A Tale of tow Constitutions

It should now be apparent that it is not a coincidence that the United States, and not Mexico, adopted and enforced a constitution that espoused democratic principles, created limitations on the use of political power, and distributed that power broadly in society. The document that the delegates sat down to write in Philadelphia in May 1787 was the outcome of a long process initiated by the formation of the General Assembly in Jamestown in 1619.

The contrast between the constitutional process that took place at the time of the independence of the United States and the one that took place a little afterward in Mexico is stark. In February 1808, Napoleon Bonaparte’s French armies invaded Spain. By May they had taken Madrid, the Spanish capital. By September the Spanish king Ferdinand had been captured and had abdicated. A national junta, the Junta Central, took his place, taking the torch in the fight against the French. The Junta met first at Aranjuez, but retreated south in the face of the French armies. Finally it reached the port of Cádiz, which, though besieged by Napoleonic forces, held out. Here the Junta formed a parliament, called the Cortes. In 1812 the Cortes produced what became known as the Cádiz Constitution, which called for the introduction of a constitutional monarchy based on notions of popular sovereignty. It also called for the end of special privileges and the introduction of equality before the law. These demands were all anathema to the elites of South America, who were still ruling an institutional environment shaped by the encomienda, forced labor, and absolute power vested in them and the colonial state.

The collapse of the Spanish state with the Napoleonic invasion created a constitutional crisis throughout colonial Latin America. There was much dispute about whether to recognize the authority of the Junta Central, and in response, many Latin Americans began to form their own juntas. It was only a matter of time before they began to sense the possibility of becoming truly independent from Spain. The first declaration of independence took place in La Paz, Bolivia, in 1809, though it was quickly crushed by Spanish troops sent from Peru. In Mexico the political attitudes of the elite had been shaped by the 1810 Hidalgo Revolt, led by a priest, Father Miguel Hidalgo. When Hidalgo’s army sacked Guanajuato on September 23, they killed the intendant, the senior colonial official, and then started indiscriminately to kill white people. It was more like class or even ethnic warfare than an independence movement, and it united all the elites in opposition. If independence allowed popular participation in politics, the local elites, not just Spaniards, were against it. Consequently, Mexican elites viewed the Cádiz Constitution, which opened the way to popular participation, with extreme skepticism; they would never recognize its legitimacy.

In 1815, as Napoleon’s European empire collapsed, King Ferdinand VII returned to power and the Cádiz Constitution was abrogated. As the Spanish Crown began trying to reclaim its American colonies, it did not face a problem with loyalist Mexico. Yet, in 1820, a Spanish army that had assembled in Cádiz to sail to the Americas mutinied against Ferdinand VII. They were soon joined by army units throughout the country, and Ferdinand was forced to restore the Cádiz Constitution and recall the Cortes. This Cortes was even more radical than the one that had written the Cádiz Constitution, and it proposed abolishing all forms of labor coercion. It also attacked special privileges—for example, the right of the military to be tried for crimes in their own courts. Faced finally with the imposition of this document in Mexico, the elites there decided that it was better to go it alone and declare independence.

This independence movement was led by Augustín de Iturbide, who had been an officer in the Spanish army. On February 24, 1821, he published the Plan de Iguala, his vision for an independent Mexico. The plan featured a constitutional monarchy with a Mexican emperor and removed the provisions of the Cádiz Constitution that Mexican elites found so threatening to their status and privileges. It received instantaneous support, and Spain quickly realized that it could not stop the inevitable. But Iturbide did not just organize Mexican secession. Recognizing the power vacuum, he quickly took advantage of his military backing to have himself declared emperor, a position that Simón Bolívar described as “by the grace of God and of bayonets.” Iturbide was not constrained by the same political institutions that constrained presidents of the United States. He quickly made himself a dictator, and by October 1822 he had dismissed the constitutionally sanctioned congress and replaced it with a junta of his choosing. Though Iturbide did not last long, this pattern of events was to be repeated time and time again in nineteenth-century Mexico.

The Constitution of the United States did not create a democracy by modern standards. Who could vote in elections was left up to the individual states to determine. While northern states quickly conceded the vote to all white men irrespective of income or property, southern states did so only gradually. No state enfranchised women or slaves, and as property and wealth restrictions were lifted on white men, racial franchises explicitly disenfranchising Black men were introduced. Slavery was deemed constitutional when the Constitution was written, and the most sordid negotiation concerned the division of seats in the House of Representatives. The compromise was that a slave would count as three-fifths of a free person. New fixes were added over time, including the Missouri Compromise, to keep the balance in the Senate.

The Civil War was bloody and destructive. But both before and after it there were ample economic opportunities for a large fraction of the population in the United States. The situation in Mexico was very different. If the United States experienced five years of political instability between 1860 and 1865, Mexico experienced almost nonstop instability for the first fifty years of independence. This is best illustrated by the career of Antonio López de Santa Ana. Santa Ana served as president eleven times.

The consequence of this unprecedented political instability is further illustrated by the fact that between 1824 and 1867 there were fifty-two presidents in Mexico, few of whom assumed power according to constitutionally sanctioned procedures. This instability led to highly insecure property rights and a severely weakened Mexican state. Large parts of the country were not under central control, enabling the annexation of Texas by the United States. Mexican independence preserved colonial economic institutions that made Mexico, in Alexander von Humboldt’s words, “the country of inequality.” As the United States entered the Industrial Revolution in the first half of the nineteenth century, Mexico became poorer.