The Mexican nation has been incessantly plagued with revolutionary plans since the “grito of demoralization” by Guerrero in 1829. The word “plagued” is used advisedly, for very few of the revolutionary plans were more than expressions of personalismo, the bane of Latin-American politics. The immense majority of these so-called “programs” have had very little in the way of social and economic reforms embodied in them, either by word or implication; for the most part they have been political rather than socio-economic in character.
Early in the twentieth century, however, a small group developed one of the few socio-economic programs to be found in Mexican history. On July 1, 1906, while the Diaz government was still firmly entrenched, Ricardo Flores Magón and his little group of followers, almost unnoticed by the majority of the Mexicans, published a program of reform which at the time was one of the most sweeping ever outlined in Mexico. Announced as the philosophy of the Mexican Liberal Party, in it were all the elements of a vast socio-economic plan for the Mexican nation, with only a small part of the program dealing with political change. The Liberals well realized that curing only the political sore would not heal the sick nation.