La Reforma

La Reforma (English: The Reform) or Liberal Reform was initiated in Mexico following the ouster of conservative president Antonio López de Santa Anna by a group of liberals under the 1854 Plan de Ayutla. From liberals' narrow purpose to remove a dictator and take power, they expanded their aims to a comprehensive program to remake Mexico governed by liberal principles as embodied by a series of laws and then the Constitution of 1857. The major goals in this movement were to undermine the power of the Catholic Church in Mexico, separation of church and state, reduce the power of the Mexican military, and integrate Mexico's large indigenous population as citizens of Mexico and not a protected class. Liberals envisioned secular education as a means to create a Mexican citizenry. The liberals' strategy was to sharply limit the traditional institutional privileges (fueros) of the Catholic Church and the army. The law prohibiting the ownership of land by corporations targeted the holdings of the Catholic Church and indigenous communities - confiscating Church land. Indigenous community lands were held by the community as a whole, not as individual parcels. Liberals sought to create a class of yeoman farmers that held land individually. No class of individualistic peasants developed with the Liberal program emerged, but many merchants acquired land (and tenant farmers). Many existing landowners expanded their holdings at peasant expense, and some upwardly mobile ranch owners, often mestizos, acquired land previously held by communities. With the promulgation of the liberal Constitution of 1857, conservatives refused to swear allegiance to it and formed a conservative government. Civil war known as the Reform War or Three Years' War between conservatives and liberals lasted three years, resulting in the defeat of the conservatives on the battlefield. Victorious liberal president Benito Juárez could not implement the envisioned reforms due to a new political threat. Conservatives had sought another route to regaining power, resulting in their active collaboration with Napoleon III's plans to turn the Mexican Empire into a part into the main American ally of the French empire. Mexican conservatives offered the crown of Mexico to Hapsburg archduke Maximilian. The French invasion and republican resistance to the French Intervention in Mexico lasted from 1862-67. With the defeat of the conservatives and the execution of Maximilian, Juárez again took up his duties as president. In this period from 1867 to 1876, often called the "Restored Republic" liberals had no credible opposition to their implementation of the laws of the Reform embodied in the 1857 Constitution.

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