The mythologizing of man has caused excess in the way we refer to him. The history of bronze, the one they teach us in elementary school, has made us think of Juárez without nuances, and has even simplified the Oaxacan’s own work, which for many is summed up in his famous phrase: “Respect for the rights of others is peace”.
One of the most harmful effects of the mythologizing of Benito Juárez is the scant public awareness of other great Mexican liberals, how little their works are studied and, therefore, how little their arguments are put forward in Mexican public discussion. and in political debates, whether legislative or between candidates.
One watches debates among politicians or among editorialists in the United States, France, or the United Kingdom, and the participants frequently quote their former political thinkers and their former chief executives or tribunes. It is true, sometimes they do it in a corny and excessively solemn way, as is often the case with the “founding fathers” in the American Union. But it is also true that there is greater public awareness of the intellectual currents and liberal traditions in those countries.
Unfortunately, this rarely happens in Mexico: beyond, I insist, the archived heroic deeds of Juárez or his famous phrases. This surprises me because the Mexican liberal tradition is very rich and very diverse. So much so that my dear professor —and extraordinary historian— Alicia Salmerón used to say: “You cannot speak of Mexican liberalism in the singular. You must speak in the plural. There are many Mexican liberalisms”.
This is not the place to explain the different liberal currents, but I do want to rescue some ideas of Mexican thinkers of the 19th century, which would be well worth studying today. Some of them are even valid and, if read today, many of us could agree that they are still necessary and applicable proposals for our country.
Regarding freedom of expression, just in the first years of independent Mexico, José María Luis Mora (1794-1850) argued that: “If in the times of Tacitus the ability to think as one wanted and speak as one wanted was a rare happiness. I thought, in ours it would be a great misfortune, and an unfavorable sign to our nation and institutions, if it were to put limits on the freedom to think, speak and write. That writer and his fellow citizens were finally under the rule of a lord, when we are under the direction of a government, which owes its existence to such freedom, which can only be preserved by it, and whose laws and institutions have given it all the widening and latitude of which it is susceptible”.
On what we now know as democracy and the rule of law, Ignacio Manuel Altamirano (1834-1893) reflected: “Have respect for the authority that you yourself choose; but without flattering her […] because many times the peoples, with their degradation, make their rulers despotic. Distinguish between the law and the one who executes it, and if you have to be a slave, it is better that you be a slave to the former and not to the latter”.
