Melchor Ocampo (5 January 1814 – 3 June 1861) was a Mexican lawyer, scientist, and politician. A mestizo and a radical liberal, he was fiercely anticlerical, perhaps an atheist, and his early writings against the Catholic Church in Mexico gained him a reputation as a leading liberal thinker.[1] Ocampo has been considered the heir to José María Luis Mora, the premier liberal intellectual of the early republic.[2] He served in the administration of Benito Juárez and negotiated a controversial agreement with the United States, the McLane-Ocampo Treaty. The Mexican state where his hometown of Maravatío is located was later renamed Michoacán de Ocampo in his honor.
- ^ Enrique Krauze, Mexico: Biography of Power, New York: HarperCollins 1997, p. 153.
- ^ Jan Bazant, "From Independence to the Liberal Republic, 1821–1867" in Mexico Since Independence, Leslie Bethell, ed. New York: Cambridge University Press 1991, p. 41.