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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 December 2015
The Mexican nation has been incessantly plagued with revolutionary plans since the “grito of demoralization” by Guerrero in 1829. The word “plagued” is used advisedly, for very few of the revolutionary plans were more than expressions of personalismo, the bane of Latin-American politics. The immense majority of these so-called “programs” have had very little in the way of social and economic reforms embodied in them, either by word or implication; for the most part they have been political rather than socio-economic in character.
Early in the twentieth century, however, a small group developed one of the few socio-economic programs to be found in Mexican history. On July 1, 1906, while the Diaz government was still firmly entrenched, Ricardo Flores Magón and his little group of followers, almost unnoticed by the majority of the Mexicans, published a program of reform which at the time was one of the most sweeping ever outlined in Mexico. Announced as the philosophy of the Mexican Liberal Party, in it were all the elements of a vast socio-economic plan for the Mexican nation, with only a small part of the program dealing with political change. The Liberals well realized that curing only the political sore would not heal the sick nation.
1 For a short study of the Flores Magón movement, see Cumberland, Charles C., “The Precursors of the Mexican Revolution of 1910,” Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. XXII, No. 2, May, 1942.Google Scholar
2 Programa del Partido Liberal. The copy used for reference here is one of the printed originals. It and the accompanying Manifesto a la Nación are reprinted in Naranjo, Francisco, Diccionario biográfico revolucionario, (Mexico, D. F., 1935), pp. 249–263 Google Scholar. Although the group was never recognized in Mexico as a political party, for the sake of convenience it will be referred to as such in this paper.
3 The army was augmented, from time to time, by a system not differing greatly from the English press-gang methods.
4 En la escuela primaria está la profunda base de la grandeza de los pueblos, y puede decirse que las mejores instituciones poco valen y están en peligro de perderse, si al lado de ellas no existen múltiples y bien atendidas escuelas en que se formen los ciudadanos que en lo futuro deban velar por esas instituciones.” Exposición of the Program of the Liberal Party.
5 No minimum age was given, but evidently it was intended that all children between the ages of seven and fourteen were to be affected.
6 The general attitude toward clericalism is discussed below.
7 At the rate of exchange at that time, a peso was worth approximately fifty cents. Compared with the general wage standard prevailing in the United States, this minimum was pitifully low.
