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The attack against Porfirio Díaz of 1897 refers to the attack on 16 September 1897 on the Mexican president in the Central Alameda of Mexico City, in Mexico. The perpetrator was identified with the name of Arnulfo Arroyo, who was imprisoned and murdered the same day by a crowd, being considered the first public lynching in Mexico.
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The event inspired the novel Expendiente del atentado of the writer Álvaro Uribe in 2008, which was adapted to film in 2010 with the name El atentado by the director Jorge Fons.
Chronology of the attack
While he went through the Central Alameda during the celebrations of the Independence of Mexico of 16 September 1897, the president Porfirio Díaz suffered an attack by part of "a known drunken named Arnulfo Arroyo". In accordance with the relation of the Mexican chronicler Jesús Rábago in Historia del gran crimen (1897), Díaz went accompanied by the generals Francisco Z. Mena (minister of communications) and Felipe Berriozábal (minister of war), when he was attacked by the back. Arroyo was detained immediately.
Uribe, author of Expediente del atentado, signalled in a conference in 2014 that Arroyo was "an anarchist clerk of Law who that day was found alcoholised", indicating that he could not consummate the attack because he was drunk. Basing in the newspapers of the diplomatic Federico Gamboa, Uribe related that Arroyo exceeded a fence of cadets of the Military School, approaching to Díaz to attack him, although he did not carry any type of white weapon or weapon of fire.
After the failed attack, Díaz ordered that Arroyo was moved to the commissariat, where it was corroborated that he had not arms. As a chronicle published in the New York Times on 18 September 1897, "from the moment in which Arroyo was detained [...] The people clamored his death. Lieutenant LaCroix, the one who was the attendant of the arrested person, was harassed by not hit him a shot".
Reactions
On 18 December, the newspaper The Impartial published the note on the lynching of Arroyo, version that was questioned by the population. Likewise, the police conducted a raid in which 21 suspects were arrested and accused them to having participated in the homicide of Arroyo. These factors outraged to the citizens, mobilizing about 15 thousand people to manifest in front of the offices of The Impartial, who burned copies of the diary and accused to the newspaper to blame people of a murder committed by the police.
It was such the public scandal that the Congress called to Manuel González Cosío, then minister of the Interior, so that it surrendered accounts. On September 21, the congressman Eduardo Velázquez and other 12 members of the police were carried to the prison of Belén, where confessed to have murdered to Arroyo and set up everything so that it seemed a public lynching. After the indictment, Velázquez committed suicide and the rest of the implicated were sentenced to death. However, his sentences were commutated, happening some years in prison; in some cases, went back to occupy public charges after serving the sentence.