Francisco I. Madero
Francisco Madero brought down a thirty-four-year dictatorship with a book and a manifesto, governed for fifteen months, and was murdered by the general he had trusted. Born in 1873 into one of the richest families in northern Mexico — landowners, and among the first Mexicans in cotton, wine and rubber — he was educated in France and at Berkeley, was a vegetarian, a spiritualist who took political advice from automatic writing, and a homeopath who ran a clinic for his workers. He wrote The Presidential Succession of 1910, which did not attack Porfirio Díaz personally but argued that a country that never changed its president could not be a republic, and asked only for a free vice-presidential election. Díaz had told an American journalist that Mexico was ready for democracy and that he would welcome an opposition party, and then had Madero arrested during the 1910 campaign and declared himself re-elected. Madero escaped to Texas and issued the Plan of San Luis Potosí, calling for a rising on 20 November 1910. The rising he called became something larger than he had in mind. Pascual Orozco and Pancho Villa took Ciudad Juárez in May 1911, Emiliano Zapata rose in Morelos over village land, and Díaz resigned and sailed for Paris. Madero was elected president and then disappointed almost everyone: he kept the old bureaucracy and army, deferred land reform to legal process, and lost Zapata within weeks. Victoriano Huerta, sent to suppress a revolt in February 1913, joined it, and had Madero shot after arranging his resignation. The American ambassador Henry Lane Wilson brokered the pact between Huerta and the rebels in his own embassy, and Washington later recalled him over it. Madero's murder turned a coup into a decade of revolution that killed perhaps a million people and produced the constitution of 1917.
- Lived: 1873 CE – 1913 CE
- Nationality: Mexican
- Roles: president, revolutionary, head_of_state
