Mexico (United Mexican States)

Maximilian is hopelessly outnumbered, and resolves on May 11 to attempt an escape through the enemy lines.

He is, however, intercepted before he can carry out this plan on May 15 and, following a court-martial, is sentenced to death.

Many of the crowned heads of Europe and other prominent figures (including liberals Victor Hugo and Giuseppe Garibaldi) have sent telegrams and letters to Mexico pleading for Maximilian's life to be spared, but Juárez refuses to commute the sentence, believing that it is necessary to send a message that Mexico will not tolerate any government imposed by foreign powers.

Maximilian, meeting the same deadly fate he had previously prescribed for captured rebels, is executed on June 19 (along with his generals Miguel Miramón and Tomás Mejía) on the Cerro de las Campanas, a hill on the outskirts of Querétaro, by the forces loyal to President Benito Juárez, who has kept the federal government functioning during the French intervention.

Juárez's position is further strengthened when the United States deploys troops to the Rio Grande, and threatens an invasion.

Mexico City surrenders the day after Maximilian is executed.

The republic is restored, President Juárez is returned to power in the national capital, yet there is little change in policy, given that Maximilian had upheld most of Juárez's liberal reforms.

Benito Juárez is reelected to yet another term as president in 1871 despite a constitutional prohibition of reelections, provoking one of the losing candidates, Porfirio Díaz (a Liberal general and a hero of the French war, but increasingly conservative in outlook) to launch a rebellion against the president.

Mexico’s Conservative party had been so thoroughly discredited by its alliance with the invading French troops that it had effectively ceased to exist after the victory over the French occupation, and the Liberal party has been almost unchallenged as a political force during the first years of the "restored republic".

The attempted revolt (the so-called Plan de la Noria), supported by conservative factions within the Liberal party, is already at the point of defeat when Juárez dies in office on July 19, 1872, making it a moot point.

Díaz runs against interim president Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada, loses the election, and retires to his hacienda in Oaxaca.

Four years later, in 1876, when Lerdo himself runs for reelection, Díaz will launch a second, successful revolt (the Plan de Tuxtepec) and capture the presidency, which he will effectively hold through eight terms until 1911.

The Mexican government finally allows the exiled former president and general Antonio López de Santa Anna to return home in 1874.

The Academia Mexicana de la Lengua (variously translated as the Mexican Academy of Language, the Mexican Academy of the Language, the Mexican Academy of Letters, or glossed as the Mexican Academy of the Spanish Language; acronym AML) is the correspondent academy in Mexico of the Royal Spanish Academy.

It is founded in Mexico City on September 11, 1875, and, like the other academies, has the principal function of working to ensure the purity of the Spanish language.

Academy members will include many of the leading figures in Mexican letters, including philologists, grammarians, philosophers, novelists, poets, historians and humanists.

A constitution is ratified for Guatemala in 1879, the Republic's first as an independent nation, as the old Conservador regime had ruled by decree.

In 1880, Barrios is reelected President for a six-year term.

Barrios unsuccessfully attempts to get the United States of America to mediate the disputed boundary between Guatemala and Mexico.

Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras agree to re-form the Central American Union, but then Salvadoran President Rafael Zaldivar decides to withdraw, and sends envoys to Mexico to join in an alliance to overthrow Barrios.

Mexican President Porfirio Díaz fears Justo Rufino Barrios' liberal reforms and the potential of a strong Central America as a neighbor if Barrios' plans bear fruit.

Díaz sends Mexican troops to seize the disputed land of Soconusco.

Barrios, still harboring ambitions of reuniting Central America, takes Guatemala to war in an unsuccessful attempt to attain it, losing his life on the battlefield in 1885 against forces in El Salvador.

Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada is reelected President of Mexico in 1876, defeating Porfirio Díaz.

Díaz rebels against the government with the proclamation of the Plan de Tuxtepec, in which he opposes reelection, in 1876.

Díaz manages to overthrow Lerdo, who flees the country, and Díaz becomes the new president.

Thus begins a period of more than thirty years (1876–1911) during which Díaz will rule as Mexico's strong man.

The Mexican government passes a law in 1883 allowing real estate companies (controlled by General Porfirio Díaz's political associates) to survey public and "vacant" lands and to retain one third of the land they survey.