Vicente Ramón Guerrero Saldaña (; baptized 10 August 1782 – 14 February 1831) was a Mexican military officer, guerrilla commander, and statesman who played a central role in the Mexican War of Independence and served as the nation's second president in 1829. Later official memory has also styled him a consummator of independence and a founder of the First Mexican Republic.
Born in Tixtla to a family of modest means, he worked as an arriero before joining the insurgent army of José María Morelos in late 1810. Assigned to deal with local Indigenous communities, he used Spanish and Indigenous languages to recruit and hold support in Morelos's southern campaign. After Morelos's capture and execution in December 1815, Guerrero became one of the last major insurgent commanders still in the field and, from 1816 to 1821, kept the war alive by guerrilla warfare in the Tierra Caliente, refusing viceregal offers of pardon. In early 1821, with the restored Constitution of Cádiz unsettling New Spain and with royalist columns unable to finish him, Guerrero and Agustín de Iturbide opened talks. Guerrero’s terms were total independence and citizenship without caste distinction; Iturbide issued those terms, with a Catholic establishment and a constitutional monarchy, in the Plan of Iguala of 24 February 1821. Their combined troops formed the Ejército Trigarante and entered Mexico City on 27 September 1821, consummating independence.
Guerrero accepted the First Mexican Empire, but when Iturbide dissolved Congress, he joined the republican rising that forced the latter's abdication and later served on the provisional Supreme Executive Power. In the 1828 presidential election the state legislatures chose the moderate Manuel Gómez Pedraza and revolts in favor of Guerrero soon followed including by Antonio López de Santa Anna in Veracruz. As unrest and sacking continued in the capital Gómez Pedraza resigned and fled the country. Congress annulled the vote and named Guerrero president, with Anastasio Bustamante as vice president; the term began on 1 April 1829.
Facing a Spanish reconquest landing, Congress granted him facultades extraordinarias. He used them, among other acts, to abolish slavery on 15 September 1829.Green, Stanley C. The Mexican Republic: The First Decade, 1823–1832. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press 1987. p. 119. On 4 December 1829 Bustamante's reserve army pronounced the Plan of Jalapa. Guerrero was deposed on 17 December, retreated to his Independence War stronghold in the south, and waged the Guerra del Sur with allies including Juan Álvarez. Betrayed and seized at Acapulco in January 1831, he was condemned by a summary court-martial and shot at Cuilápam, Oaxaca, on 14 February 1831. Liberals denounced the execution as judicial murder; the main southern rebellion collapsed with him. Early life Vicente Guerrero was born in Tixtla, a town approximately 100 kilometers inland from the port of Acapulco, in the Sierra Madre del Sur. He was the son of María Guadalupe Rodríguez Saldaña, and Juan Pedro Guerrero. His father's family included landowners, affluent farmers, traders with broad business connections in Southern Mexico, members of the Spanish militia, gunsmiths, and cannon manufacturers. During his youth, Guerrero worked for his father's prosperous mule-driven freight business, which provided him the opportunity to travel across Mexico. His travels exposed him to emerging ideas of independence and dissent against Spanish rule.
Guerrero's ethnic origins have been a subject of debate, with some historians suggesting he was of mixed African heritage. However, no portraits of him were made during his lifetime and those made posthumously may not be reliable. Fellow insurgent José María Morelos described Guerrero as a "young man with bronzed or tanned skin (broncineo in Spanish), tall and strong, with an aquiline nose, bright, light-colored eyes, and prominent sideburns". He was often supported by the indigenous people throughout the Revolution.Green, Stanley C. The Mexican Republic: The First Decade, 1823–1832. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press 1987. p. 119.
Vicente's father, Juan Pedro Guerrero, was a supporter of the Spanish rule, while his uncle, Diego Guerrero, held a prominent position in the Spanish militia. As an adult, Vicente was opposed to the Spanish colonial government. In December 1810, Guerrero enlisted in José María Morelos's insurgent army in southern Mexico, beginning his career as a revolutionary leader. He was married to María Guadalupe Hernández, and they had a daughter, María Dolores Guerrero Hernández. María Dolores married Mariano Riva Palacio, who was the defense lawyer for Maximilian I of Mexico in Querétaro, and was the mother of the late nineteenth-century intellectual Vicente Riva Palacio.
Insurgent
In 1810, Guerrero joined in the early revolt against Spain, first fighting in the forces of secular priest José María Morelos. When the Mexican War of Independence began, Guerrero was working as a muleteer and in an armory, in Tixtla, when the revolution started. He joined the rebellion in November 1810 and enlisted in a division that independence leader Morelos had organized to fight in southern Mexico.
Guerrero gained expertise in military strategy in the Battle of Zitlala. At the Battle of Tixtla, on 26 May 1811, Morelos asked Guerrero for his advice on the military strategy to be used on the town of Tixtla because Guerrero was from Tixtla. After the battle, Guerrero was told by Morelos to speak to the indigenous people of Tixtla since Guerrero was able to speak Nahuatl, the native language in Tixtla, because he had grown up in Tixtla. Morelos told Guerrero to inform the natives of their freedom from the Spanish. Historian William Sprague argued Guerrero was largely supported by the Native Americans throughout the Revolution due to his ability to speak and interact with the natives. By November 1811, Vicente Guerrero, alongside José María Morelos, took control of the highlands of the Mesa Del Sur, further building Guerrero's experience as an insurgent.
Guerrero distinguished himself in the Battle of Izúcar, in February 1812, and had achieved the rank of lieutenant colonel when Oaxaca was claimed by rebels in November 1812.Richmond, "Vicente Guerrero", p. 616. In a speech given to the indigenous people in Tlapa in 1815, Guerrero argued for citizenship to be extended to indigenous people to establish a larger free society for those originally not recognized by the Spanish. Initial victories by Morelos's forces faltered, and Morelos himself was captured and executed in December 1815.
Historian Mario S. Guerrero argued Guerrero's guerrilla tactics and successes were just as significant to winning the War of Independence as notable battles. After the death of Morelos, in March 1816, Vicente Guerrero pledged his allegiance to the itinerant insurgent government left by the Congress of Anáhuac, the Junta Subalterna Gubernativa Provisional, often called the Junta de Jaujilla after the lake fortress where it sat in 1816–18. With the Spanish in pursuit, Guerrero used guerilla tactics he learned in his early military experience with Morelos. Guerrero fought in skirmishes with the Spanish in Piaxtla and Xonacatlán. Near Xonacatlán, Guerrero ambushed royalist Captain Jose Vicente Robles's force of 150 troops, which led to a victory and a smaller force in pursuit of Guerrero.
In March 1816, According to the Historian William Sprague, Vicente Guerrero, after the death of Morelos and Juan Nepomuceno Rosains had quit the revolution taking a Spanish pardon, Guerrero had no commander; therefore, Guadalupe Victoria and Isidoro Montes de Oca gave him the position of "Commander in Chief" of the rebel troops. In 1816, the royal government under Viceroy Apodaca sought to end the insurgency, offering amnesty. Guerrero's father carried an appeal for his son to surrender, but Guerrero refused. He remained the only major rebel leader still at large and kept the rebellion going through an extensive campaign of guerrilla warfare. He won victories at Ajuchitán, Santa Fe, Tetela del Río, Huetamo, Tlalchapa, and Cuautlotitlán, regions of southern Mexico that were very familiar to him. In late 1820, as the remnant of the Junta de Jaujilla broke up, it deposited its remaining authority in Guerrero and left him commander-in-chief of the insurgent forces still in arms.
On 16 November 1820, after being appointed commander of the royal forces in southern Mexico, Agustín de Iturbide was sent against Guerrero's forces. Guerrero was victorious against Iturbide, who realized that there was a military stalemate. Guerrero appealed to Iturbide to abandon his royalist loyalty and to join the fight for independence.Richmond, "Vicente Guerrero", pp. 616–617. Events in Spain had changed in 1820, with Spanish liberals ousting Ferdinand VII and imposing the liberal constitution of 1812 that the king had repudiated. Conservatives in Mexico, including the Catholic hierarchy, began to conclude that continued allegiance to Spain would undermine their position and opted for independence to maintain their control. Guerrero's appeal to join the forces for independence was successful. Guerrero and Iturbide allied under the Plan de Iguala and their forces merged as the Army of the Three Guarantees.
The Plan of Iguala proclaimed independence, called for a constitutional monarchy and the continued place of the Roman Catholic Church, and abolished the formal casta system of racial classification. While Iturbide, in writing the Plan of Iguala, did not include mulattos and blacks in receiving rights, Guerrero advocated for all people in Mexico to receive equal protections under the law without regards to race and refused to agree to any alternative. Clause 12 was incorporated into the plan: "All inhabitants... without distinction of their European, African or Indian origins are citizens... with full freedom to pursue their livelihoods according to their merits and virtues."Richmond, "Vicente Guerrero", p. 617. The Army of the Three Guarantees marched triumphantly into Mexico City on 27 September 1821.
Iturbide was proclaimed Emperor of Mexico by Congress. In January 1823, Guerrero, along with Nicolás Bravo, rebelled against Iturbide, returning to southern Mexico to raise rebellion, according to some assessments because their careers had been blocked by the emperor. Their stated objectives were to restore the Constituent Congress. Guerrero and Bravo were defeated by Iturbide's forces at Almolongo, now in the state of Guerrero, less than a month later.Anna, Timothy E. Forging Mexico, 1821–1835. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 1998. p. 105. When Iturbide's imperial government collapsed in 1823, Guerrero was named one of Constituent Congress's ruling triumvirate.Anna, Forging Mexico, pp. 111–112.
1828 presidential election
Guerrero was a liberal by conviction, and active in the York Rite Masons, established in Mexico after independence by Joel Roberts Poinsett, the U.S. diplomatic representative to the newly independent Mexico. The Scottish Rite Masons had been established before independence. Following independence the Yorkinos appealed to a broad range of Mexico's populace, as opposed to the Scottish Rite Masons, who were a bulwark of conservatism, and in the absence of established political parties, rival groups of Masons functioned as political organizations. Guerrero had a large following among urban Yorkinos, who were mobilized during the 1828 election campaign and afterwards, in the ouster of the president-elect, Manuel Gómez Pedraza.Green, Stanley C. The Mexican Republic: The First Decade, 1823–1832. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press 1987, pp. 87–111, 155–157.