BarbarousMexico JOHN KENNETH TURNER

THE CRUSHING OF OPPOSITION PARTIES 163
The country has merely had the promise of it. However,
the promise has undoubtedly helped to keep patriotic
Mexicans fighting for a fulfillment, however great
the odds against them. When Porflrio Diaz captured
the Mexican government in 1876 the Mexican battle
for political freedom seemed won. The last foreign
soldier had been driven out of the country, the throttling
grip of the church on the state had been broken,
the country had inaugurated a system of universal suf -
frage, it had adopted a constitution much like that of
the United States, and finally, its president, one of the
authors of the constitution, Lerdo de Tejacla, was in
the act of putting that constitution in operation. The
personal revolution of General Porflrio Diaz, made successful
by force of arms only after it had failed twice,
put a sudden stop to the progressive movement, and ever
since that time the country has gone back politically,
year by year. If it were humanly possibly to put a
stop to the movement for democracy in a country by
killing the leaders and persecuting all connected with it,
democracy would long ago have been killed in Mexico,
for the leaders of every political movement in opposition
to President Diaz, however peaceful their methods,
however worthy their cause, have either been put to
death, impriSOfle(l or hunted out of the country. And
as I shall show in the next chapter, this statement is
literally true down to the present day.
Briefly I will sketch some of the more important of
these opposition movements. The first occurred toward
the close of President Diaz's first term in office and was
a movement having for its purpose the re-election of
Lerdo, who, upon Diaz's capture of the power, had fled
to the United States. The movement had not time to
gain any headway and come out in the open before