José Miguel Carrera
José Miguel Carrera ran the first Chilean republic, lost it, and spent the rest of his short life fighting the men who won Chile's independence without him. He was born in Santiago in 1785 into one of the colony's leading families, was sent to Spain as a young officer, and fought the French in the Peninsular War, at Talavera among other fields, which gave him a soldier's contempt for the lawyers running the junta he found when he came home in 1811. He removed them by coup in September, purged the congress in November, and dissolved it in December, and for two years governed Chile with his brothers Juan José and Luis holding the army. The Patria Vieja was his: the first constitution, the first flag, the first newspaper - the Aurora de Chile, printed on a press he had shipped from the United States - and a school system on paper. It was also a war, because the viceroy in Lima sent an army south in 1813, and Carrera's conduct of it was poor enough that the junta replaced him with Bernardo O'Higgins, which began a feud that outlived both of them. In October 1814 O'Higgins was surrounded at Rancagua and Carrera, commanding the reserve, did not come; the patriot army was destroyed, and the survivors of both factions fled over the Andes to Mendoza. There José de San Martín, building the army that would recross the mountains in 1817, chose O'Higgins and expelled the Carreras. José Miguel went to the United States, raised ships and volunteers on credit, and returned to find San Martín and O'Higgins in possession of the cause. His two brothers were arrested in Mendoza and shot in April 1818, twelve days after Maipú, and he took to the Argentine civil wars with a montonera of gauchos and Ranquel allies, sacking towns in the name of a Chile that would not have him back. He was captured near Mendoza and shot in the same square as his brothers on 4 September 1821, aged thirty-five. Chile later gave all three a mausoleum in the cathedral, and the argument about whether he was the founder or the wrecker of the republic has never closed.
- Lived: 1785 CE – 1821 CE
- Nationality: Chilean
- Roles: military, head_of_state, revolutionary
