What diaz did, in essence, was to try to beat the caudillos at their own game. He either coopted local strong-men and made them into his personal clients, or he inserted his own men as military or civil governors, so that they could control local opposition. His state still had very little in the treasury at first, so he was forced to rely on foreign capital to prop up this expanding structure of central patronage. He channelled money into infrastructural development railways, irrigation schemes, etc. - which increased the wealth of the landlord class, and landlords were supported by the state as they sort to take over peasant land and create a cheap rural proletariat. All this, of course, meant promoting the export dependence of the Mexican economy, though it should be said that diaz was quite astute in trying to play one foreign interest off against another: US capital, for example, didn't succeed in achieving its objective of total control of the Mexican petroleum industry. I don't think it's correct to see the Porfirian state in terms of the notion of dependency' the reliance on the development of the export economy and penetration of foreign capital were all the result of the fact that decades of civil wars and foreign interventions had drained the country of investment capital, and the state machine was too weak to support any German-style process of rapid industrialization from above based on state finance. There wasn't really any other option. .
diaz did, however, succeed in strengthening centralized state power considerably. He built up the federal army, and enormously enhanced the state's ability to collect taxes. Local communities which hadn't seen any manifestation of state power for decades now had to contend with recruiting sergeants and federal tax collectors. There was, therefore, some significant development of bureaucracy and a new administrative apparatus under the regime, a siginificant degree of state modernization' and consolidation.
