Creel was born on 30 August 1850 in Ciudad Chihuahua, Chihuahua. He was the son of Paz Cuilty Bustamante, a Mexican woman, and Reuben W. Creel, an American of English descent[10] from Greensburg, Kentucky. Reuben was an interpreter for the American army during the Mexican American War, and remained in Mexico after the war ended. Reuben was also who served as Abraham Lincoln's US Consul in Chihuahua from 1863 to 1866.[11] Enrique Creel became son-in-law of Don Luis Terrazas by virtue of marriage to his daughter Angela (Reuben Creel and Luis Terrazas were married to sisters of the wealthy Cuilty family, whose ancestry was English and was related to Sir Thomas More).[citation needed]
After Porfirio Díaz became president of Mexico in 1876, he appointed Creel as a director of the National Board of Dynamite and Explosives. Mexico's demand for explosives was high because of its mining and railroad industries and the army's need for munitions. The board imposed an 80% import duty on dynamite, allowing its members to manufacture explosives without competition and reportedly enabling Creel to amass an even larger fortune in kickbacks.[citation needed]
Enrique Creel served as Mexico's Minister of Foreign Relations and as its Ambassador to the United States. The bilingual Creel served as interpreter when Presidents Porfirio Díaz and William Howard Taft met in 1909 on the international bridge between Ciudad Juárez and El Paso. He became vice-president of the Kansas City, Mexico and Orient Railway, where he was responsible for the construction of part of the railroad west of Chihuahua, now the Chihuahua Pacific Railroad (Ferrocarril Chihuahua al Pacífico) which runs through the town of Creel, Chihuahua. He was a key intermediary between the Mexican government and foreign companies, serving on their boards, as well as helping arrange "government subsidies and tax abatements and financial support for foreign firms."[13] His haciendas once totaled more than 1.7 million acres (6,900 km2).[citation needed] Creel was one of Díaz's advisers who had urged the president to be interviewed by James Creelman of Pearson's Magazine, in which Díaz declared he would not be a candidate for president in 1910.[14]
The Mexican Revolution forced him to abandon Mexico for the United States and he had major financial losses due to the Revolution, with revolutionaries expropriating his landed estates.[15] He returned after the end of the revolution, and served for a period in the administration of northern revolutionary general Alvaro Obregón (1920–24).[14] He died in Mexico City on August 18, 1931 .[3]
Publications
Los bancos de México (English: The Banks of Mexico)[5]
Importación y exportación (Imports and Exports)[5]
Agricultura y agrarismo (Agriculture and Agrarianism)[5]
^Mark Wasserman, Capitalists, Caciques, and Revolution: the Native Elite and Foreign Enterprise in Chihuahua, Mexico. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 1984.
^Mark Wasserman, "Enrique C. Creel: Business and Politics in Mexico, 1880-1930." Business History Review 59 (Winter 1985).
^Mark Wasserman, "Enrique Clay Creel" in Encyclopedia of Mexico vol. 1, p. 370. Chicago: Fitzroy and Dearborn 1997.
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