Octavio Paz Solórzano

Octavio Ireneo Paz Solórzano (20 November 1883 – 10 March 1935) was a Mexican politician and journalist. He allied himself with Emiliano Zapata during the 1910–1917 Revolution and later served in Congress for the (PNA). He died in a railway accident in 1935 when his son, the poet and future Nobel Prize–winner Octavio Paz Lozano, was 20 years old.

Life Octavio Paz Solórzano was born in Mexico City on 20 November 1883, the youngest child of Ireneo Paz Flores, a prominent writer and newspaperman, and Clotilde Solórzano. He studied at the National School of Jurisprudence alongside Antonio Caso and José Vasconcelos and graduated in 1911 with a thesis on the freedom of the press. That same year, he married Josefina Lozano. Shortly after, he was recruited by Jesús Flores Magón, then serving in President Francisco I. Madero's cabinet, for a position with the Secretariat of Justice in Ensenada, Baja California, and later in Campeche. Upon returning to the capital, he worked as an agent of the public prosecution service. His only child, Octavio, was born in March 1914. Some months later, Paz Solórzano took up arms and joined the revolutionary forces of Emiliano Zapata. He saw action against Constitutionalist forces to the south of Mexico City in late 1914 and early 1915.

In April 1916, Zapata commissioned him to travel to the United States to disseminate his ideas about agrarian reform; after a difficult journey during which he was pursued by both federal and revolutionary forces, he crossed the border at Laredo and arrived in San Antonio, Texas, on 7 October. There, he publicised Zapata's Plan de Ayala and worked to give a positive impression of the Zapatistas while criticising the Constitutionalist forces of Venustiano Carranza. (During his time in the U.S., he also lobbied for Ricardo Flores Magón's release from prison.)

Back in Mexico, Paz was a founding member of (PNA), a party based on Zapata's agrarian ideals and dedicated to the pursuit of agrarian reform, led by his friend and fellow Zapatista Antonio Díaz Soto y Gama. In the 1920 general election, Paz was elected to the Chamber of Deputies for the PNA, representing the Federal District's 10th district as part of a seven-member PNA congressional delegation.

Following the assassination of President-elect Álvaro Obregón in 1928, Paz largely withdrew from public life and dedicated himself to writing. He published a series of articles on the Zapatistas and the Revolution in the weekly magazine supplement of El Universal that were later reprinted in José T. Meléndez's Historia de la revolución mexicana.

Work Paz Solórzano was the editor and manager of his father's newspaper, La Patria, in the early 20th century and he continued to write articles for the press in the years that followed. His published works included: Álbum a Juárez (1905, in collaboration with his brother ). A celebration of the life of Benito Juárez, reworked and expanded in 1931. Novísimo manual del elector (1911). A pamphlet with suggestions for the conduct of the 1911 general election. Emiliano Zapata (1986). A posthumous collection of Paz's articles that appeared in El Universals Magazine para Todos in 1929 and in El Porvenir in 1933 and 1934. Originally part of the three-volume Historia de la revolución mexicana (ed. José T. Meléndez, 1936), a separate edition, with a prologue by Octavio Paz, was published in 1986.