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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