In 1910, Mexico had fifteen million inhabitants. Everyone was waiting for the lavish celebration of the first Centennial of Independence, which had been prepared with desperate anticipation and promised to be the best party anyone had ever seen. Monuments, parades, balls, festivals, banquets and posters appeared everywhere. However, the appearance of Halley’s Comet, just on September 15, at the end of the Scream ceremony, was an event that nobody expected. Many panicked. Others said that it was a demonstration that the heavens were joining the luminous anniversary of the centennial celebrations and even outer space was celebrating with us. Some, scared to death, were convinced that the huge fireball was a sign of the end of the world.
As if it had not been enough, at the end of the popular festival organized in the Plaza Mayor, a crowd advanced towards the National Palace shouting howls that had nothing to do with Independence and were rising in tone. Then detonations were heard. Like fireworks, like shots fired into the air, the chronicles said. Surely because of the joy that the date provoked in the town, some thought, but the press clarified that shouts and ovations for Francisco I. Madero were clearly heard among the noise.
Born in a hacienda called El Rosario, far away, in Parras, Coahuila, on October 30, 1873, Francisco Indalecio was the first of the 16 children that the marriage of Don Francisco Madero Hernández and Doña Mercedes González Treviño would have. . He was called to be a great hero of the war that would change the country. Small in stature and frail in health, Francisco turned out to be a huge ideologue and disciplined student. His family was wealthy and wealthy: they had mines, farms, farmlands, horses, cattle, and flourishing businesses.
The second son of the marriage, Francisco’s favorite brother, was named Gustavo Adolfo and from childhood they were inseparable. When they were 12 and 10 years old, their parents sent them as interns; first to Saltillo, to the Jesuit school of San José to attend elementary school and then to Baltimore in the United States, to continue with his studies. His parents hoped that Francisco, being the eldest, would be the heir to the family’s businesses and lands. Very well on his way, after his stay on Yankee land, he wanted to go to France. He was at the Lycée Versailles for a long time and then at the School of Higher Commercial Studies in Paris. When he returned to Mexico in 1892, the fruits of his education began to show: he undertook modern irrigation works for the family’s fields and his project was so successful that it even earned him a congratulation from General Porfirio Díaz himself. But between admiration and fortune, as often happens, the bad weed of envy and gossip also grew. Among the gossip, it was said that the personal capital of the Madero’s eldest son amounted to the incredible amount of 500 thousand pesos … and that from so much reading and studying he had gone crazy because he believed that the dead were talking to him … if not, what would it be? the reason for getting more and more skinny and ashen?
Few knew of the real change that had taken place in him. After his trip to Europe, like every wealthy and wealthy young man, Francisco – who had read everything – had an ideological revelation. and began to write a book. It was called The Presidential Succession in 1910. By June 1909 he had already sold enough copies to finance his anti-reelection project and start a series of tours throughout the Republic.
His non-reelection proposal was in essence a critique of Porfirio Díaz’s forms of political management, where governors, chiefs and “notable people” made decisions without any kind of social consensus.
Determined to work on it, in April 1910, Madero headed the Convention of Party Organizations and founded the Anti-Reelection Party, which designated him as a candidate for the Presidency for the elections that were about to arrive.
A new disappointment awaited him. After the elections, held in June and July 1910, the Congress of the Union declared Porfirio Díaz President of the Republic again. In response, Madero published the San Luis Plan, a manifesto in which he declared void the elections for president and vice president of the Republic, magistrates to the Supreme Court of the Nation, and deputies and senators. He was unaware of the Díaz government and accused him of committing and supporting the most scandalous electoral fraud in the history of Mexico. It declared the Supreme Law of the Republic the principle of No Reelection and, finally, made a call so that on November 20, from six o’clock in the afternoon onwards, all citizens of the Republic take up arms to oust the women from power. authorities who at that time ruled.
That day dawned Sunday. Don Porfirio and his family had breakfast at the Hotel Géneve, famous for having served the first sandwich in Mexico City, and they ate several.
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Reference-www.eleconomista.com.mx