MEXICAN LAWYER/SCIENTIST/DIPLOMAT MELCHOR OCAMPO DIED
Born January 5, 1814, in Maravatío, Michoacán, Ocampo was Mestizo. When Manuel Gómez Pedraza became president of Mexico in 1844, he appointed Ocampo Governor of Michoacán. Ocampo reorganized the state treasury, built roads, and improved the state’s national guard. Fiercely anticlerical, he advocated free, public, secular education. Forced into exile by President Antonio López de Santa Anna, he returned in 1855 with President Juan Álvarez and attended the Constitutional Convention that drafted the liberal Constitution of 1857, providing for the separation of Church and State. During Benito Juárez’s administration, Ocampo negotiated the McLane-Ocampo Treaty in 1859 whereby the United States would pay Mexico for perpetual transit rights, for its armies and goods, through Mexico. Both Juarez and the U.S. Senate rejected it. In 1861, Ocampo was abducted by conservative guerrillas and executed on June 3, 1861, in Tepeji del Río, in the state of Hidalgo.
Source: “Melchor Ocampo, People Pill. Retrieved May 7, 2020, https://peoplepill.com/people/melchor-ocampo/
Photo: Author unknown, between 1850-1861. Public Domain in U.S.: Pre 1/1/1925. Public Domain elsewhere where copyright term is author’s life plus 70 years or less.