PUSH FOR US IMPERIALISM STARTED IN BROWNSVILLE AIDED BY DIAZ IN TANDEM WITH THE STILLMANS

By John Mason Hart
(John Mason Hart, University of Houston professor of history, is the author of "Empire and Revolution: The Americans in Mexico since the Civil War" and "Revolutionary Mexico: The Coming and Process of the Mexican Revolution."
John Hart's speech on Mexico's intertwined economic history with the United States was given as the luncheon address during the Houston Peace and Justice Center's conference, "Winners and Losers: the Impact of Globalization," April 24, 2004. We print an excerpt from the speech focusing on the role of financiers like the Stillmans who acquired their fortune in during the cotton smuggling in Brownsville during the Civil War.)
The first country they encountered in that westward expansion, (with a) duly constituted government of the Third World, not counting Native Americans, was Mexico.
And they began to pour into Mexico in the 1860s, first with loans and mercantile arrangements, and then later with infrastructure development, industrial investments, resource extraction, and finally, American settlements.
But the entry into Mexico began almost as a direct corollary to what was going on during the Civil War, because the Mexicans were fighting their own war with the French. They lacked resources, but they had the spirit to fight. In fact, back in the Mexican-American War, it turns out that they had mounted a gigantic civilian resistance against the American war machine that occupied Mexico City under the command of Winfred Scott.
So badly did they punish the Americans for their presence in Mexico City that Scott had to deploy his entire forces to protect supplies between Veracruz and Mexico City. The Congress found out that President Polk had lied about Mexicans shooting Americans on American soil, so they cut the budget on the war effort and the American government basically was forced to sign a treaty that ceded back to Mexico about a third of the land they were seeking.
That is, the boundary would have been from Mazatlan to Tampico, but instead they accepted the Rio Grande River across the Mesilla Valley to Southern California. And so, we see here the basic contours of what we are going to find in the rest of the Third World.
Having supported the Mexicans against the French to the tune of about $250,000,000, the American investors – the same people I might add, Taylor, Morgan, Baker, the heads of the three major banks that were emerging at this time in the middle of the Nineteenth Century – were demanding payment from a bankrupt Mexico. President Benito Juarez was unable to make those payments, and so they negotiated for a period of ten years, during which the Mexicans began to concede infrastructure control to the Americans in lieu of cash payments.
In other words, we'll give you a concession for railroads because we can't give you the money you want. And so they set up contracts that arranged for transfers of real estate and yielding trade and railroad/telegraph concessions to these leading American capitalists.
The trouble was that in 1876 the new Mexican president, Sebastian Lerdo de Tejada, cancelled all of the concessions saying, "betterest a desert between strength and weakness."
That decision by Lerdo led to the American financial elite support of a Mexican general for the overthrow of the democratically elected president of Mexico. 
The general that carried that action out, General Porfirio Diaz, having lost the election in Mexico to President Lerdo, went to New York, where he met with the Stillmans and Taylors and, I'm not sure who else, but I located him in the bank, and then he returned from City Bank to New Orleans, where he met with leaders of the Whitney Bank and the Morgan shipping lines, and then to Brownsville where he stayed in Charles Stillman's house for six months, during the duration of a guerilla war which overthrew the Mexican government.
(James Stillman was the heir of Charles Stillman and was born on June 9, 1850 to Charles and Elizabeth Pamela Goodrich in Brownsville, Texas. Charles Stillman had significant business interests which James acquired in 1872. He expanded those to control of sixteen Texas banks and a significant land holdings in the Rio Grande Valley, particularly Corpus Christi and Kerrville, Texas. 
Along with William Averell Harriman, Jacob Henry Schiff and William Rockefeller he controlled the most important Texas railroads (including the Texas and Pacific Railway, the Southern Pacific Railroad, the International-Great Northern Railroad, the Union Pacific Southern Railway, the St. Louis, Brownsville and Mexico Railway and the Mexican National Railroad.) In 1876 Stillman supported Porfirio Diaz's overthrow of the government of Mexico by the Revolution of Tuxtepec. He was chairman of the board of directors of the National City Bank and retired in 1908.)
Diaz then returned to Mexico as the incoming president, where he would rule the country from 1876 - 1910 directly as president, and four years indirectly through a subaltern.
During that time, Americans took over 100 percent of Mexico's infrastructure. They acquired 70 percent of the country's coastlines and frontiers. 28 percent of the nation's surface. That's 28 percent of 465,000,000 acres. 70 percent of all incorporated businesses.
All of the copper.
And with their Anglo allies, all of the oil.
Internally, Mexico was characterized, politically, with a military dictatorship. When you look at the incorporated entities that I just mentioned, and the copper and oil companies, they were characterized by segregated housing and labor, and even forced labor and slavery.
Some of the companies involved are familiar names, Phelps Dodge, International Harvester, Pennsylvania Railroad, and so on.