Felipe Ávila: today the democracy for which Madero worked is becoming a reality

The national hero Francisco I. Madero has the great merit of leading the first democratic government in Mexico in the 20th century, the only one for a long time. His dream was cut short, and we are barely making democracy a realitysaid historian Felipe Ávila, author of the biography The father of democracy (Debate).

The researcher highlighted in an interview with The Day that the former president created the first modern political party in the country: the National Anti-Reelectionist Party, which began to be mass, because thousands of anti-reelectionist clubs were formed between 1908 and 1910 in a good part of the country’s cities, held a national convention, adopted a program opposition politician and chose their candidates.

Madero, the sociologist also continued, carried out the first modern political campaign with several tours, in which he toured a large part of the Mexican Republic, and documented, for the first time, electoral fraud in the country, whose response from the authorities was rejection. .

Faced with the closure of all institutions, Madero decided to call for an insurrection in 1910. It had a great echo, not only because his diagnosis was the best, but because he had prepared the ground and had legitimacy to call for an insurrection when all legal avenues They had been cancelled.

Ávila (Mexico City, 1958) emphasized that the so-called apostle of democracy He created, between 1908 and 1911, “the conditions, or diagnosed that they existed, for a revolution to be generated, and he had the ability to influence it, accelerate it, catalyze it and capitalize on it, because not only did he have great success in fighting against Porfirio Díaz in the federal election, but in finding a way out of the closure, which none of the previous oppositions to the Porfiriato had been able to overcome.

He knew how to offer an alternative to the indignation and desires of a large part of Mexican society for a democratic country, and skillfully lead the insurrection. That would not have been possible without Madero. He is the key figure to understand the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution and the content of the profoundly revolutionary character that was shown since the Maderista insurrection.

Shoe Identification

Felipe Ávila has worked for years on the topic of the Mexican Revolution and has written biographies of some of its important figures. Since he was a student, he has identified with Zapatismo, and has addressed the Zapatista communities in various studies, as well as the caudillo and his influence on the collective imagination.

He said that he was attracted by Zapata’s break with Madero, which was decisive for both of them. “It seemed to me that it was not sufficiently explained, because the virulence with which they broke up is surprising. He Ayala Plan “It was not only a declaration of war against Madero, but it came to describe him as someone worse than Porfirio Díaz.”

In the investigation of Zapata’s companions He learned a piece of information that he considered very significant: Madero and Sara Pérez Romero were godparents at Zapata’s wedding with Josefa Espejo, in August 1911, shortly before the breakup occurred.

Ávila said that he found it striking that during the Tragic Decade, Madero traveled to Morelos in order to try to enlist General Felipe Ángeles, to help him put down the rebellion. Zapata controlled the access roads and allowed the president to pass, gesture that I could not understand; It seemed to me about nobility and gratitude, but also about political realism, since I considered Madero better than Huerta..

From there it was asked if Madero was capable of provoking the revolution that we all recognize and building a bridge with the current and the most radical leader of the Mexican Revolution, even of sponsorship; In the final moments there was still a bond of respect between them. I had to understand Madero because there are still nebulous points; So, I decided to do a biography about him..

The university professor maintained that Madero He began to appear to me as a fascinating, complex, extraordinary and unique character in many ways, and I began to reconstruct the figure of someone who changed the history of Mexico..

In the image we have of the president assassinated in 1913, as a naive and half-crazy character, who is disqualified for his taste for spiritualism, the historian discovered him as someone with great capacity for analysis and political reflection, with intuition and perception of the people’s state of mind, abilities that led him to make a very precise diagnosis of the essential contradiction of the Porfirio political system, dissect it and propose an alternative solution..

Felipe Ávila maintained that the hero of the revolution “wanted to maintain capitalism, improve the living conditions of the majority of the population through reforms, institutions and democratic governments. For him, the solution to all problems was democracy. I absolutely believed it. Violence was a necessary evil, but limited, and because they had left him no alternative.

It provoked a political uprising through insurrection, but the conditions of the country were such that it also began a much more radical parallel revolution, which was social and economic. That is why he reached an agreement with Porfirio Díaz to stop the revolt.

The author concluded that Madero could not resolve the contradiction between reform and revolution, which the European and Russian socialists were raising at the time.

That cost him his life, his project collapsed and there was a counterrevolution, which was also unsuccessful. What Madero started was ended by many of his companions who came to the fore again when he was assassinated.