Melchor Ocampo
José Telésforo Juan Nepomuceno Melchor de la Santísima Trinidad Ocampo Tapia (Maravatío, Michoacán, January 5, 1814-Tepeji del Río, Hidalgo, June 3, 1861), known as Melchor Ocampo, was a Mexican liberal lawyer, scientist and politician.
Biography
Fernando Iglesias Calderón was a politician from the best liberals in Mexico, a relative of the owner of the Pateo hacienda, he maintained that Ocampo was not the son of the Tapia and Balbuena family, but one of the children that she took in at her hacienda, a mulatto godson born in 1810.
Flatly, he told Ángel Pola: "The fact of picking up an orphan was very common in those times and among wealthy families".[citation required ]
Captured in Camargo during the US intervention in Mexico, he was taken to Morelia to work at the government printing press; place where he stayed from December 1846 to the first days of May 1847. He wrote in his adventure notebook:
"During the first two months of confinement, we were concerned with the composition of the Reprint of Ordinances of the City of Valladolid [Morelia]during which we were fortunate to visit the governor of the province (Melchor Ocampo), who supervised the publication. He is one of the best men in Mexico, and was a presidential candidate in the last elections. Ocampo has about thirty-eight years, a little low, though robust. Its fine olive faction seems darker than it really is, due to the blackness of its scalp, from which curls fall around its face and its expressive and sparkling black eyes.
Ocampo had attended classes at the Seminary of Valladolid (Morelia) in 1824-1830; that is, a 14-year-old adolescent and not a ten-year-old child.
He was born in the town of Maravatío, territory of the current state of Michoacán. From an early age he took a liberal stance, which was largely due to his stay in France, where he was influenced by the ideas of freedom. He held very important political positions in Mexico: he was governor of his native state, author and drafter of the reform laws, still in force in Mexico, and signed the Ocampo-McLane treaty. The famous epistle from him is read at civil marriage ceremonies. He died in 1861, shot by General Leonardo Márquez. [citation needed ]
In his honor, his home state was renamed Michoacán de Ocampo. His heart is permanently preserved in the Colegio Primitivo y Nacional de San Nicolás de Hidalgo and is exhibited in a room dedicated to him along with other belongings. [citation needed ]
Studies
He studied at the Morelia seminary and then law at the seminary college of Mexico (Pontifical University). Upon completing his studies at the Morelia Seminary, Ocampo enrolled at the University of Mexico, specializing in law but also studying physics, natural sciences, chemistry and botany. He worked in a law firm since 1833. In 1840 he traveled to Europe and there he soaked up the liberal and anti-clerical doctrines of the French Enlightenment. Ocampo, a Renaissance man who was equally at home in the humanities, arts, and sciences, returned to Mexico in 1842 and combined the practice of law with scientific agriculture, the cataloging of flora and fauna, and the study of indian languages. He also established one of the best private libraries in Mexico.
First political offices
He was elected deputy in 1842, and in 1845 he was the third governor of the state of Michoacán. In 1846, during the war against the United States, Ocampo served as governor of Michoacán, vigorously striving to raise troops to fight the invader from the north. After the US-Mexican War, Ocampo's anti-clerical sentiments were further intensified by a bitter dispute with the Michoacán clergy. The cause of the controversy was the refusal of a local parish priest to bury an impoverished peon because his widow could not pay the sacramental fees.
Ocampo later became Secretary of the Treasury, but was exiled from the country in 1853 by the flamboyant Antonio López de Santa Anna, who had established himself as a military dictator, sending him prisoner to the fort of San Juan de Ulúa, in front of the port of Veracruz, and later exiled to Cuba and finally moved to New Orleans, United States.
Upon settling in New Orleans, Ocampo befriended an even more illustrious exile: Benito Juárez. He became one of Juárez's most loyal supporters. In this city he is dedicated to the publication of pamphlets to promote political changes in Mexico. The result of his efforts was the Plan of Ayutla (1855). Exile for the couple ended as a result of dramatic events that took place in Mexico in 1854. Juan N. Álvarez, a general with liberal sympathies, called a meeting at his ranch in Guerrero of several influential men who wished to overthrow the corrupt dictatorship of Santa Anna. The conspirators drew up the Plan de Ayutla, calling for the ouster of Santa Anna and a temporary president who would rule until a new constitution was drawn up. The rebellion quickly spread throughout the country and Santa Anna, unable to quell the uprising through his usual method of bribery, fled into exile in the fall of 1855. Juan Álvarez was named provisional president and Juárez y Ocampo, back from the exile, were briefly appointed Ministers of Justice and Foreign Affairs.
During the Juárez government, he was appointed Minister of the Interior, also in charge of the Ministries of Relations, War and Finance. From this time are the famous Reform Laws, which separated the Church from the State, and whose drafting he was one of the main authors.
Epistle of Melchor Ocampo
He participated in the drafting of the new Civil Laws, which would ultimately give meaning to liberal politics and would end up reforming the Constitution of 1857, in order to make civil and political businesses independent from ecclesiastical ones. On July 23, 1859, the then interim president D. Benito Juárez issued in the Port of Veracruz, the "Civil Marriage Law" containing 31 articles. In article 15, as a ceremonial formalization of the marriage, the famous epistle attributed to Melchor Ocampo was included, which appears below:
...That this is the only moral means of founding the family, of conserving the species and of supplicating the imperfections of the individual that cannot suffice to himself to achieve the perfection of the human race. That this does not exist in the person alone but in conjugal duality. That the married should be and be sacred to each other, even more than each one is to himself. That the man whose sexual gifts are primarily the value and the strength, must give, and give to the woman, protection, food and direction, always treating her as the most delicate, sensitive and thin part of himself, and with the magnanimity and generous benevolence that the strong owes to the weak, essentially when the weak one surrenders to him, and when by society he has been entrusted. That the woman, whose main gifts are abnegation, beauty, compassion, insight and tenderness, must give and give the husband obedience, gradient, assistance, comfort and counsel, always treating him with the veneration that is due to the person who supports and defends us, and with the delicacy of those who do not want to exasperate the brusque, irritable and hard part of themselves. May one and the other be owed and have respect, deference, fidelity, trust, and tenderness, and both will seek that what one expected of the other by joining with him, will not be dismayed with union. That both must prudence and mitigate their faults. That they will never be said injurious, because the insults among the married, dishonor the one who pours them, and prove their lack of tino or of sanity in the choice, let alone mistreat themselves of work, for it is villain and coward to abuse the force. That both should be prepared with the study and amicable and thorough correction of their defects, to the supreme magistrate of parents, so that when they become so, their children may find in them a good example and a conduct worthy of serving them as a model. May the doctrine that inspires these tender and beloved bonds of their affection, make their prosperous or adverse fate; and the happiness or disadvantage of the children shall be the reward or punishment, the venture or the misery of the parents. That society blesses, considers and praises the good parents, for the great good that they do to give them good and fulfilled citizens; and the same, censors and duly despises those who, for abandonment, for misunderstood affection, or for their evil example, corrupt the sacred deposit that nature entrusted to them, granting them such children. And finally, that when society sees that such persons did not deserve to be elevated to the dignity of parents, they should only have lived under guardianship, as incapable of leading themselves decently, it is painful to have consecrate with their authority the union of a man and a woman who have not been able to be free and to turn for themselves towards good.
McLane-Ocampo Treaty
On December 14, 1859, by order of Juárez, he signed in Veracruz with United States Minister Robert McLane, the controversial McLane-Ocampo Treaty with the United States, through which Mexico granted the right of transit to the army in perpetuity and goods from the United States through three strips of Mexican territory. The first through the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, the second from Guaymas to Nogales (Arizona), and a third strip from Mazatlán to Heroica Matamoros, in the Gulf of Mexico, passing through Monterrey. However, Mexico maintained its sovereignty over the three steps and could sovereignly modify the treaty. That is, the term "perpetuity" it did not mean forever, but without a definite end date.
Before it was signed, William B. Churchwell confidentially recommended to US President James Buchanan that a clause be included in the treaty to achieve the cession of Baja California to the United States.
The purpose of the treaty was to achieve two distressing needs for the Juárez government: US recognition of their government and 4 million dollars, of which only half would be delivered to President Benito Juárez. The rest would be reserved to pay compensation to US citizens complaining about violations of their rights. The treaty was not ratified by the US Congress when it was introduced. On the eve of the American Civil War, senators considered that the new transit routes through Mexico would increase the economic and military power of the breakaway states of the South.
Death
On May 30, 1861, the conservatives under the command of the Spanish Lindoro Cajiga (who years later would be captured, tortured, and shot by the Republican army) apprehended him at his Pomoca hacienda, near Maravatío, Michoacán, and later transferred him the population to Tepeji del Río (Hidalgo), to be presented before Leonardo Márquez and Félix Zuloaga, conservative generals and staunch enemies of the liberals. Melchor Ocampo died shot in Tepeji del Río on June 3, 1861 by the conservative soldiers of General Leonardo Márquez. After the firing squad, Márquez ordered the body to be hung from a pirul tree. Neighbors took Ocampo's body to the capital, and he was buried on June 5 at half past three in the afternoon. Later, on June 3, 1897, his remains were transferred to the Rotunda of Illustrious Persons. In his honor, his home state is now called Michoacán de Ocampo, as well as the city of Maravatío de Ocampo, the theater in the state capital., Teatro Ocampo de Morelia, and the mountain city of the state of Puebla, Tetela de Ocampo.[citation required]
In his will, he says:
I say goodbye to all my good friends and all those who have favored me in little or in much and I die believing that I have done for the service of my country as I have believed in conscience that it was good... I read my books to the College of St. Nicholas of Morelia, after my lords bale and Sabás Iturbide take from them whatever they like.
One of his epistles that used to be read regularly in civil marriages in Mexico has become famous.[citation required]
His biographer, Raúl Arreola Cortés, wrote:
Only twenty years (1842-1861) Ocampo acted in the public affairs of the nation, a period that was decisive in the international order. The major events of the world at that time had an impact on the internal affairs of our country. In those years the great colonial dominions of England and France were formed on the American, Asian and African continents, mainly; while in our America the dominion of the United States was extended... The industrial revolution strengthened economic and political liberalism; bourgeois democracy and the republican regime advanced and the feudal aristocracy was replaced by the capitalist bourgeoisie as the ruling class...
Ideology
In terms of education, he argued that it had to be based on these basic postulates of liberalism: democracy or majority rule; in respect for different religious beliefs; in tolerance; in the equality of all before the law, strengthening the civil authority and suppressing the privileges.
Legacy
At the Colegio Primitivo y Nacional de San Nicolás de Hidalgo in Morelia, Michoacán, there is a special classroom where you can find objects that belonged to him, as well as his private library. Inside that classroom, the heart of Melchor Ocampo is found in an urn preserved in formaldehyde. His daughter handed him over to the Colegio de San Nicolás at the express request of his father, who even said: "My heart belongs to the Colegio de San Nicolás."
The film Huérfanos is a biography of Melchor Ocampo in which he is played by actor Rafael Sánchez Navarro.[citation required]