Country of the Bad Wolfes

UNDER THE PORFIRIATO

Under the rule of Porfirio Díaz, Mexico boomed. He assembled a singular group of technical and financial advisors, highly educated and worldly men who approached their national objectives with the rational and clinical dispassion of scientists, which was in fact the collective name they were known by—Los Científicos. Even as Díaz established the civil order necessary to the protection of capital interests, he brought economic order to the country. He made good on Mexico’s foreign debt. He reformed the banking system. Most important to Mexican progress, he attracted a steady influx of foreign investment through every sort of incentive—tax breaks, mineral rights, long-term leases, railroad and telegraph rights-of-way, autonomy of operation, whatever was wanted. American and European entrepreneurs mined copper and silver and gold, operated plantations of henequen and tobacco and coffee, raised cattle on the lushest and largest pasturelands, and—as Amos Bentley had predicted to John Roger Wolfe only a few years before—expanded the railroad like a great steel web to every profitable pocket of the country. And when the old century would give way to the new, there would arrive the first seekers after petroleum, a commodity whose worth was heralded by the horseless carriages already puttering over Yankee roadways.

Besides the raw riches of the Mexican earth, the greatest boon to foreign investors was the inexhaustible supply of peón labor so cheap it was almost costless. And on those inevitable occasions when some insubordinate bunch should go on strike or otherwise impede the orderly operation of a business, well, there were the army and the Rurales—the Rules, as the gringo bosses called that vaunted organization of law enforcement—to set things aright.

This singular era, known as the Porfiriato, would be the most industrially ascendant and most economically prosperous in Mexican history—and there would be much international trumpeting of Porfirio Díaz for his intrepid transformation of a lawless wilderness into one of the most progressive of nations.

At the same time, barely audible through all the fanfare, came the rumblings of a swelling fury in the hopeless impoverished. The distant thunder of a forming storm.