Governor Carranza and the Revolution in Coahuila

Abstract

It’s easier to make a revolution, than it is to make a revolution work,” Fidel Castro once told a packed audience listening to him discuss the progress of Cuba. His remark, made with characteristic candor, expressed the challenge that confronts all rebels who manage to achieve power. For the Anti-reelectionists in Mexico, the revolution had been made in the victory over federal troops at Ciudad Juárez in May, 1911. It then fell to Francisco Madero to direct the program that would make it work. He intended to justify the violent overthrow of the porfirian dictatorship by invigorating Mexican politics as a means to restore democratic government and to establish the mechanism for responsive reform of the economy and society. The critical element in his proposal was the redemption of the authority of the state governors, to whom he delegated the responsibility and the opportunity to reconstruct Mexico. This policy represented no casual abdication of authority, but a carefully devised scheme of decentralization. Madero’s opposition to highly-centralized government resulted from his birthright as a son of remote Coahuila, the native state of Mexico federalism, his political convictions, including an abiding faith in the confederated government posited in the 1857 Constitution, and his philosophic precepts, based on the ideals of Karl Christian Friedrich Krause and a reaction to the governmental consolidation rationalized by Comtean Positivism (promoted in Mexico by the Positivists, the Científicos, and the dictator).