Free Redeemers by Enrique Krauze

the world, nostalgic only for an era when Athens (or rather its leading minds) was a living force on the earth. He considers “laying down roots . . . having my own hut; forming a family; waiting in sanctified peace for the disappearance of this great illusion we call life.” In July 1916 he made the grand gesture of abandoning the Latin American “hamlet.” He traveled to Lisbon, Madrid, Barcelona. In 1917 he arrived in Italy, already feeling ill. He stayed for a month in Florence, where he composed a dialogue between two inanimate substances, “Bronze conversing with marble.” He spent time in Rome, where he went to see the statue of José Artigas, the founding father of his country, commissioned to an Italian sculptor by the Uruguayan government. In April he arrived in Palermo. There he died of meningitis on the first of May. One of his last, unrealized projects had been to write an essay on José Martí.

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    José Vasconcelos
    THE CULTURAL CAUDILLO
    The Mexican Revolution, which erupted in November 1910, would be remembered in Latin America as the first assault on the heritage of nineteenth-century liberalism. Eventually (though by a complicated route) it would become an early element of the “great roar that is mounting,” so feared by José Enrique Rodó and destined to grow ever louder across the twentieth century. It began as a liberal reproach, and then armed rebellion, against a dictator who had once been the military leader of the Liberal republican victory over the monarchy of Maximilian in 1867. Porfirio Díaz had retained much of the economic program of liberalism but completely jettisoned its commitment to electoral democracy. Francisco I. Madero, a rich businessman from the north of the country, educated in Europe and in California, had begun his campaign against Díaz’s three decades of personal power with a book published in 1908 ( The Presidential Succession in 1910 ) and passed reluctantly, step by step, toward revolution, after the aged dictator, who had finally promised to hold a genuinely free election, defrauded him of his presidential victory in 1910. Among his most ardent supporters was the young co-editor of the newspaper El Antireeleccionista (The Anti-Reelectionist), which spoke for the political party formed to support Madero in 1909. He was a lawyer and philosopher named José Vasconcelos.
    Madero was not an intellectual at the level of Martí or Rodó, but he was imbued with a similar devotion to redemption. He was “the Apostle of Democracy” and the victory of his forces against the armies of Díaz came quickly. His difficult but dedicated term as the democratically elected president of Mexico was cut short by a military coup in February 1913, carried out by a coalition of conservative forces, encouraged and assisted by the American ambassador to Mexico, Henry Lane Wilson.
    But the murder of Madero and his vice president, José María Pino Suárez, would unleash a far more complicated, violent, and confusedly social revolution than the idealistic Madero had ever imagined with his slogan geared to classic liberal premises: “Valid voting! No reelection! ( Sufragio efectivo , no reelección ).” When Madero had entered Mexico City in triumph after his victory, a tremor had shaken the unstable lake bottom on which Hernán Cortés had raised his colonial city. An earthquake of men at arms would now shake all of Mexico.
    The renewed revolt, now directed against the military government of General Victoriano Huerta, involved a coalition of leaders and armies with different interests, antecedents, and ultimate objectives. And all through the country, there were also localized uprisings and confrontations of forces, some of them social, some of them personalist (centered around loyalty to a specific leader), some of them a mere settling of old grievances.
    On the major stage of the Revolution