Independent Mexico by Will Fowler

Author:Will Fowler [Fowler, Will]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS025000 History / Latin America / Mexico
ISBN: 9780803284678
Publisher: Nebraska
Published: 2015-10-20T00:00:00+00:00

5

From Forceful Negotiation to Civil War

The Pronunciamientos, Coups d’État, and Revolutions of the Mid-Nineteenth Century, 1843–1858

Two decades after Mexico achieved its independence from Spain there was a growing and palpable sense of disillusion. In the speech José María Tornel gave on 27 September 1840 in Mexico City’s Alameda Park to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the beginning of Mexico’s struggle for independence, on what turned out to be a blustery day marked by heavy rain and thunder, the former insurgent and once idealistic federalist liberal from Orizaba could not help himself from turning what he admitted should have been a piece of jubilant oratory into a particularly dark lament.1 “Just think about what the country’s fortunes have been since it started to exist on the 16th of September of 1810,” he told his stunned—and drenched—audience, “and you will find you do not have the stomach to face, or the strength to understand, the sum of all of our misfortunes.”2 As he noted in no uncertain terms: “The Mexican nation, mutilated and ill, is still alive; but its life is torture because even the hope of happiness is nowhere to be seen. I here remember thirty years of constant suffering, thirty years in which we have sailed through a sea of tears and blood, without ever having reached the port. Our pilots have died steering our broken vessel through wind, reefs, and storms.”3 Tragically, he felt that pronunciamientos or “long civil wars” had “exhausted . . . the enthusiasm that accompanies the regeneration of the people.” 4

Tornel was not alone in feeling dispirited with Mexico’s political failures, forever hindered by a “despotism that debilitates everything, from an anarchy that consumes everything.”5 Eight years earlier, on 3 July 1832, General Manuel de Mier y Terán, an enlightened and principled high-ranking officer who had accompanied Santa Anna at the battle of Tampico, and who many had predicted would be a great president, had found himself profoundly depressed by “the tumultuous agitation and the terrible bitterness that oppress a society torn asunder by bloody partisanship.” 6 He had committed suicide by falling onto his sword on the very spot where liberator Agustín de Iturbide had been executed in 1824.7 Although Mier’s decision to kill himself was undoubtedly a private and personal matter, his suicide, with all its symbolic connotations, taking his life in the exact place where Independent Mexico’s first ruler had been shot by his fellow countrymen, embodied in a sense, albeit prematurely, the despair of an entire generation.

For some it was the pronunciamiento, as a phenomenon, that was clearly to be blamed for Mexico’s troubled early years of nationhood. As early as 1835, and in the wake of the massive 1834 Cuernavaca–Toluca cycle of pro-clerical pronunciamientos, one group of liberal-sympathizing citizens from Mexico City paradoxically circulated a pronunciamiento to pronounce against the pronunciamiento practice, stressing the importance of the law and arguing: “All the pronunciamientos that have been launched since 1821 and with the exception of that which brought about our independence,

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