Santiago Vidaurri

Santiago Vidaurri
4th First Minister of Mexico
In office March 19, 1867 – June 19, 1867
Monarch	Maximilian I
Preceded by	Teodosio Lares
Succeeded by	Post abolished
Governor of Nuevo León and Coahuila
In office 17 August 1857 – 25 September 1859
Preceded by	Juan Nepomuceno de la Garza y Evia (Nuevo León) Santiago Rodríguez del Bosque (Coahuila)
Succeeded by	José Silvestre Aramberri
Governor of Nuevo León
In office 23 May 1855 – 12 December 1856
Preceded by	Jerónimo Cardona
Succeeded by	Jerónimo Cardona
Personal details
Born	July 24, 1809 Villa Punta de Lampazos, New Kingdom of León, Viceroyalty of New Spain (now Nuevo León, Mexico)
Died	July 8, 1867(1867-07-08) (aged 57) Mexico City, Mexico
Political party	Liberal

José Santiago Vidaurri Valdez (July 24, 1809 – July 8, 1867) was a controversial and powerful governor of the northern Mexican states of Nuevo León and Coahuila between 1855 and 1864. He was an advocate of federalism.^[1]

In 1855, he supported the liberal Revolution of Ayutla, which overthrew the dictatorship of Antonio López de Santa Anna, the military strongman who dominated Mexican politics in the 1830s until his overthrow in 1855. Vidaurri stood by the liberal president Benito Juárez during the subsequent War of the Reform, a bloody civil war following Mexican conservatives' repudiation of the liberal government and the Constitution of 1857. During the war, Vidaurri commanded the liberal armies of the north. During the American Civil War (1861–65), Southern slave states had seceded from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America. Vidaurri sought advantageous trade relationships with the CSA, which bordered northern Mexico.

Confederate forces had early successes in 1861–62 against the northern Union troops, so that it was entirely possible that its existence as a sovereign nation would continue. It was a pragmatic move for Vidaurri and northern Mexico to establish such a connection. Although Mexican conservatives had been defeated militarily in the Reform War, they still sought a way to power so that when Juárez cancelled payment on foreign bonds in 1861 there was an opening for Mexican monarchists.

A coalition of European powers sought intervention for debt collection, with France using the opportunity for regime change in Mexico, with the support of Mexican conservatives. The French invaded, displacing Juárez from the capital Mexico City. Although Mexican conservatives had invited Hapsburg Archduke Maximilian to be emperor of Mexico, put into power by the French, Maximilian was in fact a political liberal.

Vidaurri broke with Juárez, who never went into foreign exile, but whose government did not effectively control territory. Vidaurri was one of several moderate liberals who joined the cabinet of Emperor Maximilian of Mexico in the Second Mexican Empire and served in early 1867 as the emperor's final First Minister. When the Empire fell in 1867, Vidaurri was captured and summarily executed by the restored Republican government.^[2] His place in Mexican history remains clouded by his collaboration with the Empire, but in Nuevo León he remains an important historical figure.