On November 21, 1877, General Porfirio Diaz, military hero of Mexico’s liberals, entered Mexico City after opposing one of the nation’s great liberal presidents, Benito Juarez (primarily out of pique), and then (out of political opportunism) Juarez’s much disliked, much less liberal successor, Sebastian Lerdo de Tejado. Diaz immediately called for a new election, flourishing his political (and soon to become ironic) banner: “Effective Suffrage. No Re-election.” He won by a landslide, one that had been cunningly launched a year earlier by a group of aggressive New York/Texas-based U.S. businessmen. As early as December 1875 Diaz had visited New York and New Orleans. In January 1876, he was in Brownsville, Texas, for intensive consultations with the town’s creator, the wealthy and inexhaustibly shrewd New York-born businessman, Charles “Don Carlos” Stillman, and his son James.
The multi-layered backing of Stillman and his wealthy and well connected friends financed the beginning of what became the brutal Porfirian dictatorship that was to last 35 years, and ultimately ignited the 1910 Mexican Revolution. Diaz, elected by a landslide in 1877, stepped down as he had promised (“No re-election”) four years later. He placed in office General Manuel Gonzalez, a Diaz subordinate in the overthrow of Lerdo de Tejada. But Gonzalez, in office, proved a careless administrator, and so childishly vain he sold off rich portions of Mexico to whatever foreigners that most flattered him. And the “gringos,” it was widely acknowledged, were the most lavish and manipulative practitioners of that art.
Diaz next became the governor of Oaxaca, straightening out its morass of debt and administrative bumbling. But he found provincial life boring. He missed the intrigue and scent of power of the capital. When Gonzalez mentioned an open seat on the court of justice, Diaz leaped at it.
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