Benito Juarez: Mexico's Great Reformer and Champion of Democracy

Introduction

Benito Pablo Juarez Garcia stands as one of the most consequential figures in Mexican history and among the most remarkable statesmen the Western Hemisphere has ever produced. Born into poverty in a remote Zapotec village in the mountains of Oaxaca, unable to speak Spanish until he was twelve years old, Juarez rose through sheer force of intellect and will to become the president of his nation, the architect of its modern constitutional order, and the man who led Mexico through its gravest existential crises. He served as president of Mexico for most of the period between 1858 and his death in office in 1872, navigating his country through a devastating civil war, a foreign military occupation, and the imposition and eventual overthrow of a European imperial monarchy. His legacy encompasses the separation of church and state, the nationalization of church property, the establishment of civil marriage and the civil registry, the defense of national sovereignty against the greatest military power of the age, and the firm principle that law, not force, must govern the relations between peoples and between nations.

Juarez was a man of few words but those he uttered or wrote carried extraordinary moral force. His most celebrated maxim, "Entre los individuos, como entre las naciones, el respeto al derecho ajeno es la paz" — "Among individuals, as among nations, respect for the rights of others is peace" — remains inscribed on the walls of Mexican public buildings, recited in school classrooms, and invoked in diplomatic discourse to this day. This single sentence encapsulates the political philosophy that guided his life: that law, equality, and the protection of rights form the only durable foundation for social harmony and international order. It was a philosophy forged not in a library but in the crucible of lived experience, tested against conservative rebellion, French cannon, and the hostility of half the world.

For Mexicans, Juarez occupies a position something like a combination of Abraham Lincoln — his contemporary, with whom he corresponded and shared political ideals — and George Washington: a founding father who both created the constitutional order and defended it against those who would extinguish it by force. He is called the Benemerito de las Americas, the Meritorious One of the Americas, and the title captures the reverence with which his memory is held. Yet Juarez was also a complex and sometimes controversial leader. His decisions were often ruthless. He governed by decree when circumstances demanded it. He was not above bending the same constitutional rules he professed to venerate when political survival required. And his final years in office, marked by mounting authoritarian tendencies and his insistence on seeking re-election despite failing health and widespread opposition, tarnished somewhat the image of the champion of democratic norms.

None of that diminishes the central fact: Benito Juarez changed Mexico, and in doing so changed the trajectory of Latin American political development. The secular, constitutional, democratic republic that Mexico aspires to be today was, in its essential form, his creation. The story of how he built it — and defended it — is one of the great political narratives of the nineteenth century.

Early Life and Origins

Benito Pablo Juarez Garcia was born on March 21, 1806, in the tiny village of San Pablo Guelatao in the Sierra Juarez mountains of the state of Oaxaca, in what was then the Kingdom of New Spain, on the very eve of Mexico's independence struggle. The village was home to only a few families, all of them Zapotec, one of the indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica whose civilization had flourished for millennia before the Spanish conquest. The Zapotecs had built Monte Alban, one of the earliest cities in the Americas, had developed their own writing system, and had maintained a sophisticated agricultural and commercial culture. By the time of Juarez's birth, however, the Zapotec peasantry of the Oaxacan mountains lived in conditions of extreme poverty and marginalization, isolated by language and geography from the centers of colonial power.

Benito was the third of four children born to Marcelino Juarez and Brigida Garcia, both full-blooded Zapotec Indians who worked small agricultural plots. His parents died when he was approximately three years old, leaving the children to be raised by their maternal grandparents, Pedro Maza and Justa Garcia. After his grandparents also died, the young Benito went to live with his uncle Bernardino Juarez. He worked as a shepherd in the mountains and fields around Guelatao throughout his childhood, tending flocks in the high altitude terrain and receiving no formal education whatsoever. Guelatao had no school. The community's language was Zapotec, and Juarez, like virtually all of his neighbors, grew up without knowing a word of Spanish — the language of law, government, commerce, and any kind of social advancement in colonial and post-colonial Mexico.

The defining turn in Juarez's early life came on December 17, 1818, when he was twelve years old. Motivated by a desperate desire for education — he had heard that there was a school in the city of Oaxaca — and reportedly having learned that his sister Josefa was working there as a cook, Juarez walked alone through the mountains the approximately forty miles to Oaxaca City. It was a journey that would, in retrospect, appear almost symbolic: the Zapotec shepherd boy descending from the mountains toward the city of knowledge and power, carrying nothing but ambition and the capacity for hard work.

In Oaxaca City, Juarez sought out and found his sister, who was employed in the household of Antonio Salanueva, a devout lay Franciscan and bookbinder. Salanueva took an immediate interest in the intelligent, serious young man from the mountains and offered him a place in his home in exchange for domestic service. He arranged for Juarez to receive instruction, initially at the parish school and then, in 1821, at the Royal School of Arts and Sciences, which Salanueva helped him enter. Salanueva's intention was that Juarez should study for the priesthood — the most accessible path to education and advancement for a poor indigenous boy in early nineteenth-century Mexico — and accordingly Juarez enrolled in the seminary of Oaxaca in 1821.

The seminary years were formative. Juarez proved to be an exceptionally diligent and gifted student. He learned Spanish rapidly and well. He studied Latin, philosophy, and theology with distinction. But as he progressed through his studies, Juarez grew increasingly drawn toward law rather than the church. The priesthood, with its hierarchical authority and its intimate connection to the social conservatism he was beginning to find troubling, did not suit his temperament. In 1827, acting against the wishes of his benefactor Salanueva, he transferred from the seminary to the newly established Institute of Sciences and Arts of Oaxaca, an institution with a decidedly more liberal and secular orientation than the church schools. It was a choice that would shape his entire future.

Education and the Formation of a Liberal Lawyer

The Institute of Sciences and Arts of Oaxaca, known commonly as the Oaxaca Institute, had been founded in 1826 as part of the broader liberal intellectual movement that accompanied Mexican independence. It offered instruction in the natural sciences, philosophy, and — crucially for Juarez — law. The institute represented a fundamentally different vision of education from the seminary: secular, rationalist, oriented toward the practical needs of a modern republic rather than the spiritual formation of clergy. Juarez flourished there. He studied law under the guidance of progressive teachers and immersed himself in the works of Enlightenment political philosophy that were then transforming political thought throughout the Atlantic world.

He received his degree in law in 1831, one of the first graduates of the Oaxaca Institute. He was twenty-five years old, and he had arrived at his profession having traversed a distance — social, cultural, linguistic, and intellectual — that few of his contemporaries could have imagined. He immediately began practicing law in Oaxaca City, taking on cases that frequently involved the defense of the poor and the indigenous population against the abuses of the wealthy and the powerful. His legal practice gave him a direct and unmediated experience of the injustices embedded in Mexican society: the privilege of the Catholic Church and the military, which were exempt from civil courts under a system of special jurisdictions called fueros; the exploitation of indigenous communities; the concentration of land in the hands of the church and a small creole elite; the vast distance between the formal equality proclaimed by the Mexican constitution and the grinding inequality of daily life.

These experiences radicalized Juarez, in the nineteenth-century sense of that word: they drove him toward a root-and-branch reform of Mexican institutions. He became convinced that Mexico's chronic instability — it had suffered more than thirty changes of government in the first three decades of independence — was rooted in the persistence of colonial-era privileges, the unaccountable power of the church, and the absence of genuine rule of law. The remedy, he believed, was a genuinely liberal constitutional order: one that subjected church and military equally to civil law, that protected individual rights, that established a secular public sphere, and that made the government answerable to the people rather than to God and tradition.

Entry into Politics

Juarez entered electoral politics in 1831, the same year he received his law degree, when he was elected to the Oaxaca city council (ayuntamiento). He served as an alderman (regidor) and demonstrated from the outset the qualities that would mark his political career: methodical attention to administrative detail, incorruptibility in financial matters, and a quiet but firm commitment to the principles of liberal governance. In 1833 he was appointed a civil judge, and in 1841 he became a judge of the Civil Court (Tribunal Civil) of Oaxaca.

His rise through the Oaxacan judicial and political establishment was steady if unspectacular. In 1843 he married Margarita Maza, the daughter of his old benefactor's family — the very household where he had first arrived as a twelve-year-old from Guelatao. The marriage would prove to be one of the great partnerships in Mexican political history: Margarita was intelligent, courageous, and fiercely devoted to her husband, and she would stand by him through the years of exile and hardship that lay ahead. Together they would have twelve children, though several died in infancy.

In 1845 Juarez was elected to represent Oaxaca in the national Chamber of Deputies in Mexico City. His term in the national legislature coincided with one of the most turbulent periods in Mexican history: the country was governed by the chronic caudillo Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, whose unstable rule had already contributed to the catastrophic loss of Texas in 1836. The period would culminate in the disastrous Mexican-American War of 1846-1848, in which Mexico lost approximately half of its national territory — including California, New Mexico, and much of what is now the American Southwest — to the United States. Juarez observed these national calamities with the eye of a constitutionalist: he attributed Mexico's weakness to its institutional incoherence, its failure to build legitimate and stable governing structures, and the destructive ambitions of military strongmen like Santa Anna.

In 1847, during the crisis of the Mexican-American War, Juarez was elected Governor of Oaxaca. He was forty-one years old, and he was about to have his first opportunity to put his principles of liberal governance into sustained practice.

Governor of Oaxaca

Juarez served as Governor of Oaxaca from 1847 to 1852, a five-year term that became a model of progressive liberal administration. He governed during extremely difficult conditions: the country was at war with the United States, the national government was in chaos, and Oaxaca was one of Mexico's poorest states, burdened by a corrupt and inefficient administration. Juarez tackled these challenges with a combination of frugality, efficiency, and genuine commitment to public welfare that was virtually unknown in Mexican governance at the time.

His financial management was exemplary. He reduced government expenditures, rooted out corruption, and left the state treasury with a surplus when he left office — an almost unheard-of achievement in mid-nineteenth-century Mexican politics, where public offices were typically treated as opportunities for personal enrichment. He invested the savings in public infrastructure: roads were built to connect isolated communities, including the mountain villages of the indigenous Zapotec and Mixtec populations. He expanded public education dramatically, establishing dozens of new schools throughout the state and — in a measure that reflected both his political principles and his personal history — opening schools in indigenous villages that had never had access to formal education.

Juarez also began, in Oaxaca, the program of secularization and limitation of ecclesiastical privilege that would define his national career. He applied the laws of the Mexican constitution more rigorously than any previous Oaxacan governor, insisting that the church's fueros — its exemption from civil law — did not extend to economic and civil matters, only to purely ecclesiastical ones. He required the church to pay taxes like any other landowner, and he reduced the influence of clerical interests in state government. These measures made him enemies among the conservative establishment of the church and the traditional elite, but they earned him an enthusiastic following among the liberal intelligentsia and the popular classes, particularly the indigenous population, who saw in Juarez one of their own.

In 1852 his gubernatorial term ended and Juarez was reappointed rector of the Oaxaca Institute. But in 1853 the political situation changed dramatically: Santa Anna returned to power for the eleventh and final time, imposing an authoritarian regime that suppressed liberal opposition throughout the country. Juarez, as a known and prominent liberal, was arrested and briefly imprisoned, then expelled from the country. He went into exile, traveling first to Havana and then, in 1853, to New Orleans, where he joined a community of Mexican liberal exiles that included Melchor Ocampo, one of the most radical and intellectually influential members of the Reform generation.

Exile, Conspiracy, and the Revolution of Ayutla

The years in New Orleans, 1853 to 1855, were years of poverty and political reflection for Juarez. He worked in a cigarette factory and other menial jobs to support himself while conspiring with his fellow exiles to overthrow Santa Anna's regime. The experience of exile sharpened his liberalism: seeing the United States from the inside, with its relatively robust constitutional institutions, its secular public culture, and its market economy, reinforced his conviction that Mexico's salvation lay in building similar institutions, adapted to Mexican conditions. He corresponded extensively with Melchor Ocampo and other exiles, developing the intellectual framework for what would become La Reforma.

The opportunity for return came in 1854, when a liberal revolt known as the Revolution of Ayutla broke out in southern Mexico under the leadership of General Juan Alvarez. The revolt's manifesto, the Plan de Ayutla, called for the expulsion of Santa Anna and the convening of a constituent congress to write a new constitution. Juarez returned to Mexico in 1855 and threw himself into the revolutionary effort. When the revolt succeeded and Santa Anna was overthrown and forced into permanent exile, Juarez received his reward: he was appointed Minister of Justice (Ministro de Justicia e Instruccion Publica) in the transitional government of Juan Alvarez.

It was in this capacity that Juarez drafted and promulgated the first and most fundamental of the Reform Laws: the Ley Juarez.

The Constitution of 1857 and the Leyes de Reforma

The era of La Reforma — the Reform — represents the central achievement of Juarez's political career, and indeed one of the most consequential periods in Mexican history. The Reform was not the work of Juarez alone: it was a collective enterprise of the liberal generation of the 1850s and 1860s, a group that included Melchor Ocampo, Miguel Lerdo de Tejada, Ignacio Ramirez, Sebastian Lerdo de Tejada, and others. But Juarez was its most powerful political figure and its most enduring symbol.

The philosophical foundation of La Reforma was a thoroughgoing liberalism derived from the Enlightenment, filtered through the particular conditions of post-colonial Mexico. Its central demand was the dismantling of the corporate privileges — the fueros — that exempted the church and the military from ordinary civil law, and the establishment of a genuine constitutional order based on individual rights and the rule of law. It also demanded the transformation of the church's enormous economic power: the Catholic Church in mid-nineteenth-century Mexico was estimated to own between a third and a half of all productive land in the country, accumulated over three centuries of colonial dominance. Liberal reformers argued that this concentration of wealth in the hands of a "dead hand" (manos muertas) institution that could not sell or subdivide its properties was a major obstacle to economic development and to the creation of a class of independent smallholders.

The Constitution of 1857 was the keystone of the Reform era. Drafted by a constituent congress convened in accordance with the Plan de Ayutla, and promulgated on February 5, 1857, it was one of the most advanced liberal constitutions in the world at that time. It guaranteed freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion (in principle), equality before the law, the right of habeas corpus, and the abolition of slavery and of all forms of personal servitude. It eliminated the special courts of the church and the military, requiring that all Mexicans, regardless of estate or profession, be subject to ordinary civil courts. It established a unicameral legislature and a federal structure that distributed significant power to the states.

The Constitution of 1857 was deeply offensive to the conservative establishment. The Catholic Church, which had been the dominant institution in Mexican society for three centuries, saw in it an existential threat. Pope Pius IX condemned it. The bishops threatened to excommunicate any official who swore an oath to it. Santa Anna's former supporters and the traditional creole elite, who had benefited from the colonial order and feared the consequences of liberal reform, mobilized against it. The stage was set for civil war.

The Ley Juarez, Ley Lerdo, and Ley Iglesias

The three principal laws that gave La Reforma its concrete substance were each named for their authors, and each targeted a different dimension of the church's privilege and power.

The Ley Juarez, formally the Ley sobre la Administracion de Justicia y Organica de los Tribunales de la Nacion, del Distrito y Territorios, was promulgated by Juarez in his capacity as Minister of Justice on November 23, 1855. It was primarily a judicial reform measure, but its most important provision was the abolition of the special ecclesiastical and military courts (fueros) for civil and criminal matters. Henceforth, priests and soldiers who committed civil crimes would be tried in ordinary civil courts, just like any other citizen. The law did not abolish the church courts entirely — they retained jurisdiction over purely ecclesiastical matters — but it struck at the principle of clerical impunity that had been one of the most corrosive aspects of colonial and post-colonial Mexican society. Conservatives and the hierarchy of the Catholic Church responded with fury, triggering the first of several armed revolts that the Reform era would produce.

The Ley Lerdo, formally the Ley de Desamortizacion de Fincas Rusticas y Urbanas Propiedad de Corporaciones Civiles y Eclesiasticas, was drafted by Miguel Lerdo de Tejada and promulgated on June 25, 1856. Its target was the church's vast landholdings. The law did not confiscate church property outright — that would come later — but rather required that all property held by corporate bodies (both ecclesiastical and civil) be sold to the individuals who were currently renting or occupying it. The theory was that by transforming church land into individually owned property, the law would both stimulate economic development and break the church's stranglehold on the Mexican land market. In practice, the law often worked against its intended beneficiaries: indigenous communities, which held their lands collectively, found that the Ley Lerdo required them to divide and sell their communal holdings, making them vulnerable to land-grabbing by wealthy individuals. This unintended consequence would fuel agrarian conflict in Mexico for generations.

The Ley Iglesias, promulgated by Jose Maria Iglesias as Minister of Justice on April 11, 1857, addressed the church's practice of charging fees for the administration of sacraments — baptisms, marriages, burials — to the poor. These fees were a significant burden on the impoverished majority of the population, and the Ley Iglesias declared them illegal, requiring the church to provide these services free of charge to those who could not afford to pay. The law also prohibited parish priests from collecting fees not sanctioned by the civil authorities.

Together, these three laws and the Constitution of 1857 constituted the legislative program of La Reforma. They represented a fundamental redefinition of the relationship between the Mexican state and the Catholic Church, and between the state and its citizens. The church was to be stripped of its political privileges, its corporate economic power, and its role as the mediator between the state and the people in vital matters of civil life. The state was to be secular, constitutional, and governed by law rather than by tradition or clerical authority.

The Reform War

The conservative establishment's response to the Constitution of 1857 and the Reform Laws was swift and violent. In December 1857, a military coup led by General Felix Zuloaga overthrew President Ignacio Comonfort, who had signed the constitution but then wavered in its defense, and proclaimed the Plan de Tacubaya, which annulled the constitution and called for a new one to be written along conservative lines. Comonfort capitulated and then, struck by remorse, went into exile.

Under the terms of the Constitution of 1857, the President of the Supreme Court was next in the line of succession to the presidency. That position was held by Benito Juarez. Thus, on January 19, 1858, Juarez was arrested by Comonfort's troops as he slept and imprisoned. But when Comonfort departed for exile, the troops released him, and Juarez emerged from prison as the constitutional President of Mexico — the legitimate head of state of a government that controlled no troops, no territory, and no resources.

What followed was a three-year civil war known as the War of the Reform (Guerra de Reforma), sometimes called the Three Years' War. Mexico now had two governments: the liberal constitutional government of Juarez, which initially controlled only the state of Veracruz and a few other areas, and the conservative government based in Mexico City, backed by the army, the church, and the traditional elite. The war was brutal. Both sides committed atrocities. Conservative general Leonardo Marquez earned the sobriquet "the Tiger of Tacubaya" for his massacre of liberal prisoners and medical personnel after the Battle of Tacubaya in 1859. The liberal forces were not without their own acts of savagery.

Juarez conducted his government from a series of improvised capitals — Guanajuato, Guadalajara, where he narrowly escaped assassination, and finally Veracruz, where he established a stable base from 1858 to 1860. It was from Veracruz, in 1859, that he issued the full package of the Leyes de Reforma. On July 12, 1859, Juarez announced the Law of Nationalization of Church Properties, which went far beyond the Ley Lerdo by simply confiscating all church real estate and declaring it national property. On July 23 he promulgated the Law of Civil Marriage, establishing that marriage was a civil contract between two individuals, not a religious sacrament, and that only the state had the authority to recognize it. The same day he issued the Law of the Civil Registry, which transferred the registration of births, marriages, and deaths from the church to secular civil registries administered by the government. On July 31 he promulgated the Law of the Secularization of Cemeteries, removing cemeteries from church control and placing them under civil authority. On August 11 he declared the suppression of all monasteries. Finally, on December 4, 1860, he proclaimed the Law of Freedom of Worship, which guaranteed citizens the right to practice any religion, definitively ending the Catholic Church's monopoly on religious life in Mexico.

These Veracruz decrees, combined with the earlier Reform Laws, represented the most thoroughgoing secularization program in Latin American history to that point. They were the legal and institutional expression of a vision of Mexico as a modern secular republic in which the state, not the church, defined the terms of citizenship and public life.

The military tide of the Reform War eventually turned in favor of the liberals. The liberal army, reorganized and re-energized by a series of capable commanders, won a series of decisive victories in the second half of 1860. The most important of these was the Battle of Calpulalpan on December 22, 1860, in which the liberal general Jesus Gonzalez Ortega decisively defeated the main conservative army. The conservative government in Mexico City collapsed, and on January 11, 1861, Benito Juarez entered the capital as the victorious constitutional president. He was received by enormous crowds. The War of the Reform was over. The liberal republic had survived.

Debt, Diplomatic Crisis, and the Coming of the French

Juarez's victory in the Reform War left him president of a country in ruins. Three years of civil war had devastated the economy, destroyed roads and infrastructure, and depleted the treasury. Mexico was deeply in debt to foreign creditors, particularly France, Britain, and Spain. Juarez confronted an immediate financial crisis: the government simply could not meet its debt obligations. On July 17, 1861, acting under emergency powers granted by congress, Juarez issued a decree suspending all payments on the foreign debt for a period of two years.

This decision, though economically understandable, triggered a major diplomatic crisis. The three European creditor nations — France, Britain, and Spain — convened the Convention of London in October 1861, agreeing to mount a joint naval expedition to Mexico to demand payment. In December 1861 their combined fleet seized Veracruz. Britain and Spain, after negotiating directly with the Mexican government and concluding that Juarez had no intention of repudiating the debts (merely postponing them), withdrew their forces in 1862. France, however, had an entirely different agenda.

Napoleon III, Emperor of the French, saw in the Mexican crisis an opportunity to build a French empire in the Americas. He was motivated by ideological ambitions — he fancied himself a builder of a new Latin civilization to counterbalance Anglo-Saxon North America — as well as by the financial interests of French bondholders. With the United States consumed by its own civil war and unable to enforce the Monroe Doctrine, the moment seemed propitious for European intervention. Napoleon arranged for a conservative Mexican faction to invite him to establish an empire in Mexico, with an Austrian archduke as its monarch. The chosen candidate was Ferdinand Maximilian, Archduke of Austria, the younger brother of Emperor Franz Josef.

The French military expedition began in earnest in early 1862. General Lorencez led a French force of approximately six thousand men toward Mexico City. On May 5, 1862, at the city of Puebla, French forces encountered fierce resistance from a Mexican army commanded by General Ignacio Zaragoza. In a remarkable battle against a vastly superior military force, the Mexicans decisively defeated the French, inflicting casualties that shocked the French army and the watching world. The Battle of Puebla — celebrated each year on May 5, the holiday known as Cinco de Mayo — was a brilliant victory. But it was not the end of the French intervention, only a delay. Napoleon III reinforced his army massively, sending approximately thirty thousand soldiers. By June 1863 the new French commander, General Forey, had taken Puebla after a lengthy siege, and by June 10, 1863, French forces entered Mexico City.

Juarez refused to surrender. He retreated northward, moving his government from city to city — San Luis Potosi, Saltillo, Chihuahua — always one step ahead of advancing French and conservative troops. In 1864 Maximilian arrived in Mexico and was formally installed as Emperor of Mexico on June 10, 1864. He established a court at the Chapultepec Castle in Mexico City and attempted to govern his new empire, issuing decrees that were — in a strange irony — often more liberal than those of the conservative faction that had invited him. Maximilian confirmed the nationalization of church property, accepted civil marriage, and declared freedom of religion. He also promulgated a sweeping labor code and attempted to protect the rights of indigenous workers. These concessions alienated his conservative supporters without winning over the liberals, who could accept neither the man nor the institution he represented.

The Government in Exile: Juarez at el Paso del Norte

The years 1864 to 1867 were the darkest and most testing of Juarez's presidency. With the French army and its imperial Mexican allies controlling most of the country, Juarez's government was reduced to a peripatetic operation conducted from a fleet of black carriages moving across the arid north of Mexico. The government-in-exile eventually established its most northerly position at El Paso del Norte (now Ciudad Juarez, named in his honor, directly across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas). At this remote desert outpost, on the very border of the United States, Juarez maintained the legal and moral claim of his republic's continuity. He issued decrees, communicated with foreign governments, and organized resistance.

The image of Juarez maintaining the dignity and continuity of republican government from his black carriage in the desert became one of the most powerful symbols of Mexican national identity. He was offered asylum in the United States and repeatedly urged to go into exile there by well-meaning sympathizers. He steadfastly refused. He was the constitutional president of Mexico, and he would remain on Mexican soil. He traveled with his government and his family, and Margarita Juarez showed the same iron determination as her husband, enduring hardship and displacement without complaint.

During these years, Juarez received critical diplomatic support from the United States. The Lincoln administration and its successors recognized Juarez's government as the legitimate government of Mexico, refused to recognize Maximilian's empire, and provided the liberal forces with arms and other assistance, facilitated by the fact that the border with the United States was always available as a supply route. The end of the American Civil War in 1865 freed the United States to apply the Monroe Doctrine more aggressively, and Secretary of State William H. Seward put increasing diplomatic pressure on Napoleon III to withdraw his forces.

Napoleon's position was becoming untenable for multiple reasons: the French army in Mexico was costing enormous sums and producing little but guerrilla warfare; Prussian military power was rising threateningly in Europe, demanding French attention; and the United States was making increasingly clear that it regarded the French presence in Mexico as a violation of the Monroe Doctrine that it would not tolerate indefinitely. In 1866, Napoleon III began withdrawing French troops. Maximilian, abandoned by his French sponsors, found himself with only his Mexican conservative supporters, whose forces were no match for the reinvigorated liberal army.

The Execution of Maximilian and the Restoration of the Republic

By early 1867, the military situation had reversed dramatically. The liberal forces, under the overall strategic direction of Juarez's government and the military command of generals like Porfirio Diaz, Mariano Escobedo, and Ramon Corona, were advancing on all fronts. Maximilian, urged by advisors and by his wife Carlota — who had traveled to Europe to plead unsuccessfully for French support and had there suffered a mental breakdown from which she would never recover — chose to remain in Mexico and fight rather than abdicate and go into exile.

Maximilian's last military campaign ended at Queretaro. The imperial forces were besieged in the city from March 1867, and on May 15, 1867, Queretaro fell. Maximilian was captured along with his generals Miguel Miramon and Tomas Mejia. Juarez ordered that the three men be tried by a military court-martial. Despite enormous international pressure — letters and telegrams of appeal poured in from the courts of Europe, from Austria, from France, from Italy, from Prussia — Juarez refused to commute the death sentences. He argued, with characteristic legal precision, that the law was clear and that to grant an exception to a foreign prince who had accepted the title of emperor of a country that was not his would be to establish a principle that the lives of princes were worth more than the lives of ordinary citizens.

On June 19, 1867, Maximilian, Miramon, and Mejia were executed by firing squad on the Hill of the Bells (Cerro de las Campanas) outside Queretaro. The executions were carried out with military ceremony. Maximilian reportedly distributed gold coins to his executioners and asked that they spare his face, so that his mother might recognize him. His last words, according to various accounts, included "I forgive everyone, and I ask everyone to forgive me. May my blood, which is about to be shed, be for the good of this land. Long live Mexico!"

The execution sent shockwaves through Europe but was received in Mexico as an act of justice and an assertion of national sovereignty. Juarez had made clear that Mexico would not accept the argument that international pressure could override its laws. The principle he had articulated — that among nations, as among individuals, the respect for the rights of others is peace — was being applied in reverse: by refusing to submit to European pressure, he was asserting Mexico's right to govern itself according to its own laws.

Juarez made his triumphal return to Mexico City on July 15, 1867. The Republic had been restored. The French had been expelled. The empire had been overthrown. The constitution of 1857 was the law of the land once more. For many Mexicans, it was the greatest moment in their nation's history, and Juarez was its hero.

The Restored Republic: Final Presidential Terms

The period from 1867 to 1872, known as the Restored Republic (Republica Restaurada), was in many ways Juarez's finest as an administrator, but also his most politically troubled. He won the presidential election of 1867 with a reduced majority — the exhaustion of war had not diminished his standing, but it had given space to competitors, including his former military commander Porfirio Diaz, who had hoped for greater recognition, and Sebastian Lerdo de Tejada, the elegant intellectual brother of the author of the Ley Lerdo.

In the years after 1867, Juarez embarked on the reconstruction of the Republic's institutions with methodical energy. He oversaw the expansion of public education, establishing a national system of primary schools and issuing the Organic Law of Public Instruction (1867), which established free and secular compulsory primary education throughout the country. He worked to restore fiscal order to the perpetually disrupted Mexican finances. He reorganized the judiciary and the executive administration. He promoted economic development, including the beginning of railroad construction, and opened Mexico more actively to foreign investment.

But his political position was contested and the conflicts deepening. In 1871 Juarez, whose health was already declining, chose to seek re-election for another presidential term — a decision that many saw as constitutionally dubious (the constitution did not explicitly prohibit re-election but its spirit seemed to favor rotation in office) and politically unwise. The 1871 election, contested among Juarez, Lerdo de Tejada, and Porfirio Diaz, produced no majority, and was referred to congress, which selected Juarez as the winner. Diaz, furious at the result, launched a military revolt under the banner of the Plan de La Noria, proclaiming the principle of no re-election — the very principle that he himself would violate scandalously when he came to power. The revolt fizzled and Juarez survived it, but the political situation remained tense.

By the early months of 1872, Juarez was visibly unwell. He continued to work with his customary discipline, presiding over cabinet meetings and attending to state business. But his health was deteriorating rapidly. He was suffering from angina pectoris, a condition involving severe chest pain caused by insufficient blood flow to the heart — a condition that, in 1872, could not be effectively treated. On the night of July 18, 1872, Benito Juarez died in the National Palace in Mexico City. He was sixty-six years old. He died as he had governed: at his post, working to the end.

The news of his death spread rapidly and was received with widespread grief. His body lay in state and was viewed by enormous crowds. Sebastian Lerdo de Tejada, as President of the Supreme Court, constitutionally succeeded him. The Juarez era — fourteen years of the most transformative leadership in Mexican history — was over.

Legacy and Historical Significance

Benito Juarez's legacy is enormous and multidimensional. At the most fundamental level, he is the father of the modern Mexican state: the secular, constitutional republic that Mexico became in the second half of the nineteenth century was substantially his creation. The Reform Laws and the Constitution of 1857 established the legal framework for a Mexico in which church and state were separated, in which individual rights were constitutionally guaranteed, in which civil institutions administered the vital records of births, marriages, and deaths, and in which no corporate body — not the church, not the military — was above the law.

The Mexico of Juarez was imperfect: indigenous communities often suffered from the application of liberal principles that worked against communal land tenure; the Reform era's land reforms contributed to the concentration of property in fewer hands; and the liberal republic, for all its constitutional idealism, governed a country where the vast majority of the population remained in poverty. But these failures do not diminish the foundational importance of what Juarez built. The constitutional order he established survived, with modifications, the revolution of 1910-1920 and remained the legal framework of Mexican public life into the twenty-first century. The 1917 constitution that still governs Mexico, though far more radical in social terms than the 1857 document, is its direct descendant.

Beyond Mexico, Juarez's significance lies in what his career demonstrates about the possibilities of democratic governance and the rule of law under extreme adversity. He was a man of the lowest social origins who reached the highest office of state through legitimate means and governed according to constitutional principles even when — especially when — those principles were under attack. He refused the temptation of personal dictatorship at moments when concentrating power in his own hands would have been easy and perhaps even understandable given the circumstances. He maintained the forms and substance of republican government through civil war and foreign occupation, setting a standard of institutional fidelity that few leaders anywhere in the world have matched.

His relationship with the indigenous peoples of Mexico is complex and debated. On one hand, he was himself an indigenous man who rose to the pinnacle of political power in a society that had systematically excluded and marginalized indigenous people — his example was and remains an inspiration. On the other hand, his liberal universalism was not a politics of indigenous particularism: he believed in the equality of all citizens before the law, but he applied liberal economic principles, including the dissolution of communal land tenure, that were often damaging to indigenous communities. He was a Zapotec who thought in universal categories, which was both his greatest strength and a source of significant historical controversy.

His famous maxim — "the respect for the rights of others is peace" — was not merely a political slogan. It was the distillation of a lifetime of experience and reflection. Juarez had seen what happens when the strong claim the right to override the law in their own interest: civil war, foreign invasion, the destruction of the republic. He had staked his presidency, his freedom, and his life on the counter-claim that only a society governed by law, in which every person and institution was subject equally to its provisions, could achieve lasting peace and prosperity. It was a profound insight, and it remains as relevant in the twenty-first century as it was in the nineteenth.

Juarez and Indigenous Identity

The fact that Benito Juarez was the first fully indigenous president of Mexico — and to this day one of very few indigenous heads of state in the Americas — has taken on enormous significance in the history of the region. He is an inspiration not only for Mexicans but for indigenous peoples throughout the hemisphere, a living proof that the barriers of race, language, and class erected by colonial society could be overcome by intelligence, determination, and the institutions of a genuinely constitutional republic.

Juarez's own relationship with his Zapotec origins was complex. He spoke Zapotec as his first language and never forgot his roots, but he governed as a universalist liberal, not as a champion of particular indigenous rights in the modern sense. His political philosophy was built on the principle that all citizens — regardless of race, religion, or social origin — were equal before the law. This was, in its context, a radical and progressive position: it swept away the colonial hierarchy of castes and the privileges of the church and the military. But it also meant that he did not pursue a politics of special protections for indigenous communities as such. The communal land holdings of indigenous villages were subject to the same liberal property laws that applied to everyone else, with often devastating results.

Nevertheless, his symbolic importance as an indigenous leader cannot be overstated. He grew up in a Zapotec-speaking village without access to school or Spanish. He learned that language as a twelve-year-old newcomer to the city. He worked his way through the legal system, the judiciary, the legislature, and the governorship of his state on the strength of his ability and his character. He became president of Mexico at a time when indigenous people were widely regarded — by the creole and mestizo elite — as intrinsically incapable of governing themselves, let alone the nation. His career gave the lie to that racism with more eloquence than any argument could.

In the modern politics of Mexico and Latin America, Juarez's example is claimed by a wide variety of political movements. Indigenous rights activists see in him a founding ancestor. Constitutional liberals see in him the champion of the rule of law. Nationalists see in him the defender of sovereignty. Anti-imperialists see in him the man who expelled the French and executed a European emperor. Each reading captures something real, because Juarez's career embodied all of these things.

International Reputation and Diplomatic Legacy

During his own lifetime, Juarez enjoyed a considerable international reputation, particularly among liberals in Europe and North America who saw in him the embodiment of their own values applied to the conditions of the non-European world. Abraham Lincoln admired him and corresponded with him; the parallels between the two men — contemporaries who each led their constitutional governments through devastating civil wars in defense of the principles of popular sovereignty — were obvious and were noted at the time. After Lincoln's assassination in 1865, Juarez sent a message of condolence to the American people that was widely reprinted and praised.

Victor Hugo, the French novelist and poet, was a passionate admirer of Juarez and one of the voices that pleaded (unsuccessfully) for clemency toward Maximilian. Hugo saw Juarez as the representative of the republican and democratic principles that he himself had championed, and he regarded the French intervention in Mexico as a crime against those principles. The Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi also expressed admiration for Juarez, seeing in him a fellow champion of national self-determination against monarchical reaction.

The execution of Maximilian, which shocked European courts and conservative opinion, was received very differently by liberal and republican opinion throughout the world. It was seen as a demonstration that the age of European imperialism and the transplantation of European dynastic institutions onto non-European peoples was coming to an end — that republican self-determination was a force that could not ultimately be suppressed by foreign bayonets.

Juarez's diplomatic legacy includes his insistence on Mexico's equal standing in international law. He rejected the notion — which European powers had often acted on in their relations with Latin American nations — that Mexico's debts or its internal political arrangements gave European powers the right to intervene in its affairs. His 1861 decree suspending debt payments was legally contentious, but his resistance to the intervention that followed it established a precedent for the principle that economic disputes between states must be settled by negotiation and law, not by military force.

Juarez in Culture and Collective Memory

The memory of Benito Juarez has been institutionalized in Mexico in ways that few historical figures anywhere in the world have achieved. His image appears on the twenty-peso bill. A statue of him stands in virtually every city and town in Mexico. The state of Oaxaca honors him as its most celebrated son. The city formerly known as El Paso del Norte was renamed Ciudad Juarez in his honor. The international airport of the state of Oaxaca bears his name, as do countless streets, schools, parks, and public institutions throughout the country.

March 21, his birthday, is a national holiday in Mexico: the Natalicio de Benito Juarez (Birthday of Benito Juarez). On that day, official ceremonies are held throughout the country, schoolchildren recite his maxims, and politicians of every stripe invoke his name. His famous phrase about the respect for the rights of others appears in countless public contexts, from government buildings to academic theses to diplomatic speeches.

Juarez has also been the subject of an extensive literary, artistic, and cinematic tradition. He is a figure in Mexican muralism — Diego Rivera depicted him in his great historical murals at the National Palace — and the subject of numerous novels, plays, and films. The most famous cinematic treatment is the 1939 American film "Juarez," starring Paul Muni in the title role and Bette Davis as the unfortunate Carlota, which presented a sympathetic and broadly accurate portrait of the man and his era to a wide international audience.

In Guelatao, his birthplace, a large statue of Juarez as a young man marks the village, which has become a site of pilgrimage for Mexicans who wish to connect with his origins. The village itself, remote and poor in his lifetime, is now connected by roads — roads that, in a certain historical irony, his own administration helped begin to build.

His statue in Washington D.C., in Benito Juarez Memorial Park, was a gift from the Mexican government and stands as a symbol of the long friendship between the two republics and of the admiration that American liberals have long felt for his memory. A copy of the same statue stands in Rome, another gift from Mexico to Italy, reflecting the international resonance of his legacy.

Conclusion: the Meaning of Juarez

Benito Juarez was not a saint, and Mexican hagiography has sometimes done him a disservice by making him one. He was a politician, which means he was pragmatic, sometimes ruthless, and capable of the kinds of compromises and maneuvers that political survival requires. He was a man of his time and his context, with all the limitations that implies. His liberal universalism, for all its grandeur, carried within it the seeds of policies that damaged indigenous communities. His insistence on re-election in 1871 was a stain on his democratic credentials.

But the fundamental achievements of his life are beyond dispute and beyond diminishment. He took Mexico from a society in which the church was a state within the state, in which military officers were above the law, in which birth and caste determined the possibilities of every life, and he transformed it — imperfectly, at enormous cost, against ferocious opposition — into a republic governed by law. He led his government through three years of civil war without surrendering the constitution. He maintained the sovereignty and territorial integrity of his republic against the military might of the French Empire. He executed an emperor because the law demanded it and justice required it. He did all of this while remaining, in his person and his conduct, a model of the constitutional leader he professed to be: austere, incorruptible, devoted to the public interest, and anchored in the belief that law was the only legitimate foundation of political authority.

"Entre los individuos, como entre las naciones, el respeto al derecho ajeno es la paz." The words are carved in stone across Mexico, and they were lived in deeds across a lifetime. For Benito Juarez, the law was not merely a tool of governance — it was the most precious achievement of human civilization, the only alternative to the rule of force, and the foundation on which alone a just and peaceful society could be built. That conviction, drawn from the depths of his own experience as a child of poverty and marginalization who made his way in the world through education and the impartial application of legal principle, is his greatest and most enduring legacy.

He died as he had lived: at his desk, working for his country, faithful to the principles he had spent a lifetime defending. The republic he built survived him. The constitution he championed endured. And the indigenous boy from Guelatao who had walked forty miles through the mountains in search of an education remained, more than a century and a half after his death, the most celebrated president in Mexican history and one of the great figures of the democratic tradition in the Western Hemisphere.

The Personal Character of Benito Juarez

To understand Benito Juarez fully, it is important to go beyond the public record and examine the personal qualities that made him what he was. Contemporaries who knew him consistently described a man of formidable self-discipline, extraordinary composure under pressure, and a certain austerity that bordered on severity. He dressed simply, lived without ostentation, and was famously uninterested in personal enrichment — a notable quality in a political culture where the abuse of public office for private gain was nearly universal. When he left the governorship of Oaxaca in 1852, he left the state treasury with a surplus and himself with nothing more than what he had owned when he entered office. The same was true of his national presidency.

He was not an orator in the grand nineteenth-century style. He did not possess the volcanic charisma of a Santa Anna or the theatrical flair of a Garibaldi. His power lay in the precision of his thought, the consistency of his principles, and the unshakeable calm with which he confronted even the most extreme dangers. When conservative forces briefly captured him during the Reform War, he showed no signs of fear. When the French were advancing on Mexico City and every newspaper in Europe was writing his political obituary, he maintained the routine of government and refused to contemplate flight. His composure was not the composure of a man who did not feel fear — it was the composure of a man who had decided, once and for all, that his obligations were more important than his safety.

His relationship with his wife Margarita was one of deep and enduring partnership. Their correspondence during the years of separation — when Margarita and the children were in New York or other places of refuge while Juarez conducted his wandering government in the north of Mexico — reveals a tender and loving relationship beneath the public severity. He wrote to her regularly and with great affection. She, in turn, was her husband's most devoted partisan and his most astute political adviser. When political opponents attacked Juarez's honor or policies, Margarita often responded with a sharpness that her more publicly restrained husband did not permit himself. Their partnership was one of the great political marriages of the century.

The death of their children affected him deeply. Several of Margarita and Benito's twelve children died in infancy or early childhood, as was tragically common in nineteenth-century Mexico. The death of his son Pepe, to whom he was particularly close, during the years of the French intervention was a blow from which he never fully recovered emotionally, though he gave no public sign of grief. He bore personal loss with the same stoic discipline that he brought to political reverses.

His faith is a subject that has been much discussed. He was raised in a deeply Catholic household and educated in a seminary, and he retained throughout his life a personal religious sensibility that was distinct from his political anticlericalism. He was not an atheist — few Mexican liberals of his generation were, in the strict sense — but he believed with absolute conviction that religion was a private matter between an individual and God, and that the church as an institution had no legitimate claim to political power or special legal privilege. This distinction — between personal faith and institutional anticlericalism — was characteristic of the nineteenth-century liberal tradition in which he was formed.

The Reform Laws in Practice: Consequences and Controversies

The implementation of the Reform Laws and the nationalization of church property had consequences that were far more complex than their authors anticipated or intended. The most significant unintended consequence was the effect of liberal property law on indigenous communities.

The Ley Lerdo of 1856 and the nationalization laws of 1859 were designed primarily to break up the church's vast landholdings and create a class of individual property owners who would form the social basis of a stable liberal republic. The architects of the Reform believed that the church's corporate landholding was an economic and social pathology that had to be corrected. But the same law that targeted church property also affected the communal landholdings (ejidos) of indigenous villages, which were legally classified as "corporate" holdings and were therefore subject to forced divestiture.

Indigenous communities throughout Mexico had held their lands collectively for centuries — in many cases since before the Spanish conquest. The communal land was not merely an economic resource but the social and cultural foundation of village life, the basis on which collective obligations, ceremonies, and governance were organized. The liberal reformers, many of whom had little direct knowledge of indigenous community life, assumed that the transition from communal to individual tenure would be beneficial: it would give indigenous people the legal status of property-owning citizens, allow them to sell their land if they chose, and incorporate them into the market economy.

In practice, the result was often the opposite. Indigenous communities, unfamiliar with the legal mechanisms of individual title registration, were frequently unable to comply with the requirements of the new laws. Unscrupulous land speculators and local political bosses — often mestizos with political connections — took advantage of the chaos to acquire indigenous communal lands for a fraction of their value or outright through legal manipulation. The communities that had survived the Spanish conquest and three hundred years of colonial exploitation now found their lands vulnerable to a new form of dispossession enacted in the name of liberal progress.

This process — which historians have called the "second conquest" of indigenous lands — was not completed during Juarez's lifetime, but his Reform Laws set it in motion. It would accelerate dramatically under the long dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz, who used similar legal mechanisms to transfer enormous amounts of land from indigenous communities and small farmers to large commercial haciendas. And it was ultimately the dispossession of the rural poor that fueled the Mexican Revolution of 1910, which began with the demand for land and liberty — tierra y libertad — under the banner of Emiliano Zapata, himself a man from indigenous Morelos.

The irony is profound: the Reform that Juarez built to liberate the Mexican people from the corporate power of the church inadvertently created the conditions for a new form of dispossession that would, in the next generation, drive the country back into revolution. Juarez himself cannot fairly be blamed for all the consequences of his policies — many of the worst abuses came after his death, under governments that implemented his legal framework in ways that he might not have endorsed. But the connection between the Reform Laws and the land crisis of the Porfiriato is real and historically significant.

Juarez, Lincoln, and the Liberal Atlantic World

The parallel between Benito Juarez and Abraham Lincoln has been noted by historians since the nineteenth century and remains one of the most illuminating comparisons in the history of the Americas. The two men were almost exact contemporaries — Lincoln was born in 1809, Juarez in 1806 — and they governed their respective countries during the same tumultuous decade. Both were self-made lawyers who rose from humble origins to lead constitutional republics through devastating civil wars. Both were committed to the principles of popular sovereignty and the rule of law. Both presided over the destruction of a system of entrenched social hierarchy — slavery in the case of Lincoln, the church's feudal privileges in the case of Juarez.

The parallel extends to their relations with hostile foreign powers. Lincoln faced British neutrality that shaded toward sympathy with the Confederacy; Juarez faced French military intervention. Both resolved their crises through a combination of military persistence, political skill, and diplomatic acuity. And both were deeply shaped by the Enlightenment liberal tradition — by the belief that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed and that the purpose of law is to protect the equal rights of all citizens.

Lincoln and Juarez actually corresponded, though the evidence of what was exchanged is fragmentary. What is clear is that the Lincoln administration recognized Juarez's government as the legitimate government of Mexico throughout the French intervention and refused to recognize Maximilian's empire. The United States' position was crucial to Juarez's ultimate survival: by denying legitimacy to Maximilian and applying increasing pressure on Napoleon III, the American government made the French project in Mexico untenable. Juarez was well aware of this and was genuinely grateful for American support, even as he was equally clear that Mexico's sovereignty was not for sale and that the ultimate outcome would be determined by Mexican arms and Mexican will.

After Lincoln's assassination in April 1865, Juarez sent a message of condolence to the American people that was widely regarded as one of the most eloquent tributes paid to Lincoln. In it he wrote of Lincoln as a man who had given his life for the principle that "no man can own another man" — a principle that resonated deeply with Juarez's own commitment to equality before the law. The two men had never met in person, but they recognized each other across the distance as representatives of the same liberal democratic tradition fighting the same battles.

The liberal Atlantic world of the mid-nineteenth century — the world of Mill and Tocqueville, of Garibaldi and Lincoln, of Juarez and the Hungarian revolutionary Kossuth — was a world in which the principles of constitutional self-government, the rule of law, and individual liberty were engaged in a global struggle against the forces of monarchy, aristocracy, and clerical authority. Juarez was Mexico's representative in that struggle, and his ultimate victory was celebrated throughout the liberal world as a triumph of those principles.

The Political Economy of the Restored Republic

When Juarez returned to Mexico City in July 1867 and the Restored Republic began, he faced the challenge of rebuilding a country that had been at war, in one form or another, for almost a decade. The economy was in ruins. The infrastructure — what little existed — had been devastated. The treasury was empty. The foreign debt, while no longer the immediate trigger for intervention, remained a heavy burden. And the political landscape was fragmented and contentious: the liberal victory over conservatism and the empire did not produce political unity, but rather opened new conflicts within the victorious coalition.

Juarez's approach to economic reconstruction was cautious and fiscally conservative. He prioritized the restoration of financial order — the payment of debts, the regularization of government revenues, the elimination of the deficit — over more ambitious developmental programs. He was aware that Mexico's long-term economic development required foreign investment and that foreign investors would not come to a country that repudiated its debts or maintained financial chaos. He therefore worked to normalize Mexico's international financial relations even as he maintained a firm stance on sovereignty in political and military matters.

The most important economic initiative of the Restored Republic was the beginning of railroad construction. Juarez's government granted concessions for the construction of a railroad line connecting Mexico City to Veracruz — the primary route for both passenger and freight traffic connecting the capital to the outside world. The Mexican Railway (Ferrocarril Mexicano) opened in January 1873, months after Juarez's death, and it transformed the Mexican economy over the following decades. Juarez had laid the groundwork for this transformation.

His educational policy was one of the most genuinely transformative aspects of his post-1867 governance. The Organic Law of Public Instruction of 1867 established a national system of free, secular, compulsory primary education. It was an extraordinary ambition for a country with the resources of Mexico in 1867 — the system was built over decades rather than years — but it represented a fundamental commitment to the principle that a democratic republic required an educated citizenry, and that the state had an obligation to provide the education that the church had monopolized for three centuries. The Escuela Nacional Preparatoria, founded in 1868 under the intellectual leadership of the philosopher Gabino Barreda, became the flagship institution of the new secular educational system and the intellectual nursery of the next generation of Mexican liberal thought.

The Opposition of Porfirio Diaz and the Plan de la Noria

The political conflicts of Juarez's final years centered on the figure of General Porfirio Diaz, who would go on, after Juarez's death, to rule Mexico as a virtual dictator for more than three decades. Diaz was a genuine military hero of the Reform War and the French Intervention — his defense of Oaxaca and his brilliant seizure of Puebla on the night of April 1-2, 1867, had been among the most celebrated military exploits of the liberation war. He expected political rewards commensurate with his military service.

Juarez, however, was not inclined to reward military heroes with political power. He was deeply suspicious of the tendency of successful generals to convert military prestige into political authority — it was precisely that tendency that had produced Santa Anna and all the disasters that followed from him. He appointed Diaz to no significant political position and made clear that the civilian constitutional government was not going to be the servant of its generals, however celebrated. Diaz, wounded in his pride and ambition, threw himself into politics as Juarez's opponent.

The 1871 election campaign was fierce and personal. Diaz, running on a platform of no re-election — which rather obviously targeted Juarez's candidacy — made the argument that Juarez's insistence on remaining in power was itself a violation of the constitutional spirit he claimed to embody. The argument had genuine force: a presidency that had begun under extraordinary circumstances had continued through the Reform War and the French Intervention, and now Juarez was seeking yet another term in conditions of relative peace. The constitution did not explicitly prohibit re-election, but its democratic spirit seemed to point toward rotation in office.

When the election went to congress and congress chose Juarez, Diaz launched the Plan de La Noria revolt in November 1871. The revolt attracted significant support in the north and west of the country, but it was ultimately defeated. Juarez died before it was fully resolved, and under Lerdo de Tejada's subsequent government the revolt petered out. But the seeds of Diaz's political career had been planted, and his eventual triumph — in the Revolution of Tuxtepec in 1876, which overthrew Lerdo de Tejada — was in a sense the delayed revenge of the military man on the civilian constitutional tradition that Juarez had represented.

Juarez and the Press

One aspect of Juarez's presidency that modern observers find troubling is his relationship with the press. Mexico in the 1860s and 1870s had a vigorous, combative newspaper culture, and that press was frequently viciously hostile to Juarez. He was subjected to personal attacks, satirical caricature, and sustained political criticism. His response was ambivalent: he publicly professed commitment to press freedom as a constitutional right, but his governments were not above using legal mechanisms to harass newspapers that were particularly offensive, and his supporters in congress passed laws that some critics argued were designed to restrict critical journalism.

This tension — between the constitutional commitment to freedom of the press and the temptation to silence particularly vicious or destabilizing critics — is not unique to Juarez; it is a recurring theme in the history of democratic governance. Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and imposed martial law in parts of the United States during the Civil War, and was subjected to newspaper attacks far more extreme than anything Juarez endured. The judgment of history has generally been that Lincoln's wartime press restrictions, while constitutionally dubious, were understandable given the circumstances. A similar judgment might be applied to Juarez.

But it is important to note these limitations, because the hagiographic tradition in Mexican political culture has sometimes transformed Juarez into an impossibly perfect symbol, stripping away the complexity and the contradictions of the actual man and his actual governance. He was a great man who built great institutions and defended them at enormous personal and national cost. He was also a politician who sometimes used the instruments of the state in ways that strained the constitutional principles he professed to champion. Both things are true, and both things are necessary to a complete understanding of his career.

A Note on Juarez's Famous Maxim

The phrase most closely associated with Benito Juarez — "Entre los individuos, como entre las naciones, el respeto al derecho ajeno es la paz" — deserves some extended commentary, because it is often quoted without adequate appreciation of its depth and context.

The statement was delivered by Juarez on July 15, 1867, the day of his return to Mexico City after the defeat of the French and the execution of Maximilian. It came at the end of a long speech in which he reflected on the years of struggle and on the nature of the peace that Mexico was now beginning to enjoy. The context is crucial: Juarez was speaking as the leader of a small, poor, war-ravaged country that had just defeated the military forces of one of the great powers of the world, not through superior military strength but through the moral force of its constitutional legitimacy and the determination of its people.

The phrase has several layers of meaning. At the most basic level, it is a statement of the fundamental liberal principle: that peace between individuals and between nations is possible only when each respects the legal rights of the others. This is a repudiation of the might-makes-right principle — the claim that power itself confers the right to dominate others — which had been the operating principle of the French intervention in Mexico and of the colonial era more generally.

But there is a deeper layer. Juarez was also making a statement about the relationship between rights and peace that goes beyond mere law. He was arguing that sustainable peace — not merely the absence of immediate armed conflict, but the genuine, durable tranquility of a society at ease with itself — is possible only when each member of that society is genuinely secure in the enjoyment of his or her rights. A peace built on domination, on the suppression of the rights of some by the power of others, is not genuine peace but merely deferred war. Genuine peace requires genuine equality of rights.

This insight — that respect for rights and peace are not merely compatible but causally connected — was a profound contribution to political thought, and it was a contribution rooted in Juarez's particular experience. He had seen, in his own country, what happened when one group — the church, the military, the creole elite — claimed the right to stand above the law. He had seen the civil war that resulted. He had seen the foreign intervention that the disorder invited. And he had seen that the only way to build a stable republic was to insist, absolutely and without exception, that the law applied to everyone equally.

The maxim is Mexico's contribution to the political philosophy of the modern world, and it was earned in blood.