Los Grandes Problemas Nacionales Molina Enríquez is best known for publishing
Los Grandes Problemas Nacionales (The Great National Problems) in 1909, a book highly critical of the
Porfirio Díaz government. Molina Enríquez characterized the period after 1821 as the era of national disintegration. The book highlighted issues of sharp political divisions, recurrent armed conflicts, and periodic foreign interventions. Molina Enríquez focused particularly on two aspects,
land reform and the rights of the indigenous people and their place in society socially. Molina Enríquez was arrested by the government of
Francisco León de la Barra on August 25, 1911 for publishing the document, which has later been described as highly influential on the eve of the
Mexican Revolution. A well-known quote from the book is "la hacienda no es negocio" [the
hacienda is not a business]: "By this he meant that the large Mexican landed states of his day (and stretching back to their origins in the era of the Spanish conquest) were for the most part not profit-oriented but 'feudal' enterprises, that rural Mexico was therefore only partially capitalistic, if at all, and that the country was ipso facto only imperfectly modern." Certain prominent personalities within the Mexican liberal tradition such as
Melchor Ocampo,
Ignacio Ramírez,
Ponciano Arriaga, José María del Castillo Velasco, and Isidoro Olvera had always had a "social" element to their liberalism inspired by French radicalism and utopian socialism, and this strand of thought influenced Molina Enríquez and other participants in the Mexican Revolution.
Indigenous rights Molina Enríquez argued indigenous people suffered because of position on national social structure. In order to resolve the suffering of the indigenous people, and create equality, Molina Enríquez believed they had to be integrated into the national state, this idea would be central to the indigenist movement when it went international. Molina Enríquez has been cited as arguing that the only true Mexicans were the
mestizos and that they would be the inheritors of Mexico, classifying the other social group in Mexico as
Criollos, who were
Spanish/
French in their thinking and ways, the mestizos to Molina Enríquez, were a new race, with a new culture of their own and the majority of Mexicans. Molina Enríquez believed that the "liberales mestizos" were the group most capable of carrying out the modernization of the country.
Land reform Molina Enríquez believed land reform was needed. In August 1911, he issued the Plan de Texcoco as a prelude to revolt, in which he called for establishing a
dictatorship committed to land reform. The role of the dictatorship would be to parcel out large
haciendas to individual, not communal claimants. Molina Enríquez would eventually go on to be a key adviser to the committee which drafted
article 27 of the
Mexican Constitution and a member of the National Agrarian Commission. Molina Enríquez had helped create the legal mandate for the destruction of the hacienda system and the re-centralization of State power. ==Further reading==