The Finest Sons of Mexico
The heroism behind Cinco de Mayo
Before guzzling down your fourth margarita for Cinco de Mayo, the story behind this holiday is rather fascinating, and not what most Americans think. It’s a tale of hubris and heroism, which includes lessons for us gringos, if we’re wise enough to heed them.
Since Mexico’s independence – declared in 1810 and achieved by 1821 – Mexico oscillated between various forms of government, from empire to federal republic, to centralized republic, to dictatorship, then back to federalism, all within the first thirty-five years! Mainly what wobbled the pendulum was the simmering tension between conservatives and liberals, which in 1858 exploded into the Mexican Civil War.
For three years Mexicans killed each other based on ideology. It was commonplace for families to split into armed camps based on politics, which sounds unsettlingly familiar to us nowadays. The country divided into competing governments, with liberals based in the north around the city of Juarez, and conservatives based in the coastal south around Veracruz. Both governments contracted exorbitant debt with foreign powers to finance armaments with which to kill more of their opponents.
Eventually the liberals triumphed, but their president Benito Juárez inherited a treasury emptied by three long years of war. Worse yet, Mexico had amassed debt to the foreign powers on the magnitude of 85 million pesos! There was no way Mexico could repay those loans on time, so President Juárez defaulted. The foreign creditor powers of Spain, Great Britain and France responded with gunboat diplomacy, sailing a fleet to Mexico to collect payment by force. Though President Juárez’s administration was able to reach a deal with Spain and Great Britain, France was intransigent… because its debt was merely a pretense for its plan to conquer Mexico.
On the morning of May 5th, 1862, France’s expeditionary force of 6000 well-equipped, battle-tested troops approached the city of Puebla. Whereas the advance could have sidled up to the battlements to reduce the French troops’ exposure to the defenders’ fire, General Charles Latrille de Lorencez had already dismissed Mexicans as inferior in “race, organization, morality and sentience,” such that a full-frontal assault would pose no challenge to his troops. After three successively bloody charges, the French attack was repulsed, and Emperor Napoleon III promptly recalled de Lorencez to France in shame. The army of France – unstoppable for half a century since Waterloo – had been defeated by around 2000 ragtag defenders – hastily levied from nearby farmhands – whose bespectacled General Ignacio Zaragoza proudly dubbed, “The finest sons of Mexico!”
Originally posted May 5th, 2023 on the Facebook page of Daniel Donnelly - Libertarian.
