Fire & Blood: A History of Mexico by T. R. Fehrenbach

Author:T. R. Fehrenbach
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2014-04-01T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter 24

TREASONS

México's independence, then, was the achievement of two opposed sectors, each working toward a different immediate objective. One side wanted to separate from a liberal Spain and continue the system without the motherland. The other side wanted separation from Spain too, but it wanted to wipe out the colony and establish a new order—especially a new political order.

- Victor Alba, The Mexicans

In 1816 Viceroy Calleja restored his authority everywhere. With Morelos dead, there was no leader and no cause to hold together the horde of dissident intellectuals in hiding, the juntas without legitimacy or armies, and the guerrilla chieftains who were more and more sheer bandits.

The deputies for whom Morelos had sacrificed his life quarreled at Tehuacán until the highminded Mier y Terán threw them out of town. Félix Fernández and the evil Rosains, the two principal guerrilleros of the Veracruz region, fought to control the insurgents operating there. Mier y Terán arrested Rosains, who escaped and turned coat, as an officer in the viceregal army. Failure, futility, and despair descended over the revolutionaries, and decent men began to desert the insurgency in disgust.

Once Calleja had full military control, he was recalled and replaced by Don Juan de Apodaca. The time for ruthlessness was over. Apodaca now worked against the remaining insurgency more effectively than Calleja could have done, by offering amnesty to rebels who surrendered, and by spectacularly rewarding men who changed sides. Insurgent officers, however tenuous their commissions, were offered commissions in the regular, royal army with only minor demotions and awarded the privilege of putting don before their names. No discrimination was made because of former class, caste, or creed. Thus people like Rosains and Vicente Gómez, the gelder of Spaniards, who had robbed, murdered, and tortured countless soldiers and civilians were given the king's commission. Most of the insurgent officers turned traitor with them.

Osorno surrendered near Puebla; Mier y Terán's officers forced him to give up Tehuacán, though the young idealist simply took the amnesty and returned to private life. Guerrilleros now operated only in parts of Guanajuato and Michoacán. Montes de Oca and Pedro Ascencio, holding out in the south, were clearly local brigands.

Thus when Xavier Mina, the Spanish liberal and revolutionary who conspired with Servando Teresa de Mier to separate King Fernando from his Mexican silver, landed in April 1817 it was a futile effort. Mina arrived on the Tamaulipas coast with three hundred North American adventurers and marched inland to Guanajuato. He recruited some rebels, but most Mexican liberals were prejudiced against him because he was Spanish and refused to shoot prisoners indiscriminately; his protests that some Spaniards loved liberty, also, were fruitless. Government forces hunted Mina down in October and executed him. In death, he was accepted by Mexicans, and afterward buried with the other insurgent heroes under the Column of Independence at the capital.

In the same months, the last guerrilla chief in Michoacán was murdered by his followers. Then, in December, 1817, Nicolás Bravo and Ignacio López Rayón accepted amnesty. The insurgency had ended.

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