Melchor Ocampo

For other uses, including places named in Melchor Ocampo's honour, see Ocampo.

Melchor Ocampo

Melchor Ocampo (5 January 1814, Maravatío, Michoacán – 3 June 1861, Tepeji del Río, Hidalgo) was a Mexican lawyer, scientist, and liberal politician.

His home state was renamed Michoacán de Ocampo in his honour.

Studies

Ocampo studied at the Roman Catholic seminary in Morelia, Michoacán, and later law at the Colegio Seminario de México (Universidad Pontificia). He began working in a law office in 1833 and travelled to France in 1840, where he was influenced by liberal and anticlerical ideas of the Enlightenment. He later returned to Michoacán to work his family's lands, practice law, investigate the region's flora and fauna, and study the local indigenous languages.

Politics

He was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1842. He served as Governor of Michoacán during the U.S. Invasion, and as Treasury Minister in 1850. Because of one of his more controversial projects, he was forced to flee the country by President Antonio López de Santa Anna, taking refuge first in Cuba and then in the U.S. city of New Orleans. In New Orleans he met a group of liberals, including Benito Juárez, and began to publish pamphlets to promote political change in Mexico. The result of his efforts was the Plan de Ayutla of 1855, which called for the overthrow of Santa Anna and the installation of the liberal general Juan Álvarez. With Álvarez's victory, Ocampo served briefly in his cabinet as foreign minister.

During Benito Juárez's administration, Ocampo was appointed Minister of the Interior, with responsibility also for foreign affairs, defence, and the treasury. During this period he drafted the Reform Laws (Leyes de Reforma), bringing about the separation of Church and State the Catholic Church had many times intervened in progress and chained the country back to the times of monarchs and the inquisition far into the 19th century.

McLane-Ocampo Treaty

In the port of Veracruz, on 14 December 1859, acting on Juárez's orders, he and U.S. Ambassador Robert McLane signed the McLane-Ocampo Treaty. This controversial treaty would have awarded the United States perpetual transit rights, for its armies and merchandise, through three strips of Mexico's territory: the Isthmus of Tehuantepec; a corridor running from Guaymas, Sonora, to Nogales, Arizona; and a second transoceanic route from Mazatlán, Sinaloa, on the Pacific to Brownsville, Texas, on the Gulf of Mexico. Although presidents Juárez and Buchanan were both in favour of the arrangement, it was never ratified by the U.S. Senate on account of the impending Civil War in the United States.

Thought

Ocampo believed that education had to be grounded on the basic postulates of liberalism, democracy, respect and tolerance for different beliefs, equality before the law, the elimination of privileges, and the supremacy of civil authority.

Death

Some months after retiring from public service, Melchor Ocampo was abducted from his hacienda in Michoacán by conservatives on orders from either Leonardo Márquez or Félix María Zuloaga (reports differ) and, after a drumhead court-martial, was executed by firing squad in Tepeji del Río, in what is today the state of Hidalgo, on 3 June 1861. His remains are interred in the Rotonda de los Hombres Ilustres in Mexico City.

Legacy

Ocampo's best-known legacy is his 1859 epistle on marriage, still read out by judges presiding over civil weddings in many states.

The man, whose main sexual attributes are courage and strength, must give and shall always give the woman protection, food and direction... The woman, whose main attributes are self-denial, beauty, compassion, shrewdness and tenderness, must give and shall always give her husband obedience, affability, attention, comfort and advice, treating him with the reverence due to the person who supports and defends us.^[1]

References

1. ^ ¿Qué dice la Epístola de Melchor Ocampo? (Spanish)

See also

• Reform War

External links

• Biography
• Pide Senado a estados sustituir epístola de Melchor Ocampo (Spanish)

Persondata
Name	Ocampo, Melchor
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	5 January 1814
Place of birth
Date of death	3 June 1861
Place of death