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Introduction: Liberty and Liberalism in Mexico by José Antonio Aguilar Rivera1

After their independence from Spain in the early nineteenth century, all of the new nations of Spanish America (except for the brief and ill-fated Mexican Empire) adopted the same model of political organization: the liberal republic. At the beginning of the twenty-first century all of these countries remain republics. Yet, at the same time, the Latin American dictator became a hallmark of despotism and brutality during the past century. This contradiction between ideal and real has produced a vast body of literature. Historians, political scientists, and sociologists have tried to explain the pervasive authoritarianism of Spanish America.

One key peculiarity of Latin America among developing and former colonial regions is its liberal experience, the “ideas and institutions that became established in this outpost of Atlantic civilization.”² Yet, the failure of written constitutions to bring about the rule of law in that part of the world is well documented. This skepticism has a long history. Indeed, on December 6, 1813, Thomas Jefferson wrote to his friend Baron Alexander von Humboldt:

I think it most fortunate that your travels in those countries were so timed as to make them known to the world in the moment they were about to become actors on its stage. That they will throw off their European dependence I have no doubt; but in what kind of government their revolution will end I am not so certain. History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining

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a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance, of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes. The vicinity of New Spain to the United States, and their consequent intercourse, may furnish schools for the higher, and example for the lower classes of their citizens. And Mexico, where we learn from you that men of science are not wanting, may revolutionize itself under better auspices than the Southern provinces.³ These last, I fear, must end in military despotisms. The different casts of their inhabitants, their mutual hatreds and jealousies, their profound ignorance and bigotry, will be played off by cunning leaders, and each be made the instrument of enslaving others.⁴

Likewise, an elderly John Adams wrote to James Lloyd in 1815:

The people of South America are the most ignorant, the most bigoted, the most superstitious of all the Roman Catholics in Christendom. . . . No Catholics on earth were so abjectly devoted to their priests, as blindly superstitious as themselves, and these priests had the powers and apparatus of the Inquisition to seize every suspected person and suppress every rising motion. Was it probable, was it possible, that such a plan as [Francisco] Miranda’s, of a free government, and a confederation of free governments, should be introduced and established among such a people, over that vast continent, or any part of it? It appeared to me more extravagant than the schemes of Condorcet and Brissot to establish a democracy in France, schemes which had always appeared to me as absurd as similar plans would be to establish democracies among the birds, beasts, and fishes.⁵

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The independence of Spanish America did not make Jefferson more optimistic regarding the future of those nations. On May 14, 1817, he wrote to the marquis de Lafayette:

I wish I could give better hopes of our southern brethren. The achievement of their independence of Spain is no longer a question. But it is a very serious one, what will then become of them? Ignorance and bigotry, like other insanities, are incapable of self-government. They will fall under military despotism, and become the murderous tools of the ambition of their respective Bonapartes; and whether this will be for their greater happiness, the rule of one only has taught you to judge. No one, I hope, can doubt my wish to see them and all mankind exercising self-government, and capable of exercising it. But the question is not what we wish, but what is practicable? As their sincere friend and brother then, I do believe the best thing for them, would be for themselves to come to an accord with Spain, under the guarantee of France, Russia, Holland, and the United States, allowing to Spain a nominal supremacy, with authority only to keep the peace among them, leaving them otherwise all the powers of self-government, until their experience in them, their emancipation from their priests, and advancement in information, shall prepare them for complete independence.⁶

SPANISH AMERICA AND THE LIBERAL TRADITION

The importation of liberal constitutionalism into Spanish America has been the object of much political and scholarly debate. Much of the discussion has focused on the performance of institutions. As Charles Hale asserts:

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Much of the skepticism about the liberal experience has focused on constitutionalism—the effort to guarantee individual liberty and limit central authority by the legal precepts of a written code. The strivings of liberal legislators to establish separation of powers, federalism, municipal autonomy, and even at times parliamentary supremacy or a plural executive typify the divergence between ideals and reality and between liberal institutional forms and political practice that is the hallmark of Latin American politics.⁷

As a result, Latin America was excluded from the liberal experience by many scholars. Liberalism, they contend, was only a disguise for traditional practices. One of the supporters of this view argues that “eighteenth-century political liberalism was almost uniformly and overwhelmingly rejected by Spanish America’s first statesmen.”⁸ These authors assert that liberalism was a political tradition alien to the Spanish American nations. The British scholar Cecil Jane identified several contradictions within Spanish culture. Spaniards were idealistic extremists who sought both order and individual liberty in such perfect forms that politics went from one extreme (despotism) to the other (anarchy) rather than “finding stability in constitutional compromise between the two contending principles.”⁹ Conservatives in power carried the “pursuit of order” to such an extreme as to provoke a violent reaction in behalf of liberty. Likewise, when liberals enacted “standard western liberal protections of the individual,” Spanish Americans did not use these liberties with the responsibility expected by the “Englishmen who had developed these liberties, but rather carried them to the extreme of anarchy.”¹⁰

Richard Morse finds the key to understanding Spanish America in

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the Spanish patrimonial state.¹¹ The state was embodied in the patrimonial power of the king, who was the source of all patronage and the ultimate arbiter of all disputes. Without the presence of the king the system collapsed. According to Morse, Spanish American leaders in the nineteenth century were constantly trying to reconstruct the patrimonial authority of the Spanish crown. One factor obstructing the reconstruction of authority along traditional Spanish lines, Morse argues, was the meddling of Western constitutional ideas. Anglo-French liberal constitutionalism—with its emphasis on the rule of law, the separation of powers, constitutional checks on authority, and the efficacy of elections—stood as a contradiction to those traditional attitudes and modes of behavior that lived in the marrow of Spanish Americans. Because liberal constitutionalism was ill adapted to traditional Spanish American culture, “attempts to erect and maintain states according to liberal principles invariably failed.” The authority of imported liberal constitutional ideas, while insufficient to provide a viable alternative to the traditional political model, was often sufficient to undermine the legitimacy of governments operating according to the traditional model.

These interpretations are wanting in several respects. For one thing, they treat culture in an excessively static manner; and while it is true that liberal constitutional ideas in Spanish America failed to gain the hegemony that they enjoyed in other parts of the world, they did have a significant effect on modes of political thought and became at least partially incorporated into the political rules.¹²

Never before were liberal constitutional procedures applied in so many places at the same time as in the first thirty years of the nineteenth century. To assume that this fact says nothing about liberal constitutionalism is myopic at best. Until very recently, scholars had refused to draw any lessons from the Latin American liberal experiment. While it is true that many liberal principles flew in the face of Spanish political

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traditions and the realities of Spanish America at the time, historians have not seized the opportunity to see Spanish America as the laboratory where liberal theories were put to the test. Until then, liberals had little empirical evidence to support their claims of universal applicability; the historical record was inconclusive at best.¹³ Why was the evidence from Spanish America disregarded by liberal pundits? Embedded in the central propositions of liberalism, Joyce Appleby contends, “was the story of its own triumph, but it was a peculiarly ahistorical one.”¹⁴ The idea of progress helps to explain why, in the eyes of past and present liberals, the failure of liberalism in Spanish America was dismissed so easily. “Shining through the darkness that was the past,” Appleby asserts, “were liberal triumphs to be recorded, examined, and celebrated. The rest of known history was useless to an enlightened present, its existence a reproach to the human spirit so long enshrouded in ignorance.”¹⁵ Since Latin America could not be celebrated as a liberal triumph it was repudiated from the liberal pantheon.

Yet, Spanish America constitutes the great postrevolutionary liberal constitutional experiment. After independence all of the revolutionary leaders moved quickly to write constitutions. As Frank Safford asserts, almost all of these constitutions “proclaimed the existence of inalienable natural rights (liberty, legal equality, security, property); many provided for freedom of the press and some attempted to establish jury trials. Almost all sought to protect these rights through the separation of powers and by making the executive branch relatively weaker than the legislature.”¹⁶ Within the first five years of the movement for independence in northern South America approximately twenty constitutions were drawn up in the provinces and capitals of the old viceroyalty of New Granada (present-day Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, and Panama). By the time Adams voiced his skepticism about the people of South America, Spanish America had already begun to experiment with

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the institutions of representative government, and highly competitive elections had taken place in New Spain in 1812. Recent historical studies on comparative elections in the early nineteenth century show that one of the peculiarities of Spanish America was the precocious adoption of modern forms of representation and universal suffrage when voting restrictions were predominant in Europe. Studies such as those of Richard Warren on popular participation in early elections in Mexico show that the selection of representatives by universal suffrage often had an impact on popular participation that challenges the usual depiction of elections as an exclusive and elite affair. Indeed, as both José María Luis Mora and Lucas Alamán argue in this book, one of their key political proposals in the 1830s was to limit broad popular participation in elections by restricting the vote to property holders. Moreover, even in countries where formal restrictions for voting applied, elections still had a significant effect on the process of democratization.¹⁷

The “liberal constitutional moment” denotes the moment, and the manner, in which liberal constitutionalism made its appearance in the Hispanic world at the dawn of the nineteenth century.¹⁸ In Spain it can be traced back to 1808. In Rio de la Plata, New Granada, and Venezuela the moment fell between 1810 and 1827; in Bolivia it was concentrated in the 1820s; and in Mexico and Guatemala its peak occurred between 1820 and 1830.¹⁹ As Frank Safford states, this “reformist burst” was followed almost everywhere by a period of pessimism and conservatism.

One of the main weaknesses of the intellectual history of the Iberian world has been its isolationism. Historians of Spanish America, Anthony Pagden asserts, “generally study Spanish America as if neither New France nor the Thirteen Colonies had ever existed.” After all, America began as Europe transplanted: “The intellectual history of its early development

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is a history of transmission, and reinterpretation, a history of how traditional European arguments from classic texts were adapted to meet the challenges of new and unforeseen circumstances.”²⁰

One of the peculiarities of the liberal constitutional moment in the Hispanic world is that the sway of liberal ideas was, for the most part, uncontested.²¹ Absolutism was more a practice than an ideology. Moreover, the Bourbon absolutism that preceded the liberal revolutions in Spain and its colonies was an enlightened despotism. There was a continuity between absolutist reform and liberal revolution: a confidence in the power of reason to order society. Moreover, liberalism found in Spain native support in the theoretical writings of Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos and of schoolman Francisco Suárez.²² For Spanish liberals, however, the “enlightened” character of the monarchy ceased when Charles IV

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and his favorite minister, Godoy, showed clear signs of political incompetence.²³

Several developments prepared the ground for the uncontested predominance of liberalism in the early nineteenth century. First, there was no classical republican tradition to dispute the field; Spain had no equivalent of James Harrington. As the fifteenth-century debate between Leonardo Bruni and Alonso de Cartagena over the merits of Bruni’s translation of the Ethics showed, the Italians saw Aristotle as an author whose texts had some literary and philosophical merit, while the Spaniards regarded him merely as “an exponent of natural virtue.”²⁴ Although the impact of humanist Aristotelianism was felt in Spain at about the same time as it was in Italy, by the end of the sixteenth century Spain had reached the brink “of that desperate obscurantism so characteristic of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.”²⁵ When Florentine political thought was flourishing in Italy, the School of Salamanca was instead devoted to new scholasticism and speculative thought.

The other historical development that proved crucial for Spanish liberalism was the French Revolution. Hispanic revolutionaries would have to perform two different tasks at the same time: on the one hand, to make the revolution, on the other, to avoid following the steps of France.²⁶ The terms “liberalism” and “liberal” were coined by the Spanish Cortes Generales²⁷ in Cádiz while drafting the 1812 Constitution.²⁸

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To recast the Spanish American revolutions as constitutive elements of the liberal experience it is necessary to assess the effectiveness of the institutional strategies designed to limit the power of absolute sovereigns in large states that are found at the core of the modern liberal republic.²⁹

Before the American Revolution there was no historical precedent to predict where the application of the ideas of the Enlightenment would lead. Abstract thinking was much more important in the American and French cases than in the Iberian world. Furthermore, the impact of the French Revolution on Spanish elites was mainly negative. Spanish American revolutionaries knew, from the French experience, where the revolutionary logic could lead.³⁰ These fears were not without foundation: a large population of these countries consisted of oppressed Indians. The slave revolt of Santo Domingo reminded them of the dangers of a social revolution. Thus, the reactionary atmosphere of Europe “both reinforced these fears and also subjected Spanish American leaders to more conservative ideological influences than they had known before 1815.”³¹

The most singular trait of the Spanish American revolutions is the absence of both modern popular mobilization and Jacobinism.³² This assertion runs counter to a long-established tradition that considers the Spanish American revolutions as the ideological heirs of the 1789 revolution.³³ The “decisive” influence of Rousseau over Spanish Americans

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is, for many historians, an uncontested fact. Yet, this interpretation misses one of the most distinctive features of the Spanish American revolutions. Paraphrasing J. G. A. Pocock, the Spanish American revolutions can be seen less as the last political act of Jacobin radicalism than as the first political act of modern liberalism. Not Rousseau but Benjamin Constant would prove to be the most relevant influence for Spaniards and Spanish Americans in the early nineteenth century. The universal influence of Constant in the 1820s and 1830s, Safford states, “is only one indication of the hegemony of moderate European constitutional ideas among Spanish American intellectuals.”³⁴ The influence of Constant is important because modern liberalism owes much to him.³⁵ Many of Constant’s ideas, particularly those developed in response to the Terror and its Thermidorian aftermath (such as the limited nature of popular sovereignty, the freedom of the press, the inviolability of property, and the restrictions upon the military), became incorporated into the liberal theory that still informs many of the constitutions of democratic countries today.

Constant provided Spanish Americans with a practical guide to constitution

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making.³⁶ The political elite was interested, above all, in works devoted to the practical arts of government rather than in “abstract theoretical treatises on the foundation of sovereignty”; thus, Spanish Americans turned to Constant’s Curso de política for its usefulness in constitution writing.³⁷ Constant was also popular among Spanish readers, Hale asserts, because they found themselves in a similar circumstance: José María Luis Mora and other liberals faced revolution and arbitrary power, just as Constant did in 1815. Therefore they shared the latter’s urgency for establishing safeguards for individual liberty, an urgency that “was not felt in the Anglo-Saxon world.”³⁸

Despite the decades of factional struggle and cyclical outbursts of dictatorship that followed independence in many Latin American countries, the search for a constitution and the reform of the old order were the main motivations behind the different groups in dispute. Later on, as most countries entered a phase of increasing political stability by the mid-nineteenth century, the observance of constitutional norms and liberal values was also essential to understand crucial conflicts among the political elite.

LIBERTY AND LIBERALISM IN MEXICO

As political practice strayed from ideal, Mexican historians and politicians sought to reaffirm the country’s liberal past. Many books and articles have attempted to show that liberalism was at the core of the founding of the republic in spite of authoritarian practices.³⁹ Liberal theories had to contend with traditional ideas and practices, such as the common negotiation among actors over the enforcement of laws, as well as long-established patron-client relations. For years, historians debated

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whether modernity had lost to tradition or vice versa. Daniel Cosío Villegas, in his well-known Historia moderna de México (1955), claimed that political practice after the Reforma and the República Restaurada (the era of liberal dominance in the nineteenth century) had “betrayed” the political constitution of the country.⁴⁰ Jesús Reyes Heroles, on the contrary, proposed that liberalism had been successful in establishing an alliance between the middle classes and the lower strata of the population. Whereas Cosío Villegas focused on the second half of the nineteenth century, Reyes Heroles’s optimism was grounded in an analysis of the first decades after independence.

In contemporary Mexico, nineteenth-century liberalism is not just a historical phenomenon. It is, as Charles Hale states, an ideological landmark. The political relevance of liberalism has often obstructed sound historical research.⁴¹ National histories, as Appleby recognizes, rest on a volatile mixture of the moral and the instrumental. Because they “aim to establish order through shared sentiments, they seek consensus, but because they partake in scholarly traditions inimicable to propaganda, they encourage critical reasoning.”⁴² Until the late 1960s, the historiography on liberalism reflected more the first trait than the second. Reyes Heroles, a statesman, was far from a detached scholar.⁴³ His interpretation of liberalism was inevitably partisan.

The debate on liberalism in Mexico centers on the potency ascribed to inherited intellectual traditions. Liberal historians, following the lead of Cosío Villegas, have constructed an ideal picture of late-nineteenth-century Mexico (1867–76). Under liberal rule, they contend, the country enjoyed unparalleled liberty, and individual rights flourished as they had never before—or since. In order to establish the rule of law, the country must look back to its liberal past, these historians claim. This use of history by liberal intellectuals has been challenged. François-Xavier

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Guerra, Laurens Ballard Perry, and Fernando Escalante assert that the historical record does not support the rosy picture portrayed by Cosío Villegas and other sympathetic historians of the Restored Republic.⁴⁴ Echoing Morse, these three scholars claim that liberal institutions presupposed the existence of a body of citizens. In Mexico these were absent from the political scene: the relevant actors were not individuals but the corporations, the army, and the Church as well as the Indian communities. Traditional practices superimposed liberal forms. Escalante characterized liberal citizens in Mexico as “imaginary citizens,”⁴⁵ but other scholars have not given up the effort to establish historically the roots of limited and constitutional government in Mexico.⁴⁶

Against the nationalistic “official” history Charles Hale provides a more objective overall view of liberalism in Mexico. His work still is

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the best and most authoritative account on the subject.⁴⁷ Prior to Hale’s work, little comparative research had been undertaken.⁴⁸ Hale argued that

constitutionalism in Mexico took two forms, the doctrinaire and the historical or traditional. The doctrinaire tendency reflected a belief that rigid adherence to or imposition of the precepts of the written document, however general or abstract, could guarantee the realization of constitutional order. Doctrinaire constitutionalists often took a radical and democratic political stand, believing it was necessary to change society to conform to the constitution. Historical or traditional constitutionalists, arguing that a constitution should reflect social and historical reality, tried to change precepts they found abstract and unrealizable in Mexico. They tended to be politically moderate or conservative and socially elitist; historical constitutionalists called for “strong government,” at the same time resisting personal presidential power. Historical constitutionalism in Mexico drew its inspiration from a current of French political thought that had its origins in Montesquieu and was put forth in the nineteenth century by Benjamin Constant, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Edouard de Laboulaye. French constitutionalists idealized Anglo-American institutions and made their point of departure a critique of the French Revolution and the egalitarian revolutionary tradition.⁴⁹

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After 1857, the principal debates between doctrinaire and historical constitutionalists in Mexico

focused on the democratic and egalitarian provisions of the Constitution of 1857—the rights of man, universal male suffrage, a single chamber legislature, parliamentary government, a weakened executive, and popular election of judges. The debates emerged first in 1878 when historical constitutionalists, led by Justo Sierra and his colleagues in the newspaper La Libertad, attacked the “dogma of equality” that permeated the Constitution and called for conservative reforms. They did so in the name of “scientific politics,” since by the 1870s the new scientific philosophy of positivism had melded with historical constitutionalism. They called themselves “new” or “conservative” liberals as opposed to “old” liberals, such as José María Vigil and Ignacio M. Altamirano, doctrinaire constitutionalists who defended the democratic and egalitarian provisions of the 1857 document. The debate resurfaced in 1893 over an effort by the historical constitutionalists, again led by Justo Sierra, to reform the Constitution to make judges irremovable, instead of being popularly and periodically elected, and thus subject to political manipulation. The measure was designed to limit the increasingly personal power of President Porfirio Díaz. They were again opposed by doctrinaire defenders of the pure Constitution (who did not necessarily support the personal power of Díaz). In the course of the debate the historical constitutionalists, or advocates of scientific politics, came to be labeled “científicos” and the doctrinaire constitutionalists “Jacobins,” labels that became embedded in the political rhetoric of the next thirty years.⁵⁰

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As Hale asserts, the major enterprise of political liberalism in Mexico during the first ten years after independence was the construction of a constitutional system. Mexico experienced in the 1820s what Reyes Heroles termed a “constitutional euphoria.” The constitution became a fetish, a magical object that would solve all the social and political ills of the country. In a way, this faith in written constitutions was new. The constitution was not considered as the safeguard of an ancient form of government (as the mixed constitution that preserved liberty by securing a proper equilibrium among the one, the few, and the many). It reflected not the ancient constitution but a whole new set of maxims and principles that would create a free civil state. The constitution was thus an instrument of the future, not of the past. In the midst of this “euphoria” some writers recommended “prudence” and argued that reformers should consider the “character” and the particular “needs” of the people. One pamphleteer argued that “it is undeniable that the safety of the people is the first law of societies, even prior to the best meditated constitution and even older than society itself.”⁵¹

Mexican liberals followed the French model regarding a strict separation of powers. The American system of checks and balances was little known in Mexico when the first charters were drawn. The Federalist Papers was not translated or published until 1829.⁵² It is thus not surprising that Mora, the leading liberal figure of the time, discovered that the “law” did not provide for adequate boundaries to the legislative branch. That “defect” was responsible, in his eyes, for all the “woes suffered by the peoples of Europe” who had adopted a representative system. In support of his ideas Mora cited the examples of Rome as well as those of the French and Spanish revolutions. Yet, when assessing the lack of effective restraints on legislative invasion, Mora failed to acknowledge that this was a deficiency of a particular constitutional model, not of the constitutional model itself. The weakness of the executive under a system of strict and functional separation would become one of the key

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issues in Mexico during the nineteenth century. This development was seen as a failure of “liberal constitutionalism,” not as the shortcoming of a specific version of it.⁵³

In 1857 the liberal faction drafted a new constitution. Although it followed the general tenets of liberal constitutionalism, the Constitution of 1857 was an original creation. The mix between a strong parliament and a presidential office followed the model of the French constitution of 1848, but the unicameral organization of the legislature in the context of a federal state broke with the models adopted by the vast majority of the constitutions at the time. Innovations also included the juicio de amparo, a form of judicial review, and the inclusion of emergency powers, which previous constitutions in Mexico omitted. The provisions of the constitution were designed to cope with specific political conditions: just as emergency powers were needed to deal with chronic political instability, the unicameral Congress was intended as a safeguard against the previous experience of executive despotism. These were perceived not as theoretical but as tailor-made solutions to real problems.

A central aspiration of the new constitution was the elimination of the traditional social order, which for Mexican liberals had its center in the corporate rights and special jurisdictions (fueros) of the military, the Catholic Church, economic guilds, and Indian communities. The most powerful of these corporations, particularly the military and the Church, soon became allies in the violent offensive initiated by the conservative opposition. Shortly after the enactment of the charter, the foes of the liberal regime issued the Plan Tacubaya in 1858. For three years, from January 1858 until January 1861, liberals and conservatives killed each other with unprecedented ferocity. The Reform War (or Three Years’ War) ended when the conservatives were defeated in January 1861, yet the opposition had not been eliminated and its members sought other means to destroy the liberal regime. The conservatives attempted to reestablish monarchical rule in Mexico. Conservatives’ pleas found an answer in Emperor Napoleon III of France, who wanted a Latin empire. Maximilian, an Austrian prince, made himself available for the adventure and was recruited by Mexican monarchists. Maximilian, however, had little more success than the dozens of caudillos before him. In October

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1866, when Prussia became a threat to France, Napoleon recalled his troops from Mexico. Without foreign military support, the empire collapsed.

The fall of the empire implied the complete defeat of the conservative faction and, in a way, the end of the conservative-liberal cleavage in Mexico. The discrediting of conservatives (blamed for their alliance with a foreign power) inaugurated an era of liberal hegemony in which most ideological conflicts would take place within the general framework of the liberal project. The liberal reform became a reality. Laws that had been issued during the Reform War, such as the nationalization of Church property, separation of church and state, secularization of society, and the forced sale of corporate property, were now backed by a legitimate government acting in the name of the Constitution of 1857.

However, the experience of the civil war and foreign intervention deeply affected the perception of the liberal elite about the institutions that could finally stabilize the country. Toward the end of the French intervention it became increasingly clear to Mexican liberals that the strengthening of presidential power was a necessity. When the Republic was finally restored, in 1867, the problem of political order was far from settled. Political turmoil was widespread, and local bosses, road bandits, kidnappers, and small groups of rebels challenged the authority of the national government.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, Emilio Rabasa, a political historian and jurist, pointed out that by making governance impossible, the liberal Constitution of 1857 had condemned the country to a de facto dictatorship. Not surprisingly, Rabasa, unlike many others, was well acquainted with Anglo-American political thought.⁵⁴ Rabasa asserted that during the war, between 1863 and 1867, President Juárez de facto replaced

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Congress by appropriating for himself the power vested in Congress to enact laws, and he de facto replaced the voice of the people by extending his term in office without a popular election. While the amount of power concentrated in Juárez’s hands had been unsurpassed, he used that power vigorously and successfully to fulfill his high purposes. The 1857 constitution, Rabasa asserted, “has never been observed because, had it been, it would have made the stability of government impossible.”

As Hale indicates,⁵⁵ major political controversies during the long regime of Porfirio Díaz in Mexico (1876–1910) reversed the interpretation and application of the Constitution of 1857. While a fraction of the old liberal elite saw in the centralization of power under Díaz as a betrayal of the principles of the Constitution of 1857, “new,” or “conservative,” liberals defended the institutional changes of the regime as necessary to satisfy the demands of political order and economic progress.

The first half of the twentieth century was no more auspicious for liberalism in Mexico than it was in other parts of the world. While in other countries fascist and communist parties clashed against liberal parliamentary governments, in Mexico a revolutionary state existed that was neither socialist nor liberal. Mexico’s regime after the revolution was eclectic in ideology. It did not oppose elections, but political legitimacy was not grounded on them. A single anticlerical, populist, and corporatist party ruled. The 1917 Constitution enacted by the revolutionaries embraced both individualism and collectivism. The Mexican regime was nationalistic and supported the intervention of the state in the economy. Through the years the government nationalized important foreign-owned industrial assets such as oil. While the Mexican regime shared some traits with several ideologies, it identified itself with none. For these reasons, the Mexican Revolution was a powerful source of illiberal inspiration for the rest of Latin America. While nineteenth-century liberalism became a founding myth of the official national history, liberal practices and ideas languished during the long period of postrevolutionary hegemony in Mexico (1929–2000). Since the 1930s a few lonely voices have voiced liberal ideas in an adverse ideological environment.

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A few economists and some poets, historians, and philosophers have defended liberty against its many foes.⁵⁶

This book presents sixty-four essays and writings on liberty and liberalism from the early republican period to the late twentieth century by key authors. The first period (1820–40) comprises the founding of the Republic and the early constitutional experiments. The most important authors in this creative and turbulent period were José María Luis Mora, Lorenzo de Zavala, Valentín Gómez Farías, and Lucas Alamán. During the era of liberal hegemony, in the second half of the century (1845–76), the most significant figures included Mariano Otero, Ignacio Ramírez, Francisco Zarco, Ignacio Manuel Altamirano, Guillermo Prieto, José María Lafragua, and Benito Juárez. The rule of Porfirio Díaz (1876–1912) provided lively debates over the nature of the liberal legacy. As noted above, the authors more relevant for this period were Justo Sierra, José María Vigil, and Emilio Rabasa. Important authors during the twentieth century (1930–90) include Jorge Cuesta, Antonio Caso, and Octavio Paz.

Unless otherwise noted, all footnotes in the texts are those of the authors.

Tepoztlán, Mexico, January 2010