Benito Juárez
Benito Juárez was a Zapotec shepherd who became president of Mexico and refused to leave the country while a French army occupied it. Born in 1806 in a village in the Oaxaca mountains, orphaned at three, he spoke no Spanish until he was twelve, when he walked to the city to join his sister, who was a domestic servant, and was taken in by a bookbinder who intended him for the priesthood. He took a law degree instead, became a judge and then governor of Oaxaca, and was exiled to New Orleans in 1853, where he worked in a cigar factory. He returned with the liberal revolution of Ayutla and drafted the law abolishing the special courts of the clergy and the army, which is where his name enters the constitutional argument. The Reform laws and the constitution of 1857 — separation of church and state, civil marriage, the sale of church lands, an end to corporate privilege — produced a three-year civil war, which the liberals won. Juárez then suspended payments on the foreign debt in 1861, and France, Britain and Spain sent a joint expedition; the other two withdrew when it became clear that Napoleon III intended a conquest. The French installed a Habsburg archduke as emperor, and Juárez spent four years moving his government by carriage across the northern deserts, never conceding that it had ceased to exist. The French withdrew under American pressure in 1867, Maximilian was shot, and Juárez returned to Mexico City. He died in office in 1872, and the phrase about respect for the rights of others being peace is his. He is the only full-blooded Indigenous president Mexico has had, and his image is on the currency and in every town. His later insistence on staying in office through repeated re-elections is also where his critics locate the precedent that Porfirio Díaz took to its conclusion.
- Lived: 1806 CE – 1872 CE
- Nationality: Mexican
- Roles: president, lawyer, head_of_state, reformer
