On March 21, 1872, Benito Juarez suffered the first of three heart attacks that five months later brought down the curtain on the amazing life of the “Lincoln of Mexico.”

As a Zapotec Indian born in the first decade of the nineteenth century, Juarez’s birthright was poverty, oppression, ignorance and disease. Orphaned at the age of three, he was taken in by an uncle and taught to be a shepherd.

But the boy wanted to do more with his life than herd sheep and goats. He desired an e...