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Updated: June 20, 2025
But although the Cientificos were ousted from direct political control, their wealth and power and the tremendous machinery of their domination were still to be contended with before the revolution could follow up its political success with the economic reforms which were its real object. Madero had pledged himself primarily to the division of the lands.
However, the Cientificos saw that this was to be the entering wedge, and they promptly prepared to crush the new political faction. Anti-reelectionists were arrested right and left; their newspapers were suppressed, the presses wrecked, and the editors thrown into prison. But the party's blood was up. It did not dissolve. It did not nominate Corral.
In 1910 the aged Diaz declared his intention of resigning. Perhaps he even intended to keep that promise when he made it; but if so, the Cientificos, who knew that his prestige and the love of the nation for him were their only shield, induced him to think better of it. The strongest of the opposing parties was the Anti-reelectionist party.
Porfirio Diaz was not a President, but, in all save the name, an absolute monarch, and inevitably there formed about his throne a cordon of men as unpatriotic and self-interested as he may have been patriotic and disinterested as to a great extent he undeniably was. These men were the Cientificos. The term is, of course, not their own.
And also he had it upon his conscience, and it was brought home to him by the mobs outside his palace, that he was not the constitutional President of Mexico, but the tool of the betrayers of her Constitution. That he had been shamelessly deceived and played upon by the impassable cordon of Cientificos about him is easy to judge.
As a proof that the country thought less of the democratic principles invoked than of the destruction of the official "cientificos," may be cited the fact that it at first placed all its trust and confidence in General Reyes, who is just as despotic and autocratic as General Diaz, but has at the same time, to them, a redeeming quality his avowed opposition to the gang.
He attacked the lotteries, the bull-fights, the terrible pulque trust, the unbridled traffic of which, more than any other one factor, has contributed to the degradation of the lower classes. He began to extend the public-school system. From the first the Cientificos hampered and impeded him.
He, and those who came after him, fired the peons to revolt and despoiled our country, leaving her prone and bleeding. We of the Cientificos have set ourselves to stop her wounds and to nourish her to life again. We shall drive all traitors into the sea and feed them to the sharks. We shall destroy them all, and Mexico shall have peace. But I am not a bloodthirsty man.
Consecrating hypocritical hymns to liberty that did not exist and heaping with wreaths the tombs and monuments of the heroes of Mexico, while violating all the ideals for which those heroes died, drunk with the power they had wielded so long, the Cientificos pressed blindly on, following the path that Privilege has taken since the beginning of history and which has only one end.
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