Translation:True History of the Profound Mexico/20
19. THE XX CENTURY.
The social cost of this neo-modernizing europeanization was very high. The exploitation of farm peons (acasillados), laborers and workers, especially at mines and textile factories, was very high. The expansionist policy of United States, that under its new Monroe policy, "America for the Americans", was not willing to tolerate, the ever greater economic and political interests of France, Germany, and England, in what they considered from those days, the "backyard of their house". All this led to the outbreak of the 1910 revolution and the new invasion of United States in 1917.
“...Mexico is a country extremely easy to dominate, because all it takes is to control a single man: the President. We must abandon the idea of having in the Mexican presidency an American citizen, since that would again lead to war. The solution needs more time: we must open the doors of our universities to ambitious young Mexicans and make the effort to educate them in the American way of life, our values and respect for the leadership of United States. Mexico will need competent administrators. Over time, these young people will come to occupy important positions and eventually take over the Presidency. Without that United States having to spend a penny or firing a shot, they will do whatever we want. And they will do so better and more radically than we..." (Richard Lansing, Secretary of State for President Wilson.) (1924).[1]
When Porfirio Díaz prepares a new re-election for the sixth consecutive time and power was among the men of the center and south of the country, Francisco Indalecio Madero (1873-1913) shows up representing the interests of the nascent economic groups from northern Mexico. The Northern Group first try that Madero is the Vice President for the next election.
"Madero proposed that the man to choose immediately was only the vicepresident. He would thus learn the craft of governing, so that when Díaz disappeared, he could naturally occupy, smoothly, the place of the president." (Eduardo Blanquel. 1973)
As the dictator did not accept, Madero founded the Anti-Re-election Party and starts an election campaign for the presidency supported by the United States. Díaz does not allow the light democratic attempt and chases after Madero getting him to jail. Díaz was re-elected president and Madero already free takes refuge in the United States, who encouraged the movement against the interests of Europe in our country. With the Plan of San Luis Potosí on November 20, Madero calls for a fight under the theme "Effective suffrage. No Re-election". Pascual Orozco (1882-1915), Francisco Villa (1877-1923) in the north and Emiliano Zapata (1879-1919) in the south will be the first to go along with the start of the revolution. After 6 months of "skirmishes" the Madero revolution had triumphed and Madero, as later stated by Díaz as he leaves the country headed to Europe, "The Tiger had been set free".
Sure enough, 20 days after being inaugurated as president by Francisco León de la Barra (1863-1939) (Acting President), Madero faces the true armed struggle. Zapata gets up in arms with the Plan of Ayala, looking for a real and profound change in the conditions of peasants and indigenous peoples with the land possession. Madero did not immediately change the political, economic and military structures of the dictatorship; an extreme sense of democracy prevented him from consolidating his revolution and was one of the reasons for his downfall.
"Moment to moment, the situation became more complex. The insecurity climate that existed deeply worried owners of economic power. For them peace and security were essential conditions for their existence and prosperity. If Madero was incapable of ordering the country, it required a strong action against the government. More so when the Mexican President dared to correct the illegal status achieved by some foreign investors, thanks to which were exempt from the minimum obligations to the country, such as paying taxes. The alarm was raised, and led by representatives of those foreign interests and by the embassy of United States as general headquarters, revolution defeated mexicans, allied with the largely intact porfirian army despite their defeat, assaulted power and assassinated Madero." (Eduardo Blanquel 1973)
Victoriano Huerta (1873-1916) the "Jackal", peon of the United States embassy appropriated the Presidency, shot Madero and José María Pino Suárez (1869-1913) and will fight against Venustiano Carranza (1859-1920), who will be the leader in this new stage of the revolution alongside with Emiliano Zapata, Francisco Villa and Álvaro Obregón (1880-1928), whom after bloody fighting will defeat Huerta in 1914. Carranza assumed the presidency and started dismantling european interests and the army's Diaz with the support of the United States. Gives his Government a nationalist character on the basis of the 1917 Constitution, tries to start the solution to centuries of injustice, but the climate in the country is total instability. The people in arms and full of "generals" whishing power and redemption, made his Government impossible. The leader loses control and confronts Zapata, Villa in turn faces Obregón.
Carranza is assassinated and Obregón takes the presidency in 1921 and thereby ending the armed struggle and starts the "institutionalized Revolution" or as writer Mario Vargas Llosa said the "Perfect dictatorship", which will govern intact until 1982, year in which neoliberalism is implanted in Mexico, that will have to dismantle the nationalist and revolutionary ideology, to open the doors to foreign finances capital through the signing of the Trilateral Free Trade Agreement, which is the submissive cancellation of self-determination and sovereignty.
"In 1921 the true national reconstruction commenced. Despite its execution slowness and fluctuations, the agrarian reform was set in motion. The ownership of large real estate (latifundio), now banned, would transfer property ownership of small land, because according to the official view of the time, this was the optimal land exploitation formula. Next to it, but as a secondary solution, restitution and land assignment. Thus, despite its shortcomings, the land redistribution constituted the basis of a more complex and productive economy; in the only real guarantee to engage, with chances of success, the process of national industrialization." (Eduardo Blanquel. 1973)
After the revolutionary struggle, the colonial exploitation structures and the denial of the indigenous culture were not dismantled. They were once again only transformed and adapted to the influence and northamerican interests. To start the road, now called "Progress", once again sacrificed the farmers to boost the supposed industrialization of Mexico; they had to put food on the table of the worker at very low prices. The United States would lend us the capital and would sell technology. After the Second World War, Mexico entered head first to the supposed industrialization, which according to northamericans and their "developmental" theories, assured us joining the select group of developed countries.
After just four decades we lost food self-sufficiency, the country is alarmingly polluted by buying expensive obsolete technology; the expected industrial plant, became branches of large transnational corporations, which produce basically consumer goods and not capital goods, commercial television and advertising in general has caused real damage in cultural identity and the conscience of Mexicans, and perhaps the most unjust; Mexico was left with a growing and un-payable, external debt, a kind of "national macro encomienda".
In 1982 Mexico had $ 53 billion debt. In 2002, twenty years later debt amounted to 157 billion dollars, three times more than in 1982. But in these 20 years Mexicans paid 460 billion dollars just for interest. A much higher amount than the 13 billion dollars invested in the Marshall Plan to recover a Europe devastated by World War II.
To enter the 21st century, Mexico faces: neoliberalism and globalization. The rapid loss of cultural identities. The dismantling of its production plant and the assault of its domestic market. The dangerous impoverishment of the majority of Mexicans and budget failure to meet the demands and the social lags. The sale of domestic enterprises, patrimony of all Mexicans and the condemnation to turn Mexico into a “Maquiladora country, that is "give labor for free" to foreign financial capital. To live a schizoid society, as the paradigm is oriented towards the northamerican society and culture; but at the same time, this society despises and rejects us. To lose, day by day, sovereignty and identity, to end up without "an own face and a real heart"... uselessly lost in the five hundredth anniversary, "Solitude Labyrinth"; but above all, that our senior leaders stubbornly continue a creole ideology for "national development". Indeed, the economic model dictated by the capitals and small circles of power of the "international merchants" and their foreign national control instruments,[2] does not change even a millimeter, although it is leading the vast majority of Mexican families to extreme poverty, the loss of cultural identity and most importantly, the alienation and brutalization of the people. Blocking any suggestion of mestizo and indigenous peoples that still keep a living and deep root the Anahuac civilization, which has a different vision of life and the world, progress and well-being; that have a long development process, briefly interrupted during these last five hundred years.