Alan Taylor: belief

Transcript context

…In your understanding, how does that temporary French occupation sway the rest of Mexican history? There had been ongoing civil war between the two political movements in Mexico that were conveniently called the liberals and the conservatives. Conservatives were committed to very traditional institutions — in other words, supporting the Catholic Church, supporting the military, supporting landlords. The liberals were modernizers in that they wanted to have a republic where the voters would choose their rulers. They wanted an economy that was freed from traditional restraints imposed by the church and by the landlords. They wanted a 19th-century liberal system in which individuals were free to compete for economic benefit. There are two very powerfully different visions for what Mexico should be. By the French intervening on behalf of the conservatives and then losing, they discredit the conservative movement for a long time. It means that the liberal movement, while they don’t fulfill all their promises by any means — for example, they don’t really succeed in taking down all the landlords. They do take down those landlords that had been most conspicuously supportive of the conservatives and the French imperialists. Mexico is going to continue to struggle with enormous inequality throughout the rest of the 19th century. The liberals do establish principles of more free elections — not completely free, but more free elections — and of a free press, and of a legal system which is going to be more equitable than what had preceded it. I would say that the triumph of the liberals in Mexico, under the leadership of Benito Juárez, is one of the most important events of the 19th century in North America. Until Porfirio Díaz later, why is there so little interest in building up national infrastructure in Mexico?…

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