Vicente Guerrero

Vicente Ramón Guerrero Saldaña (Spanish: [biˈsente raˈmoŋ ɡeˈreɾo]; 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. 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.