Melchor Ocampo

Melchor Ocampo was Mexican lawyer, scientist, and politician. A mestizo by birth and a radical liberal, he was fiercely anticlerical, perhaps an atheist, and his early writings against Roman Catholic Church in Mexico gained him a reputation as an articulate liberal ideologue. Ocampo has been considered the heir to José María Luis Mora, the premier liberal intellectual of the early republic. 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 now stands was much later renamed Michoacán de Ocampo in his honor.