Francisco Mugica

Francisco Mugica wrote the most radical parts of the Mexican constitution of 1917 and never became president. He was a Michoacan schoolmaster's son who joined Madero's revolution at its start, served as a general under Carranza, and arrived at the constitutional convention at Queretaro as chairman of the drafting committee - a position Carranza's people had not expected the radicals to hold. Carranza had submitted a moderate text, essentially the 1857 constitution with a stronger executive. Mugica led the faction of soldiers, teachers and provincial delegates who rewrote it. Article 3 made primary education free, compulsory and secular, and barred the church from running schools. Article 27 vested ownership of land, water and subsoil in the nation, which is the legal basis of every Mexican land reform and of the oil expropriation twenty-one years later. Article 123 guaranteed the eight-hour day, the right to strike, equal pay and compensation for industrial injury, at a moment when no other constitution in the world contained such a chapter. Article 130 stripped the church of legal personality. He was later governor of Michoacan, minister of the economy and then of communications under Cardenas, and drafted the expropriation decree of 1938. He expected to succeed Cardenas in 1940 and was passed over for the far more moderate Avila Camacho, which ended the revolutionary left's hold on the presidency for good. He spent his last years running a penal colony on the Islas Marias and writing. He had been imprisoned by Huerta and had signed the Plan of Guadalupe. The constitution he shaped is still in force, amended several hundred times but never replaced.

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