page_title: Mexican Revolution
section_title: Madero Presidency, Nov. 1911–Feb. 1913
hierarchical_section_title: Mexican Revolution / Madero Presidency, Nov. 1911–Feb. 1913
caption_attribution_description: Title: Madero [and] Pascual Orozco. Creator: Unknown Date: ca. 1910-1913 Part Of: American border troops and the Mexican Revolution Place: Parral, Chihuahua, Mexico Physical Description: 1 photographic print (postcard): gelatin silver; 9 x 14 cm File: ag1982_0015_126c_madero.jpg Rights: Please cite DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University when using this file. A high-resolution version of this file may be obtained for a fee. For details see the sites.smu.edu/cul/degolyer/research/permissions/ web page. For other information, contact degolyer@smu.edu. For more information and to view the image in high resolution, see: digitalcollections.smu.edu/cdm/ref/collection/mex/id/1815 View the Mexico: Photographs, Manuscripts, and Imprints Collection
context_page_description: The Mexican Revolution was a major armed struggle, lasting roughly from 1910 to 1920, that transformed Mexican culture and government. Although recent research has focused on local and regional aspects of the revolution, it was a genuinely national revolution. Its outbreak in 1910 resulted from the failure of the 31-year-long regime of Porfirio Díaz to find a managed solution to presidential succession. This meant there was a political crisis among competing elites and the opportunity for agrarian insurrection. Wealthy landowner Francisco I. Madero challenged Díaz in the 1910 presidential election, and following the rigged results, revolted under the Plan of San Luis Potosí. Armed conflict broke out in northern Mexico and Díaz was forced out. In the Treaty of Ciudad Juárez, Díaz resigned and went into exile, new elections were to occur in the fall, and an interim presidency under Francisco León de la Barra was installed. A new election was held in 1911, bringing Madero to the presidency.
  The origins of the conflict were broadly based in opposition to the Díaz regime, with the 1910 election becoming the catalyst for the outbreak of political rebellion.
context_section_description: Madero was an inexperienced politician who had never held office before, but his election as president in October 1911, following the exile of Porfirio Díaz in May 1911 and the interim presidency of Francisco León de la Barra, raised high expectations for positive change. However, the Treaty of Ciudad Juárez guaranteed that the essential structure of the Díaz regime, including the Federal Army, was kept in place. Madero fervently held to his position that Mexico needed real democracy, which included regime change by valid election, a free press and the right of labor to organize and strike.
  The rebels who brought him to power were demobilized and Madero called on these men of action to return to civilian life. According to a story told by Pancho Villa (one of those who had defeated Díaz's army and forced his resignation and exile), he told Madero at a banquet in Ciudad Juárez in 1911, "You [Madero], sir, have destroyed the revolution . . . It's simple: this bunch of dandies have made a fool of you, and this will eventually cost us our necks, yours included."  Ignoring the warning, Madero increasingly relied on the Federal Army as armed rebellions broke out in Mexico in 1911–12, with particularly threatening insurrections led by Emiliano Zapata in Morelos and Pascual Orozco in the north. Both Zapata and Orozco had led revolts that had put pressure on Díaz to resign, and both felt betrayed by Madero once he became president.
  The press embraced its newfound freedom and Madero became a target of its criticism. Organized labor, which had been suppressed under Díaz, could and did stage strikes, which foreign entrepreneurs saw as threatening their interests. Although there had been labor unrest under Díaz, labor's new freedom to organize also came with anti-American currents. The anarcho-syndicalist Casa del Obrero Mundial (House of the World Worker) was founded in September 1912 by Antonio Díaz Soto y Gama, Manuel Sarabia and Lázaro Gutiérrez de Lara and served as a center of agitation and propaganda, but it was not a formal labor union.
  Political parties proliferated, one of the most important being the National Catholic Party, which in a number of regions of the country was particularly strong. Several Catholic newspapers were in circulation during the Madero era, including El País and La Nación, only to be later suppressed under the Victoriano Huerta regime (1913–14).  From 1876–1911, relations between the Roman Catholic Church and the Mexican government were stable, with the anticlerical laws of the Mexican Constitution of 1857 remaining in place, but not enforced, so conflict was muted.
  During Madero's presidency, Church-state conflict was channeled peacefully. The National Catholic Party became an important political opposition force during the Madero presidency. In June 1912 congressional elections, "militarily quiescent states...the Catholic Party (PCN) did conspicuously well." During that period, the Catholic Association of Mexican Youth (ACJM) was founded. Although the National Catholic Party was an opposition party to the Madero regime, "Madero clearly welcomed the emergence of a kind of two party system (Catholic and liberal); he encouraged Catholic political involvement, echoing the exhortations of the episcopate." What was emerging during the Madero regime was "Díaz's old policy of Church-state detente was being continued, perhaps more rapidly and on surer foundations." The Catholic Church was working within the new democratic system promoted by Madero, but it had its own interests to promote, some of which were the forces of the old conservative Church, while the new, progressive Church supporting social Catholicism of the 1891 papal encyclical Rerum Novarum was also a current.  When Madero was overthrown in February 1913 by counter-revolutionaries, the conservative wing of the Church supported the coup.
  Madero did not have the experience or the ideological inclination to reward men who had helped bring him to power. Some revolutionary leaders expected personal rewards, such as the young and militarily gifted Pa
caption: Madero and northern revolutionary Pascual Orozco, who rebelled against him in 1912.
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