♪♪ -Throughout the ages, there have been great empires and civilizations that have risen up, their creators ruling nations, regions, and continents for hundreds, even thousands of years.

Some of the great legacies and accomplishments of these empires may be lost in the mists of time, but from what they have left behind in rock and ruin, we can trace remarkable stories.

♪♪ -Throughout its history, Mexico has been convulsed by a series of epic, violent, and bloody struggles that have defined the culture and identity of this complex nation.

-I think it was Edward Gibbon who said that history is mostly a record of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind, which is a bit of a downbeat view.

But Mexican history has a lot of that.

When Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés met Aztec Chief Montezuma, they created a new nationality in the instant they met.

But in the following centuries, divisions ran deep and continue to this day between the Indigenous and European peoples and between church and state.

After 300 years of Spanish occupation, Mexico would, in the 19th century, suffer five foreign invasions in less than 100 years, from Spain and two each from France and the United States.

These influences have created a unique culture and nation that still struggles to break free from a troubled past.

♪♪ ♪♪ In the first half of the 19th century, Mexico had emerged chaotically from a war of independence against its old colonial master, Spain, only to be plunged into a further series of crises and invasions, including another from the United States, in which it had already lost half its territory.

Now, in the second half of the century, the country would be plunged into further bloody chaos, most of it brought about because of a deep ideological conflict between church and state.

♪♪ -It perceived itself as being more Catholic than Spain.

It perceived itself as having exercising a purer form of Catholicism, of being more faithful to the Pope, of complying more exactly with all of the demands of the church, of living a more Catholic life.

It believed itself to be the most Catholic of all countries, to such an extent that at one point it even said to the Pope, while he was having problems with the French in Europe, "Come to Mexico, and you will be -- it will be a safe haven for you here, and you will always be honored."

And when Mexico had practically no money right after independence, it offered to send the pope 100,000 pesos a year to help with his expenses.

Where they were going to get the 100,000, I've never figured out.

But that was the idea, that Mexico was a very Catholic country.

And this was very important because when the Americans invaded Mexico in 1846, there was a great fear that Catholicism would be destroyed by invading Protestant troops, that the country would be taken over by a Protestant country and that it would lose that characteristic that made it so important and so unique in human history to be the most Catholic of all countries.

And so there was a tremendous amount of fear of what would happen to the country.

The essence of Mexico was entwined with the essence of Catholicism.

It was believed that you couldn't define Mexico if you didn't define it as a Catholic country.

It was an attribute of nationality.

It was an attribute of being Mexican.

The church was very much a part of the civil government, and so it was a state within a state.

[ Bugle playing ] -The conflict between conservative Catholic forces, who wanted a continuation of the old order, and liberal reformists, who wanted radical change and land redistribution, intensified and soon descended into all out civil war.

[ Bugles play, cannons firing ] -Was this state to be a liberal, modern, constitutional republic?

Was its, uh -- In a sense, was it to be following the principles of the French Revolution, the early stages, the Declaration of the Rights of Man, individual liberties, elections to a constitutional government?

Was it to be like the United States, a federal republic?

Mexican liberal leaders saw the destiny of their country in that light.

The conservatives, by contrast, were in favor of creating a Catholic state.

They saw the Catholic faith as the exclusive religion, excluding any other -- any other form of Christianity in Mexico.

Whereas the liberals wanted to pluralize the country's forms of Christianity.

So there are two completely conflicting visions of what this Mexican state should be like.

-The reformists were led by an Indigenous lawyer from the state of Oaxaca, called Benito Juárez.

He would win the war, pronouncing a vision for the country which remains today.

-From the conservative and Catholic perspective, Juárez is a demon sent by the devil to ruin the Catholic Church in Mexico.

The idea behind Juárez's government and of the liberal generation of the reform era was to assert the supremacy of the civil power over the church and the army, to emancipate education from the control of the clergy, to establish constitutional government and peaceful transfer of power, as opposed to regular interventions from military chieftains backed by various civil -- civilian political factions.

He wanted to stabilize politics and to establish the supremacy of the law.

Juárez stood for the supremacy of the law.

And it was said that Juárez was more dangerous with a law in his pocket than with a brace of pistols.

-He is a civilian.

He's not a military warlord.

He leads a political faction.

He is a president, but he actually always dresses in very discreet black civilian clothes.

He's very austere.

He's not corrupt.

He lives a rather modest life.

And I think that sort of contrasts, particularly, say, with Santa Ana, who was always sort of going around, strutting around with all these kind of fancy clothes and his military accoutrement.

So I think that Juárez is a civilian patriotic leader.

♪♪ -Juárez set about dismantling the power of the conservatives, who had run the country for 300 years, critically, including the church.

-They create a state of armed rebellion within the church.

The Vatican condemns the reform laws.

Many clergymen in Mexico write very violent pastoral letters and essays condemning the reform laws.

So his relationship with the church is a very difficult one because he is at the head of the government during a period in which the government institutes a series of reform laws that lead eventually to the separation of church and state.

♪♪ -Church property, like this ornate monastery in the center of Querétaro, was confiscated.

♪♪ -In 1833, there was a law enacted which said that the state would no longer enforce compliance of monastic vows.

That meant the only people who were cloistered in this country were nuns.

There were no cloistered men.

All of the men were friars who were involved in evangelization or were part of the secular priesthood, and they lived in their parishes, and they lived in the world.

The only cloistered people in Mexico were nuns.

There were no monks in Mexico.

There were no monks in Mexico until the 20th century when you had certain orders coming into Mexico with vows of silence, who were living a cloistered life.

But not during the colonial period and not during the 19th century.

So women were the only cloistered people in Mexico.

And this law of 1833 said that the state would no longer send the police after women who tried to escape from a convent.

Because until then, if a woman had been willing to brave excommunion somehow get herself out and be able to escape, if she was willing to face the fact that all people who came in contact with her were immediately excommunicated, if anyone so much as brought her a glass of water, they were to be excommunicated.

So it was not an easy thing to escape from a convent.

But if somebody managed to do it, the police were there to send her back.

Well, the state said, as of 1833, "We are no longer going to do this sort of thing.

We're out of the business of enforcing monastic vows."

So women were allowed to leave the convent if they so choose.

♪♪ -In Puebla, a traditional Catholic city, religious figures would go into hiding.

Carmelite nuns in this convent in Puebla retreated into this cloister, hidden from the outside world by a series of boarded-up entrances.

♪♪ ♪♪ Protected by the local community, the nuns would hide here, incredibly, for the next 60 years, with the streetscape outside displaying no sign of who lived behind the walls.

It was only in 1934, during the Cristero wars following the Mexican revolution, that they were discovered, evicted, their belongings and furnishings confiscated.

They have now been returned and are displayed in this museum.

♪♪ The civil war had not only divided the country but hit the Mexican economy hard.

When the government couldn't repay millions of dollars in debts to European lenders, the case for European retaliation, even invasion, gained traction.

-The context in Mexico was one of political fragmentation, disorganization, and of chronic bankruptcy.

The other trouble was the government had very little money.

The Spanish colonial crown had a lot of money.

By the 19th century, the state is -- is chronically bankrupt.

And so that just makes it more unstable.

And you get into a vicious circle of no money, can't pay the army, army rebels, someone else becomes president, and they can't pay the army.

And so it goes on.

-Amid continuing political turmoil, conservative forces, with some encouragement from France's Napoleon III, resolved to bring in a Habsburg to regain control.

-Napoleon III and his entourage had visions of transforming Mexico into, I suppose, a kind of neocolonial client state under French tutelage.

But there was nobody available for the crown.

And Mexican conservatives of a monarchist disposition were wanting a prince from Europe to be that figure who would stabilize the country under a European-style monarchy.

-The plan led them to the occupant of this palace in faraway Europe.

Situated on the lake outside Trieste, it still flies the Mexican flag.

This was the home to the younger brother of the emperor of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Franz Josef.

His name was Maximilian, and his would become one of Mexico's most tragic and bloody stories in its tumultuous history.

-These conservative plotters went both to Maximilian and, of course, to Napoleon III, who was the key architect of this.

And Napoleon III, who had been running this very interventionist foreign policy in Europe and trying to help the Italians to achieve unification.

So he had his fingers in lots of pies.

He was a kind of meddler, and he believed that he could create a pro-French, sympathetic regime under Maximilian that would block the expansion of the United States.

I think it was pretty crackpot, to be quite honest.

It's not even as if the French had huge economic interests in Mexico.

The British had much bigger interests, and they would have no time for this.

They said, "We're not going to go and invade Mexico.

It makes no sense."

But the French did it.

And, of course, it was eventually a disaster.

-With conservative and French backing, Archduke Maximilian of Austria was proposed as Mexico's new emperor.

-You can't be a liberal if you occupy someone else's country.

You can't impose liberal views on an occupied country.

And that's, in a sense, what it was.

And although it dragged on for several years at great cost, I think, at the end, it was always bound to fail, particularly, of course, once the American Civil War ended.

The Americans were otherwise engaged for several years.

Once that was over, they supported Juárez because they did not want a European power planting itself just to the south of the United States.

So that was another factor which meant that this wasn't going to last.

♪♪ -Puebla today remains one of Mexico's most European cities.

♪♪ It was established by the invading Spanish in 1513 and became a Catholic stronghold.

Not surprisingly, Puebla's skyline is dominated by the spires, domes, and facades of its many churches -- a hundred of them.

The massive cathedral here in the center of town was consecrated in 1649.

♪♪ Its bell towers are among the highest in the country.

♪♪ ♪♪ On May the 5th, 1562, Puebla was the scene of a rare Mexican military victory, celebrated today by an annual military parade.

[ Bugles playing ] The parade has evolved into a national celebration of the Mexican military.

♪♪ ♪♪ Here, there are giant placards of the nine heroes from the Mexican-American War and a float carrying the remnants of the defeated French army.

[ Marching band playing ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ The battle of the 5th of May, 1862, Cinco de Mayo, is also reenacted by the Mexican army.

2,000 Mexican troops routed 6,000 French soldiers, whose aim was to take over the country and install the European Maximilian as the head of the Mexican government.

But ragtag Mexican troops defeated the invading, well-equipped French forces.

♪♪ The Mexican Army, led by General Ignacio Zaragoza, killed about 1,000 French soldiers and forced the survivors to retreat to Mexico's Gulf Coast.

♪♪ But despite their victory on May the 5th, just months later, a more successful second French invasion attempt did, in fact, succeed in seating Maximilian as emperor, what its supporters called the Second Empire.

♪♪ The French invasion prompted a civil war which erupted between Maximilian and forces of Juárez, the legitimate government of Mexico.

A sizable percentage of the population of battle-weary Mexico supported the project and France's Second Empire.

-Militant Catholics were very disappointed, scared, felt threatened by the Constitution of 1857, because the Constitution of 1857 did not constitutionally recognize Mexico as a Catholic nation.

And it also intervened with what they saw was the church's independence.

And on that, on this independence, if the church was not independent, it would not be able to carry out its mission, which was the central mission of salvation.

If you have an emperor, then the highest post in Mexican politics cannot be taken over by fraudulent elections, it cannot be taken over by rebellion.

And then you will have this sort of political truce.

And during this political truce, they will build a state that is efficient, that is -- that can keep order, that can control the territory, that can defend itself from aggression coming from without.

So something like the U.S.-Mexican War in the 1840s, this would not end up in this horrible defeat.

And then, it will also withstand rebellion from within.

And then, it will guarantee order, it will bring prosperity and peace and happiness to all Mexicans.

So they are thinking that they can change the way Mexico is governed.

♪♪ -The palace on the hill in Mexico City, the site of the famous last stand against the Americans in the war 15 years earlier, would become the home of Maximilian.

Today, the palace displays the lifestyle and European trappings of Maximilian and his wife.

His elaborate royal carriage can still be found here, along with the much plainer black coach of Juárez, which was sighted often in the Mexican countryside during a continuation of the civil war, now between the reformers and the conservatives and their new European emperor.

♪♪ -As not a member of the white elite and not a, if you like, a cultural product of upper-class education, reading French or English and writing poetry or plays or novels and costumbrista literature and so on, like some of his colleagues, Juárez was seen by almost everybody that went to greet his carriage during his two exiles, interior exiles in Mexico, and people knew him.

They saw him.

They saw that dark face, and they saw him dressed in this -- And he was a politician more conscious of image than any of the resplendent generals, in his black suit, his lawyer's suit and bow tie, standing outside that black carriage, traveling in exile, fleeing the French army, fleeing being shot on the spot, you see, by conservative generals or by the French army.

They could see what the danger was, and he knew how to exploit his position, in that respect.

-Maximilian developed a genuine fondness for the Mexican people and upheld such policies as land reforms, religious freedom, and extending the right to vote beyond the landowning class.

But he never overcame the opposition of Mexican reformers and many foreign governments, including that of the United States, which refused to recognize his government.

-Maximilian was, in many respects, naive and ill-informed on what the situation in Mexico was actually like.

So, far from stabilizing the situation, the fact that he was there in the first place nullified the Constitution or ignored the Constitution of 1857, it ignored the legal election of Juárez as president in 1861, and ignored the whole tradition of Mexican struggle for constitutional government since independence.

He thrust himself into the middle of this situation, which was far too complicated for him to understand fully.

-After three years of civil war, the French abandoned the emperor, leading to his eventual surrender and capture.

♪♪ -Juárez had a law in his pocket which provided for the execution of anyone who collaborated with or promoted the foreign intervention.

So even before Maximilian arrived in Mexico, Juárez had a law in his pocket providing for his execution the minute he arrived.

♪♪ -Querétaro remains today a very Spanish place, characterized by elaborate cathedrals and convents.

A giant aqueduct here built by the Spanish is now overlooked by a modern city, home to many 21st-century industries.

But during the Civil War, its population supported conservatism, Catholicism, and monarchy.

It was here in the town of Querétaro that Maximilian had retreated and, abandoned by the French, surrendered.

♪♪ He was imprisoned in this monastery, by now a fort known as Fort Santa Cruz.

This austere room, where he was kept captive for 18 months, remains as it was more than 150 years ago.

♪♪ Maximilian was then taken here for his last days before he was taken to the hill outside town, the Hill of Bells, and shot with two collaborating Mexican generals.

♪♪ -They were regarded as traitors because they collaborated with a government that was imposed by an invading army, or the French army.

You have conservatives, who -- men who belong to the military, who, after the war, had been declared beyond the pale.

So there were prices on their heads.

Most of them either went into exile or would not put down their arms.

So they were still in a war with with liberalism.

Maximilian is put to death with two of the most -- I would say most interesting but also most influential conservative generals of the period.

One of them is Tomás Mejía.

Tomás Mejía is a cacique.

He is an Indian, an Otomi, who is from the Sierra de Querétaro, and he is convinced that if Mexico is not Catholic, Mexico will not survive.

And that -- That's why the states are so dangerous.

That's why he actually went into military service, to fight against the Americans, who are all Protestant, which is not true, but this is kind of the image.

And he does think of himself as a soldier of the faith.

-He is dedicated to the Virgin of the Pueblito, a little town outside Querétaro, and it's a Franciscan religious cult, and he's determined to resist the liberal cause because he believes it's secularizing the state and the country.

And the country has been portrayed by Catholic thinking since the 17th century as the New Jerusalem under the protection of the Virgin of Guadalupe.

And it's this Mexico that he died for.

-There is a dignity to this execution where it's the emperor and his two generals, where he gives up the central lot -- he was going to be in the middle of the two -- and he says to General Miramón, "No, los valientes, the brave ones, ought to occupy the place of honor."

And he has this very touching speech about his blood, hoping his blood will be the last to be shed for this country and now he dies for Mexico, which is now his patria, his fatherland.

Some historians have argued, "No, this actually is what makes him Mexican.

No, Mexicans don't hate Maximilian," and part of the reason that they don't hate Maximilian is because he died -- he died for the country.

He sacrificed himself for -- for the nation, even though he was executed because he was considered an enemy and a usurper.

The way he stages his death is very striking to national memory.

It stays there, and people find it very attractive.

The place where he was shot is a place where Mexican tourists visit and find, you know, touching a place of memory.

♪♪ -This famous painting by Manet interpreted the execution.

-Manet paints not as a criticism of Maximilian but as a criticism of the French government, of Napoleon, of his crazy ideas about establishing some sort of protectorate in Mexico and sacrificing French lives and French fortunes in this crazy, crazy idea, that it's an authoritarian government.

The soldiers that are executing Maximilian in the painting are not Mexican soldiers, as it was, but French soldiers.

The fact that he painted it three times, the fact that the paintings traveled -- they went to New York, and you could pay a small fee to go look at these paintings -- I think really speaks to the evocative character of the painting itself but also of a certain moment in world history in which men and women thought that the world was divided between two possibilities.

One was democracy, progress, in some cases, republics, and on the other hand, this idea that there was this reaction that had killed off the 1848 revolutions, that was authoritarian, that was imperialist, you know, that was Europe trying to build up its -- and dominate other parts of the world, and that the execution of Maximilian is also the triumph of the side that's defending democracy, progress, and the future against these forces of authoritarianism and, I would say, of the past.

And that Manet's painting gives an idea that things are going to be okay because the good guys won.

♪♪ -Maximilian offered gold coins to his executioners not to shoot him in the face.

They took the money and did.

Maximilian's body languished in Mexico City for months before being returned to Austria.

-So great was the offense caused by the European intervention and the bringing of a European prince to Mexico and the attempt to roll back the freedoms that had been achieved at so great a cost by the liberals that an execution was merited as an example to Europeans not to send any more princes.

But specifically, the fact that Maximilian was a Habsburg, the first Spanish king during the conquest was also a Habsburg, Charles V. He had, under his watch, probably on his own instructions, he had allowed the execution of the last Aztec emperor who had been taken voluntarily, along with some conquistadors into Southern Mexico, in order to show them all the abundance of the former Aztec empire, which was on its last knees.

And whilst he was there, he was summarily executed by some of the conquistadors.

Mexicans have not forgotten this.

So the point was made that, "A Habsburg killed our man, Cuauhtémoc, in 1522.

We're going to kill your man in 1867."

It's tit for tat.

It's vengeance for the murder of Cuauhtémoc.

♪♪ -In 1900, the Austrian government built this memorial to Maximilian at the site of the execution.

This giant statue of Juárez, the man Maximilian had usurped and who then defeated him and had him executed, was erected in 1967 and towers over Maximilian's memorial, a symbolic image of victor over vanquished.

Benito Juárez, the Zapotec Indian lawyer, would become one of Mexico's greatest heroes.

Juárez's plans and visions bore fruit for decades.

He ruled Mexico for 12 tumultuous years until his death in 1872.

♪♪ ♪♪ The defeat of Maximilian was the first in a series of terminal military disasters for Napoleon III.

The nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte had rebuilt France after the 1848 revolution, including its capital, Paris, where many of the classical buildings and boulevards he commissioned remain to this day.

Napoleon III had also attempted to rebuild a French colonial empire, deploying hundreds of thousands of troops not only in Mexico but in troublesome Algeria.

But when the Prussians, under Bismarck, went on the march next door to create a German state, he fought them to.

France's second empire collapsed.

Napoleon, who had modeled himself on Bonaparte, was captured by the Prussians, exiled, and died in England just a few years later, where his tomb can still be found.

♪♪ At the time of these great upheavals, Mexican landscape artist Velasco painted this breathtaking series of exquisite Mexican landscapes.

♪♪ As the Industrial Revolution swept the world, Velasco's bucolic landscapes would soon include railway lines.

♪♪ ♪♪ All seems idyllic in the countryside.

But when Juárez died, it would soon bring to power an army general who had made his name in the civil war against the French.

A young Porfirio Díaz had been one of the generals leading the successful defeat of the French outside Puebla in 1862.

As president, his rule would become synonymous with Mexico's march towards modernization but would ultimately lead to not only another civil war but revolution.

Seizing power in a coup, Porfirio Díaz would become Mexico's longest-serving president, overseeing a wave of foreign investment and industrialization of the country.

Like his mentor, Juárez, Díaz was a Zapotec from Oaxaca and had Indigenous blood.

-Although they are, like, genetically indigenous people, you know, of kind of indigenous racial heritage, they identify often with the elite that they have joined.

-Juárez governed largely through people from his own state who he'd been at college with and knew when he was governor.

Well, Díaz did the same thing.

It wasn't simply Mexico ruled by two men from Oaxaca.

It was whole camarillas, as they're called, sort of networks of friends who came from the state and helped them run the administration.

-So we have this military dictator who comes in and says, "I'm going to put the lid on all of this.

Things are going to quiet down.

We're going to have a possibility of economic growth," especially economic growth which is going to favor certain sectors of society and certainly not favor other sectors of society.

The first thing he did was to bring a certain degree of stability to the country, and that's one of the reasons why he was in power for so long and why he became a very popular and admired figure for many people at the time.

We have to remember, as I said, that there were these five foreign invasions.

There was continual poverty in the country.

The communications were in dreadful condition.

And he brings the country forcibly to a peaceful situation.

He brings railroads in through foreign investment.

And so there's a communication within the country that we never had before.

There's -- He has an expression which says, "We're going to have lots of administration and not much politics, not much politicking."

It's a period of stability, and stability is very attractive after you've had 60 years, 70 years of -- You can't have 70 years of chaos, but 70 years of instability.

♪♪ -Díaz ruled for 34 years, from 1877 to 1911, a period now called the Porfiriato.

Towards the end, he maintained his rule through repression and by the courting of favor from powerful nations.

-Although the kind of cultural and social extinction of Indigenous Mexico was a goal that the state was actively pursuing, that's not the same as saying that an actual genocide of the Indigenous population was something that the Mexican government was trying to carry out under Díaz.

They didn't want the Indigenous people to be killed.

They just wanted Indigenous people to stop being Indigenous and become Mexican.

So the extinction of their languages, of their political systems, of their territorial and cultural autonomy, their idiosyncratic religious practices, their very specific and special relationships with the land, all of those were seen as primitive holdovers from the colonial period that needed to be kind of swept away in order to usher in this period of glorious, shiny Mexican modernity.

And the idea was that, if their lands could be taken from them and redistributed to those who knew how to use land more productively and efficiently, Mexico would be a better place.

The country would be a stronger country.

And so, essentially, like, in practical terms, the extinction of Mexico's Indigenous people becomes state policy.

-Generous in his dealings with foreign investors, cities like Mexico City were Europeanized.

This was an era in Europe of the Belle Epoque and, soon, art nouveau, and a lot of it brushed off in Mexico City.

This Tiffany ceiling in the Hotel de Madrid was imported from Paris in 1905.

Civic buildings, like the post office, were similarly grand.

As part of his modernization program, Díaz oversaw the construction of Mexico's first railway, from Veracruz to Mexico City.

Today, the railway station in Mexico's port city no longer functions.

♪♪ The occasional freight train the only surviving feature of Díaz's industrial dream for his country.

♪♪ His critics said Díaz became the archetypal entreguista, one who sells out his country for private gain.

With foreign investment came the concentration of great wealth in a few hands, and social conditions worsened.

♪♪ -Mexican land is privatized, and many people swoop in, including very large numbers of foreigners, land speculators.

He was a man in charge during that massive change in property ownership, and it led to an enormous amount of competition between different groups of foreign landowners, particularly between the Americans, who kind of regarded Mexico, by then, as a kind of very informal colony, that their economic interests in Mexico were vast, the railways, whole areas of the economy, land, mining.

It was, to quote one historian, "It was annexation without the inconveniences of having to annex the country."

You had all the access you needed.

-As often happens with people who are in power a long time, I think he began to lose the plot.

He became increasingly, I think, surrounded by a narrow group of advisers who had their own particular economic model, which was strong government, forget elections, or just have phony elections, keep the plebs in place, get foreign investment, export, build railways and telegraphs.

Now, they were successful at doing all of that, but it wasn't a very popular program.

And the result of that, in particular by the 1890s, 1900s, was a regime that was very autocratic and narrow, didn't have much popular support anymore, and it also presided over, I think fairly clearly, declining living standards and an impoverishment of a lot of particularly the peasants, who were the majority of the population.

♪♪ -As the Díaz era turns sour, Veracruz's famous fort became a symbol for the president's oppression, part of it being used as a jail for political prisoners.

The eerie and damp cells contained in this 500-year-old building can still be visited today.

♪♪ Meanwhile, back in Mexico City, Díaz lived like a king in the castle on the hill.

Like Maximilian, 50 years earlier, he had his own wing kitted out to his regal liking.

-In 1910, it's the 100th anniversary of the Mexican Revolution.

So Díaz and those that -- he has a very good team of very literate, good writers around him, and they take advantage of this moment to tell the world that Mexico has arrived.

There's a phrase that they use over and over again.

Mexico now forms part of the concourse of civilized nations.

Things are looking very good, and he can invite the world to see how Mexico has made it.

Mexico is now a civilized country.

It's becoming industrialized.

The cities have monumental buildings in them, and the streets are clean, and they've kind of shooed away all of the Indians that look as though they're not very well-dressed.

Mexico has arrived.

Mexico is a civilized country.

Mexico is like Europe.

And he was admired as a benevolent dictator by many, and he was reviled as a ruthless dictator by those who suffered from his lack of justice and violent repressions of some Indian Indigenous communities.

The image that was created of him as the great civilizer, as a man who, in spite of being pure-blooded Indian himself, actually became whiter as time went on.

They "whitened" him up, and he became a respected member of the international community.

♪♪ -The isolated ruin of mining town Mineral de Pozos was one of Díaz's pet projects.

Seeking a rebirth of Mexico's famous silver-mining industry, it grew to a population of 70,000.

♪♪ It now sits desolate atop a ridge... ♪♪ ...together with train carriages from another forgotten railway scattered about.

♪♪ -And there are huge fortunes that are made.

The Guggenheims are one of them.

The Guggenheims make their money in Aguas Calientes refining Mexican silver.

And you have several important mining companies, American mining companies, that are still going concerns today from the money that they made in Mexico during this period in time.

-Mineral de Pozos is a symbolic reminder of what went wrong for Díaz.

-Díaz was brought down in 1911 because it was felt that he had flouted for far too long basic guarantees and ignored the right of access to justice and that people were losing their land and they had no political rights anymore.

They weren't enjoying free elections.

So that's created a kind of cycle in Mexican history of reform, followed by reaction, followed by revolution, followed by reform.

Just the cycle, really, since 18-- since Hidalgo, of polarization and periods of improvement.

-A wealthy lawyer, Francisco Madero, challenged Díaz and was supported by a popular uprising.

After 34 years in power, Díaz stepped aside.

-Díaz, having started well, sort of outlived his welcome or outlived his stay in the way that strong leaders often do, and by the 1900s, as he's getting actually quite old and even maybe just a little bit gaga, I think he sort of loses the political plot.

He doesn't see that his government is now encouraging widespread discontent, and they make no effort really to try and assuage that.

They could have tried a few modest reforms here or there, but they didn't really do that.

And the thing just kind of built and built until suddenly there's this big explosion in 1910, which people had not expected.

But then that is what sometimes happens with revolutions.

People don't realize how fed up and disgruntled people are until they actually take to the streets.

-Like so many others before and after, Díaz went into exile.

He ended his days in Paris, a city which was very much a symbol of a European dream he held for his country.

As Díaz boarded a ship in Veracruz Harbor, his last glimpse of his country would have been the fort, as it had been for so many others in the centuries before him.

While Díaz sailed into exile in Paris, where he would die just a few years later, in Mexico, whoever controlled the fort controlled the country.

A series of events would now take place that would end in a revolution.

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