liberties, but due to the complexity of the situation or because of a political error, he did not manage to build a social base to sustain his democratic project and thus confront the conservative reaction.
In contrast, unlike Maderismo, the right wing took advantage of the climate of liberties to bring together all those who felt their interests threatened and built up a civilian base of support for the military coup. In Mexico City itself, here, a group of young reactionaries from the upper and middle classes was formed that encouraged the military coup against the governmentand spurred the population to rebel against President Madero. Even with the nefarious actions of these "fifís", the vilest moves were carried out by the military, politicians and political leaders and Henry Wilson, the U.S. ambassador in Mexico, the most sinister U.S. ambassador ever in our country.
I am not going to relate what occurred in the final days of President Madero's government or his very painful assassination. I will only say that it is one of the most abominable episodes in the history of our country.
In any case, the betrayal engineered against Madero helps clarify the reason for our political strategy. If we were not backed by the majority of Mexicans and especially by the poor, we would have already been defeated by the conservatives or we would have had to submit to their whims and interests to become mere puppets or wimps of those who had already become accustomed to stealing and holding economic and political power in our country. They already felt they were the owners of Mexico.
Friends, members of the Armed Forces,
Those who executed the coup were military officers of the old Porfiriato regime such as Victoriano Huerta, Bernardo Reyes, Félix Díaz, Manuel Mondragón, Gregorio Ruiz, Juvencio Robles, Aureliano Blanquet, Francisco Cárdenas, and others, who had made a career out of committing abuses in different regions of the country and who had earned a reputation as repressors due to the brutality with which they treated indigenous peoples to dispossess them of their lands, water, forests, and other communal property.
On February 18, while Gustavo Madero and Adolfo Bassó were cruelly assassinated in La Ciudadela, President Madero, Vice President Pino Suárez and General Felipe Ángeles were apprehended here in the National Palace and imprisoned in the quartermaster's office. In the afternoon, Victoriano Huerta notified all the governors and military authorities, in a brief and nefarious telegram "that as authorized by the Senate, I have taken office as head of the Executive Branch of government, and the president and his cabinet areimprisoned".
Unfortunately, this crime was accepted by almost all civilian and military authorities. Only one governor, Venustiano Carranza, gathered his collaborators that night in his home in Saltillo, Coahuila, and made them see the need to disavow the usurper. The following day, on February 19, 1913, he addressed Congress and declared that "the Senate, according to the Constitution, does not have the power to appoint the head of the nation, it cannot legally authorize General Victoriano Huerta to assume the post of head of the Executive Branch and, consequently, the previously mentioned General does not have the legitimate designation as President of the Republic".
That same day, the Constitutional Points Commission of the Local Congress approved a motion disavowing Huerta and granting extraordinary powers to Governor Venustiano Carranza to create the Armed Forces and sustain the "constitutional order of the Republic".
This is the origin of the current army. That is why Army Day is celebrated precisely on February 19, this is the origin of the current Army that arises from the people to defend legality, democracy, and to enforce justice. I have in my possession the questionnaire that, still, in 1916, had to be filled out by those who wished to join the Army. Among other clauses, they were asked if they had occupied, and I quote: "...a position in the time of the dictator Porfirio Diaz or in the time of the usurpation of the murderer and traitor Victoriano Huerta”. Throughout its history, this military institution has more positive points in its favor that its mistakes or its blemishes, many of them not attributable to the military commanders, but to the civilian governments that on some occasions have used them improperly, have used the Armed Forces to repress the people.
In Latin America and even in comparison with what has occurred in other countries of the world, the Mexican Armed Forces are exceptional because they have never belonged to the oligarchy. The soldiers, marines,and officers come from the lower echelons of society and have their origin and identity from deep within Mexico.
Now in this new transformation, as in the origins, there is a close and fraternal coexistence between the military and the civilian population. Both the Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of the Navy are key pillars of the democratic and social rule of law.
With the new reforms to the Constitution, the Army and the Navy will continue to support us in public security tasks and the National Guard will be consolidated under the direction of the Ministry of Defense.
I am certain that we will continue to count on the Armed Forces to defend our sovereignty and territorial integrity and, at the same time, they will be guarantors of public security, as bodies of peace and progress with justice.
I congratulate all the Navy and Defense officers who are being promoted on this historic day, November 20, and I call on them to always uphold their loyalty to the people and their love for the homeland.
Thank you very much.
Zócalo, Mexico City, November 20, 2022
(translated by Pedro Gellert)