Benito Juárez

Mexico's Reform Laws of the 1850s and 1860s, which Juárez championed and enforced as president, separated church and state, created civil marriage and civil registries of births and deaths, and put Church property up for sale. The secular state they built still frames Mexican public life. The contested part is the land policy: the same laws that broke up Church estates also undermined communally held Indigenous land, which ended up concentrated in fewer hands and fed the grievances behind the 1910 revolution.