Benito Hermión.
The Night of the Caballeros was a coup d'etat carried out by Constabulary Commandant Benito Hermión on the night of 16-17 September 1881. The coup resulted in the establishment of a dictatorship by Hermión that lasted until his own ouster on the morning of 16 October 1901.
The Night of the Caballeros took place against the backdrop of a nationwide insurgency by the Moralistas, a Mexicano-based revolutionary movement led by former Senator Carlos Concepción of Chiapas. An attempt by the Moralistas to seize power in the majority-Mexicano states of Chiapas and Durango over the summer of 1881 had been defeated, but the United States of Mexico had become a police state under President George Vining and Hermión, with travel restricted and newspapers shut down.
On the morning of 12 September, nine days before the 1881 Mexican elections, a delegation of Senators from the opposition Liberty Party led by Libertarian presidential nominee Thomas Rogers met with President Vining to protest the abuses of the Constitution. Vining replied, "Have no fear for the Constitution. I have it here in the Palace, and will release it once peace returns to our land." Whether Vining intended to restore the rule of law would never be known, because he suffered a fatal heart attack that afternoon.
Secretary of State Marcos Ruíz called the Senate into session the next day to select an interim president to serve until the upcoming election. The Libertarians supported Rogers, while the Continentalist Party caucus supported Ruíz himself. The Senate apparently deadlocked over the question, and Senator Frank Hill of California, acting on orders from Bernard Kramer of the San Francisco based corporation Kramer Associates, suggested that the Cabinet itself rule as a corporate body until the election.
Sobel remarks that under ordinary circumstances, Hill's proposal would have been rejected, but that the tension and fear of the time led the senators to see it as sensible, and it was adopted. Sobel says that on that day, Mexican republicanism died.
At the next Cabinet meeting on 15 September, Hermión claimed to have information proving that several leading members of the Liberty Party were under the control of French revolutionaries, who were also financing the Moralistas. "Should the people, ignorant of these facts, elect a Libertarian government, then Mexico will be doomed." When Ruíz asked Hermión to present his information to the Cabinet, he refused, claiming that two of the Cabinet secretaries were also in the pay of the French. "I cannot divulge my information until a full investigation is made, and then only to the people, and not to traitors."
Although the other members of the Cabinet were shocked, they approved Hermión's suggestion that the election be indefinitely delayed by a vote of seven to four. The Cabinet also approved Hermión's proposal that the position of Chief of State be created in the interim to serve as the government's executive, and Hermión himself was chosen to fill it.
The next day Hermión appeared before the Senate to ask for confirmation of the Cabinet's decisions. The Libertarian caucus immediately objected, with Senator Homer Sheridan of Arizona calling the proposals "cynical and contrary to law," and Rogers denouncing Hermión as "a man of great ambition but little character." The Continentalist caucus was able to delay a vote until the next day, and the Senate was adjourned.
During the night of 16-17 September, the Constabulary seized and imprisoned five Libertarian senators, including Rogers' chief lieutenant, Fritz Carmody of Mexico del Norte. Rogers himself was warned of the action and fled the capital with his family, as well as those of imprisoned Senators Schuyler Stanley of Durango and Winthrop Sharp of Arizona. Rogers and his family left Mexico and settled in the Bahamas. By the morning of the 17th, every major Libertarian politician in Mexico City was either in jail, in hiding, had suffered a mysterious "death by accident", or had gone over to the Continentalists. That afternoon, the fourteen remaining members of the Senate met to ratify the Cabinet's decisions from two days earlier, and Hermión was appointed Chief of State of the U.S.M.
Those who opposed Hermión's seizure of power were either intimidated into silence, or were jailed, often to disappear forever. Those who supported Hermión claimed that the country was in danger of anarchy, and needed a strong man in charge to restore order; or else pointed to Kramer and his ally Monte Benedict of Petroleum of Mexico as the country's true rulers, insisting that they were men of intelligence and force that Mexico needed at a time of trouble.
Kramer, however, suffered a stroke in February 1882 and died two months later. He was succeeded as President of K.A. by Diego Cortez y Catalán, who had no interest in politics, and was content to allow Hermión to govern Mexico as he saw fit as long as he left K.A. alone. Later in 1882 Benedict retired as head of P.M., and was succeeded by his nephew Andrew Benedict, who was of the same mind as Cortez. By the summer of 1883 Hermión was in complete control in Mexico City and the southern states, while Benedict ruled Jefferson, and Cortez controlled California and Arizona.
Sobel's sources for the Night of the Caballeros are Earl Watson's The Right Man: The Vining Administration (Mexico City, 1943); Mortimor Dow's The Giants of Mexico: The Political Maneuverings of Kramer and Benedict in the Industrial Era (Mexico City, 1950); Felix Lombardi's Francophobia in Mexico: The Summer of 1881 (Mexico City, 1952); William Berry's The Dead Are Unburied in the Plaza: The Mexican Repression of 1881 (Mexico City, 1956); And Bernard Mix's The Night of the Caballeros: The Hermión Seizure (Mexico City, 1964).