By Robert Nickel
Mexico has long been a region of trials and tribulations, and these have blossomed forth in the form of republics, disputes, revolutions and reversions. Until the Spanish discovered the region in the 16th century, it had been the dominion of the Maya and Aztec, plus some other cultures, but this changed abruptly with the arrival of the Spanish. Conquistadors arrived after 1519, and starting with the Yucatan area, proceeded to conquer and rule the country, creating a colony of Spain for several centuries.
But the story was far from over. An interesting time in Mexico occurred, when a monarchy that was established by Napoleon III, (nephew of Bonaparte) collapsed within the space of only three years, after his troops invaded in the 19th century and installed his friends to the throne. In order to understand why these events took place, it’s important to establish a rough sense of what had occurred in New Spain over the previous three centuries.
The conquest of the Aztec empire by Cortes in 1521 was only the beginning; taking over the rest of the country took another century to complete. Friars began converting the indigenous populations and helped to establish a feudal system that best benefited Spain, in which the locals were seen as nothing but a labor force. Under colonial law, Mexican natives were forbidden from education, had no access to administrative office, and were only able to grow crops which would benefit the European nation.
In 1810, the locals had had enough. A peasant uprising escalated into a full-blown War of Independence, lasting eleven years, which resulted in Spain surrendering their colonial claims to the land. Augustine de Iturbide was the ruler of the First Mexican Empire, and he had helped in stopping the conflict.. However, the regime collapsed after only eight months due to infighting between two major factions: the liberals, who favored democracy, and the conservatives, who wanted a monarch to rule.
This struggle would be a major aspect in Mexico’s politics over the next several decades. After declaring the land to be a Republic, the nation found itself at war with the United States several times, losing the northern states (what are now Texas and California, among others). The Reform Wars of the mid 19th century were instrumental in hampering a second federalist government: an attempt, by the liberals, to to strip the Catholic Church of a lot of its power, and to remove centralist authority, resulted in a brutal civil war.
It was an unstable period of time, where fourteen different state heads reigned over the course of seventeen years, as part of the Second Republic. The war between the liberals and conservatives ended with the election of Benito Juarez as president in 1861, but the infrastructure and economy of Mexico were utterly crippled. It was around this time that Spain, Great Britain, and France began to pressure the government over the immense amount of debt that they were owed. The conservadores saw a chance to implement their desired monarchy, and when European fleets (including Napoleon III) arrived in 1862, there were treasonous people waiting to help them take over.
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