The politician Matias Romero, the natural-geographical sciences and the environment of southeastern Mexico, 1870-1883

Abstract

The second half of the 19th century was the period in which the foundations were laid for Mexico’s economic policy based on agro-export from the exploitation of natural resources. For this, liberal politicians, like Matías Romero, used scientific knowledge for the exploitation of Mexican and foreign plants of great world demand harvested mainly in the southeast of the country, where forests, forests and mangroves were valued as unproductive lands. In this Mexican zone, a series of plant products demanded in the United States and Europe was intensively produced, which at the same time enriched the treasury degraded the regional biological diversity. The objective of the research is to understand the influence of scientific criteria in Romero’s political-economic projects by encouraging the cultivation of Mexican and acclimatized commercial plants from 1870 to 1883 and the beginning of the environmental transformation of the southeast of the Mexican Republic. This region had been valued by the political elite as unproductive in economic terms due to the difficult recovery of agricultural activities between the Independence revolution and the 1870s. Romero’s writings published between 1870 and 1883 are an example of the use of scientific criteria for economic development.