Francisco Indalecio Madero was born on October 30, 1873, in Parras, in the northern Mexican state of Coahuila, into one of the wealthiest landowning families in the country. He was educated partly in France and at the University of California, Berkeley, exposure that shaped his interest in liberal democratic thought, spiritism, and vegetarianism, subjects he wrote about alongside his political work. Returning to Mexico, he managed family agricultural and industrial enterprises while becoming increasingly involved in political reform efforts opposing the long dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz. In 1908 Madero published La sucesion presidencial en 1910, a work arguing against the indefinite reelection of Diaz and calling for genuine electoral democracy. The book brought him national attention and positioned him as a leading voice of the anti reelectionist movement. He ran against Diaz in the 1910 presidential election, was arrested on the pretext of inciting rebellion, and after his release fled to Texas, where he issued the Plan de San Luis Potosi, calling for armed uprising against the Diaz regime and setting November 20, 1910, as the date to begin the revolt. This call is generally recognized as the opening act of the Mexican Revolution. Madero returned to Mexico to lead the rebellion, and following military successes and negotiations that forced Diaz into exile in 1911, he was elected president later that year. His presidency proved short and turbulent, caught between conservative forces resistant to change and former revolutionary allies, including Emiliano Zapata and Pascual Orozco, who felt his reforms did not go far enough, particularly on land redistribution. His government was undermined by factional violence and elite opposition. In February 1913, during an episode known as the Decena Tragica, Madero was overthrown in a coup orchestrated by General Victoriano Huerta with the involvement of the United States ambassador Henry Lane Wilson. Madero was arrested and, on February 22, 1913, assassinated along with Vice President Jose Maria Pino Suarez while supposedly being transferred to prison. He is remembered as the Apostle of Democracy and as the figure whose writings and political courage ignited the Mexican Revolution, even though his own presidency fell short of consolidating the broader social changes the revolution eventually produced.
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