Vicente Guerrero

Vicente Guerrero kept the Mexican independence war alive when it had been reduced to a few hundred men in the mountains, became president, abolished slavery, and was betrayed and shot within two years. He was of mixed African, Indigenous and Spanish descent from what is now the state named after him, worked as a muleteer, and joined the rising under Morelos. After Morelos was executed in 1815 the insurgency collapsed everywhere except in the south, where Guerrero refused every amnesty and kept fighting for six years. Sent to destroy him in 1820, the royalist officer Agustin de Iturbide instead negotiated with him, and the two agreed the Plan of Iguala, which won independence in 1821 on terms Guerrero disliked - a monarchy - and he took them for the sake of the result. When his own father came to him with a royal pardon, he is said to have replied that his father was his father but the fatherland came first. He became president in 1829 through a coup after losing an election, abolished slavery by decree in September of that year, and repelled a Spanish attempt at reconquest. Conservatives deposed him in 1830. He was lured aboard a ship at Acapulco by a Genoese captain paid 50,000 pesos, handed over, tried by a military court and shot in 1831. Mexico abolished slavery a generation before the United States and thirty-two years before the Emancipation Proclamation, and the decree contributed directly to the Texan settlers' quarrel with Mexico City. He is one of very few heads of state of African descent anywhere in the nineteenth century. The state of Guerrero carries his name, and so does the phrase about the fatherland coming first.

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