Vicente Guerrero

Biography

Vicente Guerrero was born in Tixtla, in the south of New Spain, to a family of modest means and worked as a muleteer before joining the insurgent forces of José María Morelos in late 1810. He was given the task of dealing with local Indigenous communities, using both Spanish and Indigenous languages to win recruits and support for the southern campaign, and rose through the insurgent ranks.

After Morelos was captured and executed in 1815, Guerrero became one of the few major rebel commanders still fighting. For five years he sustained a guerrilla war in the Tierra Caliente and turned down royalist offers of a pardon. In early 1821 he opened negotiations with the royalist officer Agustín de Iturbide; the resulting Plan of Iguala joined their forces into the Army of the Three Guarantees, which entered Mexico City in September 1821 and secured independence.

Guerrero accepted the First Mexican Empire at first but joined the republican movement against Iturbide and then sat on the Supreme Executive Power that governed until the 1824 constitution took effect. After losing the bitterly contested 1828 presidential vote in the state legislatures to Manuel Gómez Pedraza, he came to power through revolts by his supporters and took office as president on 1 April 1829. Using emergency powers granted during a Spanish attempt at reconquest, he decreed the abolition of slavery across most of Mexico in September 1829.

His vice president, Anastasio Bustamante, rose against him in December 1829, and Guerrero was deposed on 17 December. He withdrew to the south and fought on, but in January 1831 he was seized in Acapulco through the treachery of an Italian sea captain paid by the government. He was tried by a military court and shot at Cuilapam, Oaxaca, on 14 February 1831, and many Mexicans came to remember him as the martyr of Cuilapam.