Bernardo de Monteagudo
Bernardo José Monteagudo (Tucumán, August 20, 1789 - Lima, January 28, 1825) was an Argentine lawyer, politician, journalist, soldier, and revolutionary who participated in the independence processes in the Río de la Plata, Chile and Peru.
He was an early promoter of Spanish-American independence, and at the age of nineteen, one of the leaders of the Chuquisaca Revolution of May 25, 1809, whose proclamation he wrote.
Linked to the "Argentine Jacobins" of the May Revolution, especially Juan José Castelli from Buenos Aires, practiced, like them, violent revolutionary policies, adhering to the most radical sector of the independence movement. In 1811, he was the author of the first draft constitution of the American Southern Cone. In 1812 he reorganized the Patriotic Society of the Morenista party, with whose members he joined the Lautaro Lodge, which included Bernardo O'Higgins and José de San Martín, among others.
He influenced the Second Triumvirate, the Assembly of the Year XIII, of which he was a member, and the government of the Supreme Director of the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata, Carlos María de Alvear.
He accompanied General José de San Martín as auditor of the Army of the Andes and would be —according to his own statements, which on the other hand are rejected by Chilean historiography— the drafter of the act of independence of Chile that he proclaimed Bernardo O'Higgins in 1818. In Peru, he was Minister of War and Navy and, later, also Minister of Government and Foreign Relations of San Martín, during the first independent government of that country.
After the retirement of San Martín, he collaborated with the liberator Simón Bolívar. He developed an Americanist vision of the Spanish-American revolution, which led him to propose and design the organization of a great nation with the territories that had belonged to the Spanish crown. His ideas were confused with the identical dream of Bolívar, who convened the Amphictyonic Congress of Panama to establish a confederation that would incorporate all the states of America.
He founded and directed pro-independence newspapers in three countries, such as the Gaceta de Buenos Aires, Mártir o Libre and El Grito del Sud, in Argentina; The Censor of the Revolution in Chile, and The Peacemaker in Peru.
Monteagudo was assassinated in Lima at the age of thirty-five. His figure has been and continues to be the subject of controversy.
In Tucumán and Córdoba
Bernardo Monteagudo was born in Tucumán, his father being the Spanish Miguel Monteagudo and his mother the Tucuman Catalina Cáceres Bramajo. Other versions affirm that his mother was a slave to a canon, and that she later married a soldier of Spanish origin who opened a grocery store with which he paid for his stepson's law degree. As an adult, his political enemies sought to discriminate against him using the criteria established in the Spanish colonies by the Statutes of clean blood, maintaining that his mother descended from indigenous or African slaves and applying the qualifiers "zambo" or "mulatto".
He was the only survivor of eleven children and spent his childhood in relative economic poverty: when he died, after spending his fortune helping his son, his father was the owner of a grocery store and a slave. He studied law In cordoba.
In Upper Peru
Recommended by a priest who was a friend of his father, he entered the University of Chuquisaca, where he graduated in law in 1808, and began to work as an advocate for the poor.
That same year, when Napoleon Bonaparte's French invasion of Spain became known, Monteagudo wrote a work entitled Dialogue between Atahualpa and Fernando VII. In it, Monteagudo recreated an imaginary conversation between Atahualpa, the last monarch of the Inca Empire assassinated by the Spanish invaders, and Fernando VII, displaced from the Spanish Crown by the French invaders. In that work, Monteagudo, barely eighteen years old, formulated the famous Chuquisaca syllogism:
Should the fate of Spain be followed or resisted in America? The Indies are a personal domain of the king of Spain; the king is prevented from reigning; then the Indies must govern themselves.Bernardo de Monteagudo, Dialogue between Atahualpa and Fernando VII1808.
Monteagudo's writing circulated clandestinely and was one of those that inspired the independence uprisings in Chuquisaca, La Paz and Buenos Aires.
He joined the revolutionary army as an artillery lieutenant, led by Juan Antonio Álvarez de Arenales. When the royalist forces regained control of Upper Peru, Monteagudo was imprisoned along with the other independence leaders, accused of the "abominable crime of disloyalty to the king's cause". At the end of 1809, after escaping from the Chuquisaca prison, He went to Potosí and joined the Army of the North of the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata as auditor, which, under the command of Juan José Castelli, had taken that city after the triumph in the battle of Suipacha.
Monteagudo strengthened ties with Castelli, who was a member of the radical wing of the May Revolution in Buenos Aires, led by Mariano Moreno and opposed to the conservative current led by the president of the Primera Junta de Buenos Aires, Cornelio Saavedra. Monteagudo unreservedly supported the extreme measures adopted by Castelli in Upper Peru, which included the abolition of taxes on the indigenous people, the elimination of the Inquisition, the suppression of titles of nobility and the instruments of torture. He also supported the decision of Castelli to execute the royalist soldiers who led the repression of the independence movements, Francisco de Paula Sanz, Vicente Nieto and José de Córdoba, attributing responsibility for the Chuquisaca and La Paz massacres. Monteagudo also supported the policy ordered by Mariano Moreno to monitor, restrict and displace Spaniards suspected of supporting the royalists; that policy was manifested at that time, in Castelli's decision to move 56 Spaniards suspected of not supporting independence from Potosí to Salta. Finally, Monteagudo shared a hostile attitude towards the Catholic Church, due to its anti-independence stance, which Castelli made manifest in Upper Peru, and which was an important factor of disgust on the part of a population so attached to Catholicism.
After the battle of Huaqui, which ended with the victory of the royalist troops under the command of General José Manuel de Goyeneche, Monteagudo headed for Buenos Aires.
In Buenos Aires
Monteagudo arrived in Buenos Aires in 1811, after the death of Mariano Moreno and the Revolution of April 5 and 6, 1811, which displaced the radical wing of the May Revolution from the government, consolidating the power of the conservative wing led by Saavedra. He assumed the defense of several of the defendants, including Castelli, in the trial to find those responsible for Huaqui's defeat. He was editor of the newspaper Gaceta de Buenos Aires , alternating with Vicente Pazos Silva, who soon became his enemy and accused him of "sacrilegious desecration". He influenced the drafting of the Provisional Statute by which the government was to be governed until the meeting of the Constituent General Assembly, the first constitutional norm issued in the area of the American Southern Cone.
He defended the morenista policy of maintaining a permanent action of surveillance and suspicion on peninsular Spaniards. In 1812, during the government of the First Triumvirate, he supported the denunciation and investigation of Minister Bernardino Rivadavia into a conspiracy against the government headed by the Spanish merchant and former cabildante Martín de Álzaga. Monteagudo was appointed by Rivadavia as prosecutor of the summary process followed against the defendants, carried out in two days and without the defendants being allowed to defend themselves, as was the rule on both sides during the independence war. The trial ended with the execution and subsequent hanging of the bodies of the 41 condemned in the Plaza de Mayo (at that time Plaza de la Victoria), including Álzaga, causing a great commotion due to the execution of a rich and influential man like Álzaga.. The deaths disorganized the Espanolista group that had been active since before the revolution and opposed the Americanista group that took power in 1810.
In 1812 he founded the newspaper Mártir o Libre, where he stressed the need for an immediate proclamation of independence. He would try to revive the Patriotic Society, and with those who had been its members he joined the Lautaro Lodge, founded by José de San Martín and Carlos María de Alvear. He supported the October Revolution of 1812, which deposed the First Triumvirate and put in its place the lodge-dominated Second Triumvirate.
He was a member of the Assembly of the Year XIII as a representative of Mendoza, and was one of the promoters of constituent measures, such as the adoption of national symbols, the abolition of the mita and indigenous servitude, the freedom of wombs and the suppression titles of nobility and instruments of torture.
In 1814 he supported the Supreme Director of the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata Carlos María de Alvear, one of the leaders of the Lautaro Lodge. Upon his fall, in 1815, he was imprisoned in a floating jail on the Río de la Plata, from which he escaped. He spent two years in Europe, where he changed his political orientation and became a supporter of the constitutional monarchy. Protected by Antonio González Balcarce, he was allowed to return, although not to Buenos Aires, but to Mendoza.
In Chile, Mendoza and San Luis
In 1817, a few days after the battle of Chacabuco, he crossed the Andes Mountains and placed himself under the orders of José de San Martín as auditor of the Army of the Andes. In January 1818 he wrote the Proclamation of the Independence of Chile (the authorship is disputed with Miguel Zañartu), and became a confidant and adviser to the director Bernardo O'Higgins, also a member of the Lautaro Lodge.
In the disbandment generated by the Cancha Rayada Surprise, he returned to Mendoza in order to reorganize the forces, which by the way Chilean historiography interprets as an act of cowardice typical of his status as a man of letters and not of arms; once there he found out that the Army of the Andes had been reorganized, and that San Martín and O'Higgins were still alive. After the patriot victory in the Battle of Maipú, he was involved in the summary execution of the brothers Juan José and Luis Carrera, and probably also in the murder of Manuel Rodríguez Erdoíza, after being arrested by O'Higgins. Los Carreras and Rodríguez were part of a pro-independence current that was directly opposed to San Martín and O'Higgins.
Monteagudo's performance in validating the death sentence against the Carreras brothers, pitted him against San Martín and the Lautaro Lodge. As a consequence of this, San Martín ordered his confinement in freedom in San Luis. During his stay in San Luis, Monteagudo pressured Governor Vicente Dupuy to worsen the prison conditions to which a group of royalist prisoners were subjected. There he also fell in love with Margarita Pringles, sister of Lieutenant Juan Pascual Pringles, commander of the patriot troops stationed there. However, she, the young woman, would reject Monteagudo's flattery, since the young woman herself was in love with one of the royalist prisoners, Brigadier José Ordóñez.
In these conditions a confrontation took place between the royalist prisoners and the patriotic troops that guarded them. The event began when a delegation of detained Spanish officials asked to see Governor Vicente Dupuy. During the meeting, Captain Gregorio Carretero attacked the governor with a dagger, in order to kill him, while other Spaniards murdered his assistant. Immediately the prisoners sought to take the Government House "injuring and killing all those who oppose their will." The patriotic troops under the command of Pringles, seconded by Facundo Quiroga from La Rioja attacked the government house with in order to recover it, "and after a fierce and bloody battle (they put) an end to the mutiny". At the time of the confrontation, Governor Dupuy ordered 31 Spanish prisoners to be immediately beheaded.
(The riot) was carefully planned and one of its objectives was to kill the hated Monteagudo and then to provide arms, horses and vituallas, to cross the mountain range and join the realistic army again.Pacho O'Donell.
The following day, Monteagudo was appointed prosecutor in the trial that followed the surviving royalists, obtaining the execution of eight of them.
After his confinement ended, at the beginning of 1820 he returned to Santiago de Chile where he founded the newspaper El Censor de la Revolución and collaborated in preparing the expedition to liberate Peru.
In Peru
In 1821 Monteagudo embarked with the liberation expedition under the command of San Martín as auditor of the Argentine army in Peru, replacing the recently deceased Antonio Álvarez Jonte. His first success was to convince the governor of Trujillo to go over to the patriots: he was the Marquis of Torre Tagle, the future first Peruvian president (with the title of Supreme Delegate) of Peru.
On July 28, 1821, San Martín proclaimed the independence of Peru from Lima, to assume as Supreme Protector on August 3. Monteagudo became his right hand in the government, taking over as Minister of War and Navy and later also taking charge of the Ministry of Government and Foreign Relations. While San Martín concentrated on military aspects, giving priority to the war, Monteagudo was effectively in charge of the government of Peru.
His main government measures were the freedom of wombs, the abolition of the mita, the expulsion of the Archbishop of Lima, the creation of a normal school for teacher training and the National Library of Peru.
In Peru, Monteagudo supported the opinion of San Martín in favor of installing a constitutional monarchy in that country, at the same time that he strongly influenced them and their propaganda, especially through the Patriotic Society of Lima, which he founded in 1822. Both shared the idea that only a democratic constitutional monarchy could avoid anarchy and civil wars. On the other hand, Monteagudo thought that the priority task was to declare and consolidate independence, and that political liberties should be gradually established. This strategic line of Monteagudo was expressed in San Martín's decision not to immediately sanction a constitution, postponing the task until independence was assured, instead issuing the Regulation of February 12, 1821 and then the Provisional Statute of October 8, 1821.
By order of San Martín, Monteagudo created the Order of the Sun, in order to distinguish the patriots who had contributed to achieve the independence of Peru, this distinction and the advantages that it implied being hereditary. The Order of the Sun was a very controversial institution, of an aristocratic type. Monteagudo himself recognized in his Memorias that he had the goal of “restricting democratic ideas.” Monteagudo's monarchical ideas were very unpopular in Peru and constituted the axis of the opposition that finally caused the fall of him when leaving San Martín. The Order of the Sun was annulled in 1825 but was re-established in 1921 under the name Orden El Sol del Perú, which persists until today.
Between December 1821 and February 1822, Monteagudo issued a series of resolutions aimed at banishing, confiscating part of their property, and prohibiting the exercise of commerce by peninsular Spaniards who had not been baptized. of how many supporters of the king left Peru because of the serious episodes of its independence, as well as the political change itself that they did not want to recognize; some calculations suggest between ten and twelve thousand. Ricardo Palma, in his historical study on Monteagudo, estimates the number of Spaniards expelled from Peru by his decision at 4,000.
When the liberating army reached the coast of Peru, there were more than 10 000 Spaniards in Lima distributed in all the ranks of the [...] Shortly before my separation, there were no more than 600 left in the capital. This is making a revolution, because believing that a new order of things can be established with the same elements that oppose it is a chimeraMonteagudo, 1822, p. 351
On January 19, 1822, San Martín left Lima and met with Simón Bolívar in the Interview of Guayaquil, leaving José Bernardo de Tagle in charge of power, with the title of Supreme Delegate. The absence of San Martín weakened Monteagudo. On July 25, 1822, a group of influential residents of Lima delivered Tagle a manifesto demanding Monteagudo's resignation. Tagle accepted the demand and decreed the dismissal of Monteagudo. Immediately afterward, Congress ordered his banishment to Panama, under penalty of death if he returned.
Panama, Ecuador and Guatemala
On November 28, 1821, the residents of Panama proclaimed in an open town hall the independence of the Isthmus of Panama from the Spanish crown and their decision to form part of Greater Colombia. A few months after that event, Monteagudo arrived. Tagle had entrusted his fate to the patriotic governor José María Carreño, who in turn placed him in the custody of Lieutenant Colonel Francisco Burdett O'Connor, then Chief of Staff of Panama, with whom he established a relationship of friendship. From Panama Monteagudo began writing to the liberator Simón Bolívar, who eventually invited him to join him in Ecuador.
The meeting between Bolívar and Monteagudo finally took place in Ibarra, shortly after the fierce Battle of Ibarra on July 10, 1823, which liberated the north of present-day Ecuador. Bolívar was pleasantly impressed with Monteagudo, especially his ability to work, and he commissioned him to travel to Mexico in order to obtain funds.
The trip was finally suspended, since in Bogotá another representative had already been legally and officially chosen for said task, in addition to the fact that Bolívar did not have the powers to do so, since the executive power had been entrusted to Francisco de Paula Santander and the Liberator only possessed military faculties. In a letter dated September 6, 1823, Santander, the so-called Architect of the Republic , made him see his overreach:
Allow you to declare that it has not seemed good to the mission of Monteagudo, because we give the idea that in Colombia there are two governments and these things repair them much in Europe, where they do not attend but the regularity of our political march. The Mexican government will be pregnant with two ministers accredited by two different authorities, who do not recognize the constitution.
He has made an impression that Sucre is called a commissioner of the government of Colombia, when he is not, nor is he calling the government constitution but the one who dispatches the executive power, which can well be the president of the Senate. I say, for my part, that how much you do is good; but my opinion is not that of the Republic, nor can I with one hand undo what with the other is to build. If Monteagudo was an extraordinary minister, he could be exposed to not being admitted, because ministers are appointed not by the President of the Republic but by the executive branch. I hope you do not recognize in this frank exhibition but my desires that things go with the regularity you proclaim and we all want to follow. My deference for what you propose and do is noticeable and you have received uncountable evidence.
Monteagudo then decided to travel to the United Provinces of Central America, which at that time included all the current Central American countries (Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Costa Rica) and Chiapas, with the exception of Panama.
In Guatemala City, Monteagudo met José Cecilio del Valle, president of the United Provinces of Central America, with whom he shared an Americanist vision of the independence process, and who had launched the idea of organizing a Congress continental that dealt with the common problems of the nations independent from Spain and established the bases of a new American international law.
Return to Peru and essay on a Hispano-American Federation
Notwithstanding the validity of the legislative resolution that ordered his proscription, Monteagudo returned to Peru entering through Trujillo and accompanied Bolívar with the rank of colonel in the final campaign of the Peruvian war of independence, entering Lima, after of the victory in the battle of Ayacucho on December 9, 1824.
By then Monteagudo had developed an Americanist vision of independence. He had been part of the independence revolutions of the Río de la Plata, Chile and Peru, as well as having visited the newly independent nations of Panama and Central America. This led him to the conviction that all of Latin America should be a single nation.
His vision excited Simón Bolívar to such an extent that Hispanic American unity has been identified as the Bolivarian dream. Bolívar prompted Monteagudo to design the bases to materialize that vision and it was, precisely in this period, that Monteagudo wrote -although he could not finish it due to his death- what is considered his most outstanding work, the Essay on the The need for a general federation among the Spanish-American states and plan of its organization.
A few months after Monteagudo's death, Bolívar convened the Congress of Panama in 1826 and approved the creation of a single great Spanish-American nation, with the exception of Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and Paraguay. However, the treaties were never ratified by the Spanish-American countries, except for Gran Colombia, and the Spanish-American federation was never established.
The death of Monteagudo seriously affected the realization of the project.
A great and terrible man conceived the colossal attempt of the alliance between the newly born republics, and was the only one able to direct it to his arduous end. Monteagudo was that man. He died, the idea of the American Confederation that had sprouted into its powerful brain became devoid of itself.
It has been attributed to the Liberator of Colombia, Simon Bolivar, the glory of having conceived the important design of bringing together a congress of the American Nations, similar to all the Confederations, so famous in the history of the ancient Greeks. But impartiality demands that it be referred to that the first to recommend the truly great project, was Colonel Monteagudo, a very strong temper of soul and companion of Campaigns of General San Martín, in his memorables from Chile and Peru.
Death of Monteagudo
The Murder
Bernardo de Monteagudo was assassinated in Lima on January 28, 1825, at the age of thirty-five. The crime occurred between 7:30 p.m. and 8:00 p.m., in the Plazoleta de la Micheo, located at the north end of the then Belén street, tenth block of the current Jirón de la Unión, one of the main streets of the Lima at that time, in front of the south wing of the already demolished hospital and convent of San Juan de Dios. The small square and the sidewalk in which he expired no longer exist, but the exact point of his death is located in front of the southwest corner of Plaza San Martín, at the point where the Quilca passageway, Colmena avenue, and Jirón de la Union, in front of the Giacoletti building and the Teatro Colón. Monteagudo came from his house, located on Santo Domingo street (currently the second block of Jirón Conde de Superunda) and was heading to Juana Salguero's house.
The body remained at the scene for about an hour, without anyone daring to approach it, until the priests of the convent lifted it up and placed it in one of the cells. In that same place, on land that currently occupies Plaza San Martín, he was finally buried.
The body was found face down, with its hands clinging to a huge dagger that was stuck in the chest. The death certificate states:
That the wound had been with a cutting instrument and that pierced his heart by entering the weapon on the left tile, leaving it an inch and a half opening and five or six fingers deep.Ramon Castro, a surgeon who checked the body that night.
That same night, Bolívar personally went to the convent of San Juan de Dios, as soon as he found out about the assassination, where he said:
Monteagudo! You'll be avenged.Simon Bolivar.
Montegudo's life had been in danger from the moment he returned to Lima. Minister Sánchez Carrión, one of the main suspects of having been the mastermind of the crime, had come to make a public appeal for any inhabitant to kill Monteagudo if he returned to Peru, guaranteeing him impunity. In a letter to Santander, Bolívar told him about Monteagudo:
It is hated in Peru for having pretended to be a Constitutional Monarchy, for its accession to San Martín, for its hasty reforms and for its high-pitched tone when it was commanded; this circumstance makes it very scary in the eyes of the current corifeos of Peru, those who have begged me by God to take him away from their beaches, because they have a panic. I will frankly add that Monteagudo with me can be an infinitely useful man.Letter from Bolivar to Santander of August 4, 1823.
Monteagudo was aware of the risk he was running when he returned to Peru with Bolívar:
He was sentenced to death and he knew it. But he was determined to face his tragic destiny without subverting his essential condition as a revolutionist to outrage. And the American revolution was played, at that time, in the proximity of Simon Bolivar.Pacho O'Donell.
Investigation and conviction
The assassination shocked Peruvian society and Bolívar took action on the matter that same night, forbidding the residents of the place to leave their homes, closing public offices and ordering all the necessary resources to be made available to the investigation.
The main clue was the knife, which had just been sharpened, so the highest level of the government ordered that all the barbers in Lima be summoned to see if any of them recognized the murder weapon. The barbers appeared on January 29 and one of them admitted having sharpened the knife on a black man who looked like a porter or water carrier, for which the government ordered that in the following 24 hours they should appear to be recognized "all house servants and people of color". The following day, Sunday, January 30, a neighborhood watchman, Casimiro Granados, declared that in the previous days, the "dark-haired Candelario Espinosa" I had been three times in Alfonso Dulce's grocery store located on Gremios street (fourth block from Jirón Callao). The night watchman reported that Espinosa had gone to the grocery store, at around 7 pm on the same day of the crime, accompanied by a "zambo cook from Francisco Moreira" where he asked for half a boot of brandy on credit, and since the storekeeper refused him, he threatened him, showing him a knife and a gun, and shouted that "he would have money for bullfighting." That same Sunday morning, Espinosa had returned to the grocery store to ask to have his pistol while he went to present himself to the investigators, as the government had ordered. Finally, when they showed him the murder weapon, the night watchman recognized that it was the same knife that Espinosa had.
On Sunday, January 30, Candelario Espinosa and Ramón Moreira were arrested. Both confessed from the beginning their guilt in the crime and were finally sentenced to death, in the case of Espinosa, and to 10 years in prison, in the case of Moreira, ultimately sentenced by the Supreme Court made up of Fernando López Aldana, José de Armas and Manuel Villanueva.
The ruling also declared Francisco Moreira y Matute -owner of the slave Ramón Moreira-, Francisco Colmenares and José Pérez, who had been denounced as masterminds by Ramón Moreira, innocent.
However, the sentences would not be carried out, due to a private decision by Bolívar after meeting in private with the murderer. On March 4, 1826, in his only act in which he exercised his functions as dictator, Bolívar commuted Espinosa's death sentence to 10 years in prison, and Moreira's to 6 years, both being sent to prison. Chagres prison.
The material authors
There is no doubt that the perpetrators of the crime were Candelario Espinosa and Ramón Moreira. Both were recognized by several witnesses, confessed their responsibility and gave details of the facts. All historians agree on this point.
Candelario Espinosa was 19 years old, he had been a soldier in the royalist army and after the patriot triumph he had dedicated himself to the trade of a sawyer. Ramón Moreira was a slave and cook for Francisco Moreira y Matute, one of the founders of the Patriotic Society of Lima, together with Monteagudo.
The ruling also sentenced José Mercedes Mendoza, considering that his sentence had been served with the imprisonment he suffered until sentencing.
The Masterminds
The question of the intellectual authors of the Monteagudo crime has remained surrounded by mystery and contradictions, while it has been the subject of historiographical debates and literary accounts.
Initially, Candelario Espinosa assured, even under torture, that no one had commissioned him to kill Monteagudo and that his only motive was robbery. However, this statement is directly contradicted by the fact that Monteagudo was not robbed, despite take with them a gold and diamond brooch, a gold watch, and money..
Francisco Moreira y Matute, was the owner of Espinosa's accomplice in the crime, and had been a member of the Patriotic League of Lima, led by Monteagudo. José Francisco Colmenares was one of the members of the secret republican lodge, led by Sánchez Carrión, which had caused the overthrow of Monteagudo in 1822 and called on the people to assassinate him if he returned to Peru. José Pérez was a Guayaquileño, a doorman for the Cabildo and a baker, who had a dagger identical to the one used to kill Monteagudo.
The trial evidence, however, proved that Moreira, Colmenares and Pérez had not been involved in the murder and they were finally acquitted. Formally, then, the sentence does not condemn or identify any intellectual author of the murder.
Bolívar's meeting with the murderer
From the very beginning of the investigation, Candelario Espinosa was tempted to confess to intellectual authorship with the promise that his death sentence would be commuted. However, Espinosa first maintained that his intention had only been robbery, then that the crime had been commissioned by Moreira and Colmenares, to finally back down and insist on the motive for the robbery. These statements occurred in a context of threats and torture.
In this situation, the prisoner offered to tell the truth about the masterminds, but only to Simón Bolívar, personally and alone. That meeting took place on April 23, 1825 and what happened in it was never officially reported. Subsequently, Bolívar ordered the prisoners Espinosa and Moreira to be transferred to Colombia, while the death sentence handed down on the former was never carried out.
The Sánchez Carrión hypothesis
The hypothesis that Minister José Sánchez Carrión was the intellectual author of the murder of Monteagudo has been consolidated as one of the most probable, as a result of the declaration of General Tomás Mosquera, president of Colombia, who at that time He served as Bolivar's chief of staff.
Many years after the events, Mosquera recounted what had happened in the meeting between Bolívar and Espinosa and the fate of the events that followed after it. Mosquera recounted that Espinosa confessed that he assassinated Monteagudo on behalf of the minister José Sánchez Carrión, who paid him 50 doubloons of four pesos in gold for the task. Sánchez Carrión was the leader of the secret republican lodge that had confronted the monarchist intentions of Monteagudo, organizing his overthrow and expulsion from Peru in 1822 and later published a call to kill him if he returned to Peru.
Mosquera also explained that, in response, Bolívar ordered Sánchez Carrión to be poisoned, who died of a strange condition a few days later, on June 2, 1825. In turn, Sánchez Carrión's murderer was also assassinated by order of Bolívar, to avoid any leak. Finally, Bolívar suspended Espinosa's execution and ordered the transfer of the murderers from Monteagudo to Colombia.
Other possible masterminds
Vidaurre, in a communication to Bolívar, which appears in Supplement to American Letters, wrote:
Sir, a powerful hand moved that killer's knife, I would have discovered it if it worked for me alone. Black will lead the secret to eternity.Letter from Manuel Lorenzo de Vidaurre to Simon Bolivar.
According to San Martín, in a letter to Mariano Alejo Álvarez, written in 1833 (and published in the Boletín del Museo Bolivariano of Lima in 1930), he made an effort to ask as many people as he could about of this murder and received contradictory versions: the defendants were Sánchez Carrión, the Spaniards, a colonel jealous of his wife and even Bolívar, without missing those who said that the fact was covered by an impenetrable veil.
Other possible managers of the crime could have been some supporters of the Spanish, emboldened by the news of the imminent arrival of a royalist squad in Callao to help José Ramón Rodil y Campillo and obsessed by their hatred of the minister of San Martín who did so much damage. In that sense he declared, for a moment, the same murderer. Simón Bolívar wrote to Santander a few days later, on February 9, accepting, in a certain way, the same version:
This event must have a very deep or very high origin. The killers are imprisoned and they confess two people who belong to the Gothic faction of this country. I believe that this may originate in the intriguings of the Holy Covenant that surround us; for the goal should not only be to kill Monteagudo but me and other leaders.Letter from Bolivar to Santander on February 9, 1825.
It could also be revenge for private or domestic reasons. Or a case of murder to rob as Heres, O'Leary and Colonel Belford Wilson, aide-de-camp to the Liberator, believed.
His Remains
Monteagudo was buried in the Convent of San Juan de Dios on Sunday, January 30, 1825, leaving no personal fortune. Between 1848 and 1851 the convent was demolished and the railway station of the same name was built in its place, the first in Peru. Currently that land is occupied by Plaza San Martín. His remains were transferred to the Presbítero Matías Maestro Cemetery.
In 1878 it was exhumed and arranged for it to be deposited in a mausoleum in the same cemetery. In 1917 the remains of Monteagudo were sent to Argentina, arranging their location in the Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires, in section 7, resting in the mausoleum of Lieutenant General Pablo Riccheri, in the central part of the Cemetery, where in the back of the mausoleum, on the right of the access door there is a small plaque that reads "Here lie the remains of Dr. Bernardo de Monteagudo"; The event opened a dispute between Argentina, Bolivia and Peru over Monteagudo's nationality and the right of those countries to preserve his relics.
On the occasion of the repatriation of Monteagudo's remains to Argentina, the inauguration of a monument in his tribute was arranged, which was sculpted by the German artist Gustavo Eberlein and located in the Pringles Square in the Parque Patricios neighborhood, in the intersection of Avenida Caseros and Monteagudo street, the place where the street that remembers him in the City of Buenos Aires was born.
On June 24, 2016, the urn containing his remains was exhumed from the mausoleum of General Pablo Riccheri, in Recoleta, to be transferred to his hometown of San Miguel de Tucumán, where it was deposited in a mausoleum in the central street of the Western Cemetery during the official acts for his "repatriation" on Wednesday June 29.
The two portraits of Monteagudo
Monteagudo's face has been spread based on a false image. The mistake was caused by the Argentine historian Mariano Pelliza, Monteagudo's first biographer. Pelliza published in 1880 his book Monteagudo, his life and his writings. Volume II (1816 - 1825), in two volumes. Pelliza then came across the fact that there was no known portrait of Monteagudo, and this prompted him to build one. Pelliza had inquired about the appearance of the hero, and had established that he was similar to the Chilean Bernardo Vera y Pintado. On this basis, he asked the cartoonist Henri Stein to make an alleged portrait of Monteagudo, based on the face of Vera y Pintado, with some modifications. That portrait was included in the first biography of Monteagudo and since then it has been disseminated as the real image.
Decades later, another Argentine biographer of Monteagudo, Manuel Lizondo Borda from Tucumán, discovered a portrait made by the painter V. S. Noroña in 1876, in which he appears with mulatto features. Noroña had based his portrait on a previous one, which Monteagudo had had done when he was in Panama, and whose current destination is unknown. When publishing his biography of Monteagudo in 1943, Lizondo included in his book a black and white photograph of Noroña's painting. After 1966 the trace of the destination of the original painting was lost.
Political crimes attributed to Monteagudo
Monteagudo has been described as a monster of cruelty. It is stated that he would have exiled almost ten thousand civilians, in an attempt to give greater political stability to the nascent independence project. Lafond or Stevenson describe him as a bloodthirsty subject.
It is related to the massacre of Spanish prisoners in the San Luis prison, or the assassination of the Chilean independentist Manuel Rodríguez and the death of the brothers Juan José and Luis Carrera Verdugo.
Historiographic controversies
The figure of Monteagudo has been and continues to be the subject of political and historiographical controversies. In some cases his passion, his commitment to the cause of independence and his determination to make drastic decisions in revolutionary moments are praised. In others he is accused of cowardice for having fled to Mendoza before the first setback of José de San Martín in the battle of Cancha Rayada.
Fonts
- Argentinas: