While the intention of the disamortization Reform Laws was to divert the Church's vast holdings of land into a nation of small, privately-owned farms, Diaz "colonized,"" and at one point, eight foreigners held more than 55 million acres, mostly along the U.S. border. Even with the Mexican-only landlord elite, it was just as egregious.
On the one hand, kilometers of railroad track went from nearly zero to 14,000; silver production from 607,037 kilograms (1877-1878) to 1,816,605 in 1900; copper from 6,483 tons (1891-1892) to 52,116 tons in 1910-1911; and sisal from 11,283 tons (1877) to 128,849 tons in 1910. And then on the other hand, Mexico City's infant mortality rate was 323 per 1,000 in 1893. In 1895 life expectancy was 30 years. The 1910 census said half of Mexican houses were unfit for human habitation. A 1900 survey in Mexico City revealed 15,000 homeless families "16% of the population. .
I will not issue wholesale condemnation of Diaz,because he jumpstarted the economic machine of Mexico. He cannot be entirely faulted in his enormous encouragement of U.S. interests in the realms of mining, lumber, oil and similar resources. Hadn't he seen the growth of the U.S. as a naval power, and its interventionism in other Latin American and Caribbean countries? It behooved him to be friendly.
Perhaps a more open embrace of new ideas would have served him well, too. His resistance to anything opposed to positivism led to a growth of humanist intellectual circles, one of which included the young liberal, Francisco Madero, educated at Baltimore, Paris, and Berkeley.
Atypical, a spritualist/vegetarian/non-drinking, overly-trusting son of a rich man, Madero was 5'2- and had a shrill, high-pitched voice. Should there have been a free and honest election on June 26, 1910, he undoubtedly would have won. However, he took the long was around Diaz and his Vice-President Ramon Corral, designated November 20 as a nationwide uprising for the overthrow of the Diaz regime, and set the Mexican Revolution into motion.