Benito Juarez

Juárez was born of Mesoamerican Indian parents, both of whom died when he was three years old. When he was 12, he left the uncle who was caring for him and joined his sister in the city of Oaxaca, where he began his formal education. He originally studied for the priesthood, but in 1829 he entered the Oaxaca Institute of Arts and Sciences (1827; now Benito Juárez Autonomous University of Oaxaca) to study law and science. In 1831 he received a law degree and won his first public office, a seat on the municipal council. Impeccably honest, he never used public office for personal gain, and his modest way of life reflected his simple tastes, even after his marriage in 1843 to Margarita Maza, a Oaxacan woman 17 years his junior. Politics soon became his life’s work: he was a member of both the state and national legislatures, he became a judge in 1841, and he served as governor of his state, a post that brought him into national prominence. During his early years in politics, Juárez began to formulate liberal solutions for his country’s many problems. The road to economic health, he concluded, lay in substituting capitalism for the stifling economic monopoly held by the Roman Catholic Church and the landed aristocracy. He also believed that political stability could be achieved only through the adoption of a constitutional form of government based on a federal system . The conservatives’ return to power in the elections of 1853, however, doomed any reform in the near term in Mexico. Many prominent liberals were exiled, including Juárez. From December 1853 until June 1855 he lived in New Orleans in semipoverty, occupying himself by exchanging ideas with other Mexicans and laying plans to return home. The opportunity to put his ideas into action finally came in 1855, when the liberals took control of the national government, and Juárez left the United States to join the new administration of Juan Álvarez as minister of justice and public instruction.