Man, Land, and Water: Mexico's Farmlands Irrigation Policies 1885-1911

By Clifton Kroeber

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1983.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520322547

Clifton Kroeber

Enter the Author Bio(s) here.

Book preview

MAN, LAND, AND WATER

Porfirio Díaz, sponsor both of powerful businesses and of government strength in limiting the power of rich corporations. (Courtesy Bancroft Library)

To those so near

Betty, Scott, Alan, Keith, and Katie

To those not far away

in Brooklyn, Portland, SanJose, and in Pacifica

Man, Land

and

Water

Mexico ’s Farmlands Irrigation Policies

1885-1911

CLIFTON B. KROEBER

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley Los Angeles London

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

Copyright © 1983 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Kroeber, Clifton B.

Man, land, and water.

Bibliography: p. 265.

Includes index.

1. Irrigation—Government policy — Mexico—History.

I. Title.

HD1741.M6K76 1983 333.91’3’0972 82-21939

ISBN 0-520-04843-1

Printed in the United States of America

123456789

Contents

Contents

1 Introduction

2 New Analyses and Shifting Interpretations

3 The Complex Analyses

Reconnoitering the Rivers: The Early Projects

5 Reconnoitering the Rivers: The Later Work

6 Bringing Law to Policy

7 For the Future of Agriculture and Irrigation

8 Crisis in La Laguna

9 Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

1

Introduction

For a full generation after independence in 1821 Mexico saw very little in the way of economic growth or development. Ravaged by civil strife and by foreign intervention and invasion, the country remained disunified, stricken by poverty, and unable to attract enough investment by Mexicans or by foreigners. Even with the victory of the Liberal party in the 1850s, the same conditions prevailed. The government was too poor and too preoccupied with its own survival to encourage economic change.

From the mid-1850s until the late 1860s, Mexico under Benito Juarez’s presidency continued to suffer as it had for a long time. On the surface the problem seemed to be political, expressed in factional conflicts and war. Leaders of the political factions were divided into two absolutely opposed camps. Economic activity suffered from war, from lack of strong government policies, and from a near-absence of new investment. The economy had not expanded much since the wars of independence. In some ways it had lost ground since then.¹

One could speak of Mexico as an assortment of regional and local cultures. The country contained a loose collection of regional economies, barely limping along. It also seemed to be losing its one national institution, the Roman Catholic church, which had to some minor degree given symbolic unity to the various peoples. For a long time the Church had been involved politically, and it lost respectability in the eyes of many Mexicans by siding with the Conservative party and later with Maximilian’s empire during the 1860s. On the losing side in the wars of that period, the Church never regained the full measure of respect and power to which its hierarchs had aspired since the sixteenth century.

As for the economy during the 1850s and 1860s, no national market as yet existed,² and little was happening to bring the many isolated economies into mutual communication. Indeed, no institutions yet existed for purposes of building a national economy. Neither the federal government nor the state governments had budgets sizable enough to lend stimulation to economic life, and foreign investment was slight until after the end of Maximilian’s empire in the late sixties. Long after the French army units and the imperial court were gone, Benito Juárez’s government still spent more than 45 percent of its funds in military expenditures to keep the central government in power. The federal budget was so inadequate for the urgent needs it faced that, years before, President Juárez had stopped making payments on the foreign debt.

Unfortunately, the system of taxation was not easy to improve in a situation of such weakness and need. The government had to have money to pay its soldiers, even though other government workers might go unpaid. Taxes had to be collected from the few available and vulnerable sources. The result was a discouragingly high tax on agriculture,³ and ineffective assessments on foreign trade—which in itself was too small to act as a force for Mexico’s domestic expansion. Neither agriculture nor domestic commerce nor foreign trade, however, gave a large enough tax base.⁴ Nor could Mexico borrow its way out of immediate difficulties: its foreign credit still stood at zero, with the same president in office who had repudiated payment on its foreign debt not many years before. For all these reasons it was nearly impossible to attract foreign investors, who might otherwise have helped Mexico to build up its economy.

This panorama of problems and deficiencies suggests to one writer, John Coatsworth, that since colonial times, Mexico had suffered from two basic difficulties. One of these was inadequacy of transport. The other was inefficient economic organization, an ensemble of policies, laws, and institutions that magnified instead of reduced, the gap between private and social benefits of economic activity. Coatsworth concludes that private economic enterprise was bound to be continually discouraged, without some revolution in the relationship between the state and economic activity.⁵

Dark as the day must have seemed in 1866 or 1867, however, Mexico now for the first time could call new strengths to the tasks of building a nation, an economy, and a government. With the recent discrediting of the monarchist faction and many of its most conservative allies, only one major political combination remained. That one had a chance to gain significant power. The possibility was also good that rich and powerful people would cooperate. No matter how variant their individual views, these people could agree at least upon a mild philosophy of progress. They would doubtless support constructive public policies. The core of this potential unifying sector was the Liberal party leadership. Its main objectives were well suited to the moment, because the Liberals wanted to respond to a widespread desire for peace, unity, and progress in material life.

The Liberal leaders respected and relied upon the institutions and uses of private property. They viewed individual initiative and personal enterprise as the saving and enriching influences for Mexico’s future. Their beliefs were echoed by the desire of many other Liberals to see personal freedoms protected and expanded. Related to this desire was a deep conviction that universal education was necessary for a healthy nation of selfdetermining people.⁶ And with regard to the masses of people and their need for freedom and for liberation of mind and spirit by way of education, the Liberals hoped also to strengthen the fabric of civic life by creating a whole new class of small, independent farmers.⁷

This ideal of the independent small-farm operator remained in the minds of Liberals as the key to a lively domestic economy. Moreover, the small farmers, self-respecting and hardworking, would also constitute the massive base for Mexican democracy. And Liberals expected that the solid core of small agriculturists would be expanded by a steady flow of immigrants—educated farmers from Europe who would add their numbers to millions of Mexican smallholders.⁸ Attempts to bring in thousands upon thousands of such industrious farmers, in fact, would remain as part of the national policy for agriculture until after 1900. Indeed, the hope for agricultural regeneration of Mexico through colonization of immigrants on unused lands or on modern haciendas never died during the half century from the early years of Juarez’s presidency until the end of the regime of Porfirio Diaz.⁹

There were propitious signs as well. A textile industry with modern machinery was growing up, to create strong demand for cotton grown in Mexico.¹⁰ Some other infant industries, such as the manufacture of paper and of iron, were rising behind protective tariff walls. Hope for quick encouragement of economic growth after 1867, though, seemed to rest upon two factors: the expanding activities of capitalists then located in the cities, and the movement of still other capitalists into Mexico from industrializing nations, whose economies now called for primary materials wherever these could be found.¹¹

President Juárez and his supporters believed in the benefits to be brought by business, industry, and agriculture. They placed much of their faith, and a surprisingly large proportion of the central government’s budget, in various activities intended to stimulate economic development. Juárez gave more than 12 percent of the federal budget —thus, more than a quarter of all non-military spending—to basic economic facilities and other infrastructure expenditure.¹² Of course, the results were not immediately or uniformly impressive. Some money was wasted. Further, trade within Mexico would rise very slowly as long as state governments still assessed customs duties at their borders. And change would be slow where there was nothing by way of a national communications network and where several forms of taxation probably tended to cancel out the stimulating effects of some other government policies.

The degree of loss that occurred, from among the varieties of wealth that Mexico did produce, will probably never be computed accurately. But that loss was considerable. For instance, the flight of Mexican capital from Mexico was steady and debilitating. More money left the country in this way than entered in the form of foreign investment funds.¹³ As another example, perhaps 10 percent of all silver mined in Mexico slipped out of the country as contraband. But despite all such difficulties, the Juárez regime moved as strongly as possible to try to stimulate production. Juarez intended to accumulate enough wealth in both private and public hands to begin a new epoch of prosperity for the whole population.

In Juarez’s last years, from 1867 until 1871, and during the presidency of his successor, Sebastian Lerdo de Tejada, the basic understandings and beliefs upholding the government’s economic program were clear. First, the Liberals had gradually come around to a conviction that the central government had to lead the way.¹⁴ During the earlier years of the century, these Liberals had been federalists, and believers in grass-roots government; but after Emperor Maximilian’s departure they followed President Juárez in his very determined and even unconstitutionally strong use of the national government¹⁵ as a weapon for economic change. It was probably easier for Juárez to act so forcefully because Mexico did not yet have most of the laws that would give specific guidance and limit public power in all that related to industry, commerce, and agriculture. Without those laws, there were no clear and specific bases upon which to stand if one wished to defend one’s own private rights or private property against the president’s or the congress’s strong exercise of power.

That is, the Constitution of 1857 gave only general guidance in these respects, as it was intended to do. The constitutional articles could not act as specific ground rules for day-to-day decisions, because they did not give specific enough guidance in controversies between private and public power. So as the economy became more complex, and conflicting jurisdictions and rights collided more frequently, the need arose for a whole series of enabling laws the congress would have to produce to define constitutional provisions. Mexico did not yet have even the basic civil and criminal codes of laws. Without these —let alone any special legislation —the country was trying to go on without practical guidelines for business and government activity.

Meantime, Presidents Juárez and Lerdo de Tejada built up a constitudonai dictatorship, which Richard Sinkin characterizes as the form of centralized government that has persisted in Mexico from the late 1860s until our own time.¹⁶ This was the early Liberals’ enduring contribution toward solution of many problems then holding the nation in their grip.

Other bases for the new approaches by President Juárez existed as a series of accepted beliefs about how best to build the economy. One of these was the assumption that mining was the key activity. It had for a long time provided most of the income in foreign trade and therefore almost half the national government’s tax income. So, although mining was not in a growth phase during the 1860s, it should lead the economy. Another basic assumption was that foreign exports would provide the money with which to develop Mexico’s economy on a much larger scale. There was also a growing belief that foreign investment could now be obtained. And there was a dual assumption as to how railroads and farms could combine to expand the domestic market: the thought was that a national rail network running through lands inhabited by the coming class of small farmers would quickly enough encourage demand, exchange, and consumption, and, that all that activity would in turn stimulate a steady growth of Mexican-owned industries. The country would then no longer need to buy so many costly imported items. All of these assumptions taken together constituted a bright feeling of hope, a faith in the future of various sectors of the economy and in expansion of the whole.

As it proved, President Juárez saw few gains from his attempts to invigorate economic life. His land policy went awry, as more owners did acquire land but agricultural production did not rise. The laws were so written as to make it easy to dispossess or otherwise deprive smallholders of their properties. So the class of ruggedly independent small farmers now seemed less likely to appear, as the number of small properties diminished.

Mexico’s Liberals have always had a remarkably equivocal view as the policies for the small farmer. On the one hand, some Liberals have always thought of smallholders in primarily moralistic terms —as people in need of social engineering measures, rather than as deprived economic operators who need material improvements in their farming situation. These Liberals have been less concerned, or unconcerned, with such questions as whether the small operator owns his own land, or owns in a collectivity, or whether he is not an owner at all but a sharecropper or one driven to find wage work.

On the other hand, some Liberals have taken a predominantly economic view of the millions of small producers. They have felt that the only ones worth encouraging are those who can produce significant amounts of food or fiber for the national and export markets. To such Liberals as these, the small subsistence farmers so numerous in Mexico during the late nine teenth and early twentieth centuries did not seem important. Such people were not expected to be important producers for the money economy. Some of them would of course always live in their hills and valleys, scratching away at the soil, while some of their sons and daughters might provide the laboring force for the factories Mexico hoped to build.

An equally important difference of view thus occurs when anyone in Mexico discusses small farming. In taking up this subject, some of the city-side people are thinking of the operators of the smallest enterprises that provide a subsistence level of living; others are thinking of much larger operations, perhaps involving a hundred or two hundred hectares in each unit—farms that produce very effectively for local or national markets. And at some time in the late nineteenth century, probably in Benito Juarez’s time, it is this larger kind of operation that gradually became the hope of Liberal policymakers. That hope, for a nation of smallish and very efficient producers whose work makes itself felt in both domestic and foreign trade and in supply of food and of materials for industries, increasingly became the central expectation of the Liberals.

So it remained at least until the 1920s, if not into our own time. The more lively hope was for an emerging class of effective producers whose properties were thought of as small in a special sense. What was of immediate concern in President Juárez’s time, of course, was that no such class of productive smallish farmers was at work. Agriculture was not in a growth phase, nor were there signs of enough innovation in farming methods to promise increasing production from the countryside.

Nor was mining moving forward as expected. And foreign investment remained sluggish. Whether or not tariff policy could have been manipulated to favor such activities, the president still did not tend to make tariff policy so as to encourage foreign imports needed in Mexico’s industries. Customs taxes continued to be devised mainly as revenue measures. Taxes on imports produced about half the central government’s small income. And these taxes protected a few Mexican producers from foreign competition.¹⁷

As for the government’s own income, when President Juárez was able to return to Mexico City in 1867, some four-fifths of his budget went to payments on the public debt.¹⁸ He never escaped the disadvantages of a small budget heavily committed in advance. Mexico’s internal trade still suffered from the combination of heavy direct and indirect taxation, in addition to high transportation costs.¹⁹ So, like many another colonial economy, Mexico’s still showed higher expenses bearing on its own producers than on those in western Europe or in the United States, who would sell more cheaply in Mexico if permitted to do so. President Juarez’s policies could not be strong or effective enough either to approximate the Liberal ideal of a free market or to make gains toward establishing a strong domestic market within Mexico.

Where President Juárez did achieve the first results in Liberal policies was in encouraging the building of railroads. Mexico’s first, the Veracruz line, fostered a small wheat trade with Cuba and a steep improvement in efficiency and quantity of agricultural production on lands near the rails. This was true even though the earliest effect was a disquieting one: to stimulate pulque production and sale in nearby markets—not an entirely happy fact, because Liberals were desirous of discouraging consumption of the inexpensive liquors.

Juárez also had a success with his own major policy regarding mining. With a reduction in the export duty on silver, and with freedom to trade that metal abroad, mines were now motivated to greatly increase production. For the time being it appeared that mining would lead the expansion in Mexico’s foreign trade. That trade soon equaled the highest level it had ever enjoyed, that of some sixty years before. And Juárez’s government also spent money on new schools. Moreover, there was an attempt to increase public confidence in the stability of the national currency. In all, these few tentative successes and forward steps in infrastructure development, in Laura Randall’s view, provided the basis for much of the economic development… achieved during the next 40 years.⁸⁰

With the coming of Porfirio Diaz to the presidency, the main lines of Liberal policy would gradually be strengthened and intensified during the late 1870s and 1880s. Why Diaz’s policies could be stronger and, in some cases, more effective is a matter not yet fully understood. One advantage certainly lay in Diaz’s early success in building a strong political coalition under his own personal control. Soon his potential rivals were discouraged from fighting him or from trying to block his policies within the government at Mexico City.⁸¹ Another advantage lay in the fact that funds were moving outward from western Europe and from the United States, seeking the very kinds of investment opportunities Mexico wished to offer. Still another advantage, lesser but of importance, was in the continuing flow of silver from Mexico’s mines into foreign hands. This gave government an increasing budget and gradually built abroad the image of Mexico as a scene of real and satisfying wealth and stability in economic affairs.

As the president so often said in later years, the rapid development of railroads was an immensely important change. More than that, railroads soon began to have effects unsuspected even by those promoting this new industry. Already in Benito Juárez’s day the per-pound cost of transporting heavy materials had been falling by more than 80 percent wherever the railroad ran. The very existence of the lines—linking those centers of population already the largest and economically most active —began to encourage the establishment of whole congeries of small and medium-sized businesses.⁸⁸

The mining industry as it grew during the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries—modernizing, and proliferating into many new activities—was a child of the railroad network. Only with so many kilometers of railroads, connecting with the United States and with ports for the European trade, could mining constantly take on such remarkable expansion and development. It is likely also that even in their early days the railways began to make for a better distribution of laborers in Mexico. Meantime, the labor policies of the Diaz regime, such as they were, aimed at holding wages down so as to encourage private entrepreneurship across the whole face of the country.

The railroad boom furnished the first opportunity to develop the Liberals’ policies for a new style of government guidance and control of economic activities.²⁸ As early as 1880 the federal government moved to a powerful position in railroad affairs by taking to itself the power to amend railroad companies’ contracts. The control exerted by government over railway operations tightened, and it would become dominant early in the twentieth century.

President Porfirio Diaz and his aides did not see such exercises of power as invasions of private property. There was no intent here to discourage business enterprise or to tamper with the freedom of businessmen to make their own decisions. Mexico’s political leaders were simply continuing in their closer and closer domination of railroads, the traditionally preeminent role of the central government in important decision making for the economy. That had been the traditional usage since the Spanish colonial period. The custom of looking to the central government for the most serious decisions, including those in economic life, was very old and very firm. There had never been a time in Hispano-Mexican history when government and private enterprise had been thought of as separated spheres of action or of decision.

Despite the strong start toward political control, and in spite of early successes in some other respects, the Diaz version of Liberal policies did not by any means bring about quick regeneration of the economy. Many of the shackling and smothering influences that had held Juarez’s successes to a minimum continued to exist as problems for years after Diaz originally came to power in 1876.²⁴ These depressing influences included the unreliability of the national currency, the pressure to keep import duties high, the internal customs barriers, and the fact that the nation’s foreign credit still did not exist. Diaz encountered difficulties in obtaining recognition of his regime from the United States and from France and later in reestablishing relations with Great Britain. He finally settled things with the British in 1884 by agreeing to renegotiate Mexico’s debt to British subjects.

Furthermore, some of the early decisions Diaz made were ill advised. One was to prefer encouragement of European immigration to a strong expansion of Mexican public education. The President expected to see improvement of the level of technical skill and literacy in the population by seeding the country with foreign immigrants. This was what President Juárez had hoped to do. But few immigrants came,²⁵ and the mass of Mexicans went unschooled. Education was an aspect of Mexican development which Diaz did not begin to emphasize until the first years of the twentieth century. By that time the very scope of the enterprise had converted public education in Mexico into a very serious problem. It was too vast and too complex for any such regime as that of Porfirio Diaz to attack.

As for the internal customs barriers, these were not eliminated until the 1890s.²⁶ And in currency reform the president was too slow to take action. Opposed as he was to leaving the minting of coins in the hands of private contractors, the president nonetheless did not take forceful action in this regard as he often did with other problems. He sat by and let the contracts run out, so that only begiïming in 1893 could the government start to avoid the needless expense and other abuses of the private-coinage system.²⁷

Likewise, President Diaz did not manage to break in upon the succession of upward and downward cycles in Mexican prices and interest rates. To some extent these ups and downs might have been unavoidable. After all, Mexico was slowly becoming more dependent upon world market conditions and processes. But a visible influence in these rises and falls of prices and interest rates was the fact that Mexico sold silver abroad in large amounts, both as coin and as bullion. A rising price of silver in the world market, for instance, would result in a flight of bullion and coin into foreign hands. And with coins scarce, Mexican interest rates would rise and make it harder for small businesses to conduct their affairs or to expand. Similarly, when world silver prices rose, it was likely that foreign imports could enter the country at favorable enough prices to discourage manufacture of those goods in Mexico.

Of course the reverberation of world conditions in Mexico was not always unfavorable. With the swings in silver price would often come encouraging conditions. For instance, when silver prices fell, taking Mexican interest rates down with them, many entrepreneurs were encouraged to spend for new plant or other essential purposes. Perhaps this fact, that conditions bad for some were favorable for others, restrained President Diaz from making policies designed to even out the effects of ups and downs in silver prices.²⁸ Be that as it may, manufacturing crept steadily forward during those years. The owners bought better machinery, kept wages constant, and thus accumulated their own resources, which then were used in still further modernization and expansion.²⁹

As the foregoing suggests, the Diaz government was always engaged in trying to please a number of different factions within its aspiring coalition of political support. Policy for one group, however, could not by any means be designed so as to please all groups. And as time went on and the economy began to expand and to develop remarkably, the number and complexity of President Diaz’s favored interest groups and individuals grew. By the 1890s there had to be a much more rapid and broader flow of new policies, and the stakes had risen considerably.

As we will see, the central government continued to take some actions to favor individuals, some to favor traditional supporters of the president, and some to accommodate new groups appearing on the economic scene. It was less and less possible to make all these policy lines and personal favors work to the benefit of some without injuring or simply overlooking the interests of others. As for making policy to diminish the difficulties resulting from swings in silver price, the president would only begin to address that situation during the 1890s and after 1900.

Meantime, from the early days of his first presidential term, Porfirio Diaz was well aware that he must somehow reestablish Mexico’s credit, so as to regain respectability in the Western world’s main money markets. The president must contrive somehow to fund the foreign debt, as a crucial step in establishing Mexico’s image of reliability in the eyes of foreign rulers and foreign investors. He must then go on to attract as much foreign investment as possible, aiming at a constant increase in capital expenditure in all main sectors of the economy. If the new Mexico could be made to look attractive enough to foreign investors, what Diaz most wished to see developing were commercial agriculture, manufacturing, and mining, always speeded along of course by the steady march of new railroad building. All of these hopes did not amount to a master plan. Instead, as Laura Randall concludes, the president’s expectations took the shape of a very generalized and traditional sort of policy that had existed before Diaz’s own presidency and that would long survive him: namely, to bring all groups into production for the domestic market, and to subject them to national control.⁸⁰

As it proved, before Porfirio Diaz left the presidency of Mexico he would have done a great deal to extend his policy of national control to almost all producers and industrialists anywhere in Mexico. Those groups that felt the suasion of government power would include the most powerful foreign investors, most of them now forced to accept government dictates. The hundreds of small and middle-sized businesses that grew up during Diaz’s long years in the presidency would also come within the government’s coercive power. So also, more indirectly, would the millions of poor people, many of whom would be deprived of their lands or of their occupations as artisans and forced to work on the nearby estates of the new commercial- agricultural barons of modern Mexico.

During the late 1870s and into the 1880s Porfirio Diaz, and his nominee Manual Gonzalez, who held the presidency from 1880 to 1884, made a few false starts in trying to regulate the monetary system. They did not deal effectively with all the associated problems, such as the huge foreign debt and complications of handling two sets of pesos, one for internal and one for foreign payments.³¹

Presidents Diaz and Gonzalez did succeed, however, in reestablishing diplomatic relationships with the United States, France, and Great Britain. Those ties were absolutely necessary to Mexico’s future as a capitalist nation attempting to attract foreign investment and to expand foreign trade. Diaz also began to move in the direction of granting monopolies of scale to foreign as well as Mexican investors, instead of continuing with small, local monopolies. Also in the 1880s President Diaz began to move some tariff rates lower and lower to encourage import of certain raw materials and manufactured goods that Mexico needed to build import substitution industries of its own. These tariff reductions were also supposed to encourage creation of a Mexican merchant marine for overseas shipping. But customs-tax policy proved insufficient in this regard.³²

With this sort of policy it was plain that the president wanted to force Mexican industrial and agricultural production as rapidly as possible. The short-range objectives were to build a domestic market and to take whatever savings in foreign exchange might result from that and from expanding industrial activity. This kind of industrial emphasis seemed promising, because the railroads kept on showing new savings for transport of large amounts of materials.

Railroads also broadened the market for sales of many products. One of the early results of this constructive influence was the arrival of Europeans, in small numbers but equipped to establish new businesses. Some brought their own funds. Others borrowed in Mexico, or combined their operations in partnership with well-to-do Mexicans. In the central core of the country, in the cities, these new businesses and industries began to show important results. They further broadened the traditionally diversified pattern of Mexico’s industrial production.³³

Agriculture was to remain the least served of all major sectors of the economy. There were bright spots, to be sure, as with the cotton industry, whose expansion was one of the more important developments Mexico needed for purposes of import substitution. With the crossing of new railroads through the Laguna District in north-central Mexico, where climate and soil were ideal for cotton cultivation, the insufficient production began to rise. Finally, the center of this agricultural industry moved into the Laguna District —the Comarca Lagunera as it was called—away from its former focus near the Gulf Coast. The rising production of cotton was immediately usable in Mexico’s textile plants and would fill a real national need.

In general, however, agriculture did not see a renaissance, even though railroads were supposedly creating opportunities to move any amount of product from one region to another and into the export trade. One can guess that one of the main problems was that few rich foreigners chose to invest in agricultural production. A few did enter the cotton industry, and a few others appeared as producers of semitropical crops for export. Some established large cattle ranches. And as time went on foreigners were to be seen in small swarms in almost every other realm of economic activity. But in agriculture the foreign investors were too few.³⁴ Frequently they were unskilled and met disaster amid the intricacies of tropical and semitropical commercial farming.

One of the many exceptions to this general rule was William Purcell, who did invest very successfully in cotton cultivation and concurrently in mining, as well as in other enterprises including cattle raising, in the state of Coahuila. But the question arises whether there were inducements enough to tip the balance toward Mexico in the minds of foreign entrepreneurs looking for agricultural opportunities. They could choose to put their skills and their money into any one of a number of other parts of the world, some of which were at the time becoming colonies of European powers. Investors who leaned toward pastoralism also had a very wide choice of opportunities in southern South America, in Canada or the United States, in Australia, or in New Zealand. In all those regions model enterprises were already showing strong success. In addition, all those other lands were of a temperate climate, so familiar to western Europeans and North Americans.

Whatever the reasons, the formula of jacking up the economy by attracting foreign investment had limited success in agriculture. Mexico entered the 1880s without the great strength in the rural economy that had been expected. In time, the land policies of the 1880s and 1890s would be among the government’s earlier attempts to solve this problem of slow growth in agriculture. So also would the regime eventually turn, in the late 1880s, to a new waters policy, a development with which this present work principally concerns itself.

By the 1880s the president was using at least five techniques or approaches to coax in foreign investment while keeping Mexican money in the country and attracting it into economic enterprises. Those five approaches were: (1) to assure safety for the persons and property of well-to- do people; (2) to increase the reliability of government assistance to owners of large, productive properties; (3) to afford speedier and better service to private enterprises and to property owners of large scale by an increasing number of bureaucrats; (4) to offer all manner of inducements to foreign investors; and (5) to continue to encourage the building of new facilities such as railroads and port works. All these general lines of policy contained many special programs and incentives designed for single industries, or for individuals of particular personal or political importance to the president. The five approaches were, of course, of greater symbolic than material benefit during their early days.³⁵

These techniques, elaborated as needed in specific cases by the leading officials of the central government, helped to achieve the important goal of creating a climate of hope and promise for those with money to invest. Thus the close attention to funding the national debt³⁶ and to banking and monetary policies, from the late 1880s onward, proved to be necessary and also of specific use to the government. All those fiscal reforms directly advanced the policies of providing additional infrastructure facilities. They also advanced the cause of increasing the reliability of government support to property owners. By the 1890s the government had had notable success in establishing Mexico’s standing in world money centers, allowing President Diaz to arrange new loans for the many expenditures the government then wished to make to enhance and to speed economic development.

The government had already organized an effective rural police to assure safety for well-to-do people residing or working outside the cities. Over time the president also made it clear that he expected state governors to use military or police units to keep the peace or to restore stability wherever it might be threatened. As time went on, through the 1880s and 1890s, this objective of safety for influential persons, and security for their properties, met with success.³⁷ Only near the turn of the century and thereafter did these conditions deteriorate. Then, embryonic labor groups and the government’s armed guardians of order began to come into direct conflict.

During the 1880s the central government’s policies laid the groundwork for remarkable gains that would occur in several sectors of the economy during the 1890s. The president and congress set forth procedures and structures of incentives for all kinds of private enterprise. The railroad acts of 1880, 1881, and 1883 were such actions.³⁸ The tariff was reduced in 1880, 1885, and 1887 to favor imports of some materials and equipment. Customs taxes on many consumer products rose so as to favor Mexican manufacturing and public utilities.³⁹ The central government made important changes in mining legislation late in 1883 and issued a new mining code in 1884. This was followed by the Mining, Agriculture, and Industry Act of 1886; the revision of the mining tax law in 1887;⁴⁰ and many other new measures intended to encourage private investment. To the same effect the congress authorized the Law of Waters of Federal Jurisdiction on June 5, 1888. The president and congress worked out the major civil and criminal codes and made some early revisions in the civil law code.⁴¹ All these were important roadmap indications for businessmen, industrialists, and commercial entrepreneurs.

As David Pletcher understands it, this large body of constructive policy making reflected President Porfirio Diaz’s gradual success in establishing close control over the political process. He came to dominate the congress by the middle years of the 1880s. His new coalition in public affairs now included an increasing number of old-line liberals and neo-conserva- tives.⁴² These men represented two generations, the Liberals mostly being veterans of the Juárez and Lerdo regimes while the neo-Conservatives often were younger people now making their first appearance in the congress or in private corporations.

What President Diaz had been doing in economic policies was part and parcel of his step-by-step achievement of political domination. Those who could be bound to the regime by favors and services, he courted. Those who would never be friends could be frightened or neutralized, or given enough of what they wanted to quiet them. Landowners were aided in extending their holdings. Businessmen could expect assistance at crucial moments. Intellectuals received some preferment in employments somewhere in the government. And, as Raymond Vernon writes, President Diaz in his early years winked at the local monopolies of business, the labor impressment systems of the mines and haciendas, and the illegal levies of states and municipalities. As Vernon sees it, Porfirio Diaz built a new and much more extensive system of preferences and privileges for men of power—for Mexican hacienda owners, generals, and politicians, and for foreign investors as well.⁴⁸ The characteristic of this system was that government gained piecemeal support from many diverse groups and individuals and thus acquired a broader base. But this seems to have occurred without any subsequent stage of uniflcation wherein individuals might have become cooperative with each other in some relationship with government or politics.

The superficial sign of this conglomerate political support was that no political party existed—none in support of the regime and not one opposed. Another way of seeing the disunified nature of the Diaz system in politics is to notice that key political appointments tended to follow an age- old pattern of patrimonialism, wherein the central concern was the appointee’s loyalty to the president. But at the same time privileges were being granted to many other people in businesses and industries. Many of them never held political office. Few had anything in common with the patrimonial appointees occupying public posts of authority. The point here, thus, is to be aware of the fact that economic and political institutions in Mexico were being built of very disparate kinds of units. There was no concern for knitting the growing totality into networks or personal associations that would give the regime a strength beyond the simple presence of Porfirio Diaz in the presidency.

Why the regime built its political strength, and to some extent the new economic strength of the country, in this patchwork and piecemeal fashion is a deep question, one we cannot resolve here in any important way. Three aspects of the developing picture are obvious enough, even though others were important. First, Porfirio Diaz knew he was managing the first Mexican regime that had ever had a hope of drawing together most of the influential Mexicans. He attracted people to support himself. He did not seem to feel that more complicated steps toward unification would ever be needed, beyond that fact of simple obedience to his regime.

Second, there was much that was sensible, in a Mexican style, in taking real problems one after another and solving each one insofar as possible at the time. Many of Diaz’s policies and appointments responded to this strong Mexican habit of confronting problems with available solutions that seemed to be the most rational alternatives. So Diaz linked himself with a very wide variety of people. Some were in office, and others possessed profitable enterprises or other privileges. He accumulated still other sorts of people in the growing bureaucracy. One may guess that no two of all these people received favor for the very same reasons. One might be a traditionalist, a very conservative hacendado; another, a neo-conservative