Policies of Mexico’s Porfirio Diaz
What were the policies of Mexico’s Porfirio Diaz regarding indigenous communities, land, labor, trade, and foreign investment? How does it compare with the policies of Argentina’s Julio Roca regarding indigenous communities, land, labor, and foreign investment?
Sample Solution
rule accomplished through a combination of consensus and repression during which the country underwent extensive modernization but political liberties were limited and the free press was muzzled. The Diaz government, like other “progressive dictatorships” in Latin America, worked to promote railroad construction, to force reluctant peasants and indigenous groups to work on rural estates, to repress popular organizing, and in other ways to benefit the dominant elites. Diaz continued the La Reforma policy of breaking up the ejido (the communally held land under the traditional Indian system of land tenure) but did not take adequate measures to protect the Indians from being deprived of their holdings by fraud or intimidation.
