JUAREZ, BENITO PABLO. - Mexican politician, b. 11 March 1806 at S. Pueblo Guelatao (Oaxaca), d. 18 July 1872 at Mexico City. He first practiced law before devoting himself to politics. Of radical and liberal ideas, he was governor of the State of Oaxaca. In 1857 he became vice-president and minister of the Interior. The following year he succeeded Comonfort in the presidency, but the conservatives opposed this appointment and unleashed a civil war, which ended in January 1861 with Juárez’s entry into Mexico City.
Elected president in March of the same year, he began a policy aimed at stripping the conservative party and the Catholic Church, which supported it, of their power. He confiscated ecclesiastical property, abolished clerical privileges, suppressed convents, banished the nuncio, the bishops, and anyone who had supported his adversaries during the civil war. The same intransigence was applied in his relations with other states, decreeing the annulment of all treaties, and, given the financial difficulties in which the country was mired, he suspended for two years the payment of all foreign debt. These measures led to French military intervention: an expeditionary force landed in the country in 1862; Juárez was forced to retreat toward the United States border, and Archduke Maximilian, brother of Emperor Franz Joseph, became emperor of Mexico. The United States, torn apart by the Civil War, were unable to provide Juárez with any assistance in the meantime, but once the fratricidal struggle had ended, they granted him full support. Juárez returned to the offensive, captured Maximilian, and ordered his execution at Querétaro (19 June 1867). Re-elected president in the same year, Juárez stood again in the 1871 elections and was once more conferred the highest dignity, but he died of a stroke a few months later.