est obscurity, at the height of Diaz' presidential career, Benito Juarez influenced the Mexican political equation.
It is only just, then, that the irony of history has Porfirio Diaz virtually erased from the roll call of Mexico's finest - for essentially the same reason that Diaz excluded Juarez. Diaz did not leave office peacefully; rather, it was under the shadow of La Revolucion, THE Revolution, which tore apart Mexico for the ten years of the second decade of this century, and left her still licking wounds of civil strife another twenty years longer. To the forces that overthrew Diaz' regime, enmity to the Porfiriato (or, as various sarcastic detractors called it, the Diaz-potism) was all that united them. It was only fair, therefore, that, just as Diaz had raised his prestige at the expense of Juarez' reputation, so have his Revolutionary successors done to him. There is no immediate "rehabilitation" of Diaz' reputation in sight: the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) which dominates Mexican politics dates its creation from the Revolution
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