History in brief

The earliest of Mexico's known civilisations was the Olmecs, who flourished in southern Mexico between 1200 and 400 BC; they established traditions that subsequent civilisations, especially the Maya (300-900 AD) and the Aztecs (1200-1521 AD), built upon. The Aztecs, who by the beginning of the 16th century had conquered much of Mexico, believed that the god Quetzlcoátl would return one day from the east to reclaim the land. When Hernán Cortés, a Spanish explorer, appeared on the coast in 1519, the Aztecs' ruler, Montezuma II, believed Quetzlcoátl might have returned. Cortés was able to take advantage of Moctezuma's belief, as well as European technology, and defeat the Aztecs in just two years. The natives were subsequently devastated by European diseases.

Mexico was still a Spanish colony in 1808, when Napoleon's deposition of the relatively liberal Spanish king Ferdinand VII sparked Mexico's war for independence, finally won in 1821. But the years after independence were full of unrest and disappointment, the biggest being the loss of huge territories to the United States after the two countries' 1847-48 war. Maximilian, the Archduke of Austria, took power with the help of Mexican conservatives and Napoleon III in 1863, but he was defeated by Benito Juárez, a former president, in 1867. Juárez died in 1872, and Porfirio Díaz, his former ally, dominated Mexican politics from 1876 to 1911, when he was overthrown by a group of regional political leaders and generals. The Mexican Revolution, pitting Díaz's opponents against each other, claimed more than 1m lives and left the country in chaos for much of the next twenty years.