Juan Martin de Pueyrredon
Juan Martín Mariano de Pueyrredón (Buenos Aires, Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, December 18, 1777-i>ibidem, March 13, 1850) was a military and Argentine politician, who served as Supreme Director of the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata.
Family and youth
Juan Martín de Pueyrredón was the sixth of the eleven offspring of the French merchant Juan Martín de Pueyrredon y de la Boucherie or Labrucherie (1738-1791) —born in Issor, today the Atlantic Pyrenees, France— and the Buenos Aires lady Rita Damasia Dogan y Martínez de Soria (1747-1808) (daughter of an Irish immigrant according to some, or of a Galician soldier, according to others, and a mother of Creole origins).
He was unable to finish his studies[citation required] and in 1795 he was sent to Cádiz, Spain, to assume the responsibilities of the family business after the death of his father. He spent the next few years traveling through France and Spain.
Perdriel's hero
Juan Martín de Pueyrredón returned to his hometown in 1805, having already amassed a considerable fortune as a merchant. When the first of the English invasions of the Río de la Plata occurred in 1806, led by General William Carr Beresford and Commodore Sir Home Riggs Popham, he went to the countryside and assembled a volunteer army that he trained to recapture the city, along with other officials like Martín Rodríguez and Cornelio Zelaya. When the English found out about his activities, they attacked him in the Perdriel Farm (currently the General San Martín Party), defeating him on the morning of August 1, 1806. However, the meager defeat made it clear that invaders with greater forces could be defeated. He joined the army that Santiago de Liniers brought from Montevideo and participated with him in the so-called Reconquest of Buenos Aires, on August 12.
He was the first commander of the Húsares de Buenos Aires regiment, founded on August 14 of the same year and divided into three squadrons: the first under the direct command of Pueyrredón and the other two under Lucas Vivas and Pedro Ramón Núñez. Five days later, Martín Rodríguez was appointed second chief. In the month of November, the Buenos Aires council appointed her as its representative before the Madrid government to ask for help, since the English fleet still controlled the river. When he left, he left command of the Husares to Martín Rodríguez, in addition to creating a fourth squad under the command of Diego Herrera.
Their efforts were unsuccessful. After the French invasion of Spain, he returned to Montevideo in January 1809, but was arrested by order of Governor Francisco Javier de Elío, an enemy of Viceroy Santiago de Liniers. He managed to escape and arrived in Buenos Aires, where he tried to convince Liniers not to hand over command to the new viceroy, Baltasar Hidalgo de Cisneros; he just got a new arrest. He fled a second time, and traveled to Rio de Janeiro, acting as a messenger for the Carlotista party, with which he also achieved no results.
Governors and First Campaign to Upper Peru
In June 1810, Juan Martín de Pueyrredón arrived in Buenos Aires —where the May Revolution had already broken out— and made himself available to the new government. Shortly after, on August 3 of the same year, he was appointed Governor of Córdoba. After the firing squad of Liniers, he brought peace to the city through an amnesty. He supported the Army of the North and organized the open council that elected dean Gregorio Funes, as deputy to the Junta Grande. In January 1811 he took office as mayor governor of Chuquisaca, where he was when the revolutionaries were defeated in the battle from Huaqui.
He withdrew to Potosí during the retreat of the Army of the North, where he initially placed himself under the command of Juan José Castelli; a tumult in that city led him to actually take command of a good part of the army.
A few days later, while he withdrew to the south, Pueyrredón took all the coined and uncoined silver he found to the city of Salta, saving the cash funds available to the government.
In September he was officially named commander of the demoralized Army of the North, when it had already reached San Salvador de Jujuy.
His efforts to reorganize the Army were not particularly successful; Before the advance of the Royal Army of Peru, he sent the best part of his troops under the command of Eustoquio Díaz Vélez, who were defeated in the battle of Nazareno. So Pueyrredón withdrew the entire army to the south, settling in the Yatasto post, where in March 1812 he was replaced by Manuel Belgrano in command, and he returned to Buenos Aires to take care of political affairs.
First Triumvirate
The failed General Assembly held in April 1812 had appointed him a member of the First Triumvirate to replace Juan José Paso, while he was on his way back to the Capital. He took office after the dissolution of the assembly, at the end of April or beginning of May. The government was led by Secretary of War Bernardino Rivadavia, and his position towards the war of independence was extremely withdrawn: he preferred diplomatic solutions to war and rejected any outward gesture of independence.
Pueyrredón entrusted the recently arrived José de San Martín with the formation of the Grenadier Regiment on Horseback and stopped the massacre of Spaniards that followed the denunciation of a conspiracy against Martín de Álzaga, which was never proven true.
When the news of Belgrano's victory in the Battle of Tucumán arrived, the Triumvirate was accused of weakness since this had been achieved precisely by disobeying government orders. A coup d'état known as the Revolution of October 8, 1812 and led by San Martín, other military leaders and members of the Lautaro Lodge overthrew the government and forced the cabildo to name a Second Triumvirate.
Rivadavia and Pueyrredón were exiled. The second ended up confined in San Luis, where he dedicated himself to commerce and agriculture.
The Directory
In September 1814, Pueyrredón received a visit from San Martín, who authorized him to visit him in Mendoza, which in fact meant the end of his confinement. In these two meetings, San Martín convinced Pueyrredón to organize a naval campaign to Peru from Chile; Since the latter country had fallen into royalist hands, it was first necessary to recover it for the independentistas.
He returned to Buenos Aires at the beginning of 1815, and in May he married Calixta Telechea, daughter of the Spanish Francisco de Telechea, one of those shot by the Triumvirate in 1812. She owned a farm in San Isidro, which would be his home for the rest of his life, and which is currently the Juan Martín de Pueyrredón Museum.
In January of the following year, he was elected deputy for San Luis to the Congress of Tucumán, due to pressure from Governor Vicente Dupuy on the San Luis council. A few days after his incorporation into Congress, he was appointed Supreme Director of the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata, which is why the deputy for San Luis was not present at the Argentine Declaration of Independence.
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Before leaving for Buenos Aires, Juan Martín de Pueyrredón first met with General José Rondeau in Trancas, and then with General Martín Miguel de Güemes at the Cobos fort.
On the way to the capital, he also met with José de San Martín, with whom he spoke without witnesses, although presumably they discussed the details of the campaign plan for Chile. From then on, a large part of his efforts They were focused on supporting the Continental Liberation Plan devised by San Martín in order to declare the independence of the territory of South America that was part of the Spanish Empire.
He arrived in Buenos Aires on July 29, 1816 and immediately assumed the Board of Directors, naming Vicente López y Planes in Government and Foreign Relations, Domingo Trillo in Finance and Juan Florencio Terrada in War and Navy as ministers.
From the beginning he reorganized the Lautaro Lodge, created among others by José de San Martín and who had governed between 1812 and 1815 through Carlos María de Alvear. The management of the lodge was in the hands of Gregorio García de Tagle —who would later be Minister of Foreign Affairs— and General Tomás Guido, a close collaborator of San Martín. In Buenos Aires the lodge received the name of "Grand Lodge" or "Ministerial Lodge" which had a heterodox composition in terms of its members, since it was made up of personalities of very diverse origins, but orthodox in terms of its objectives, and its main purposes were the declaration of South American independence and the equipment of the army that should defeat the royalists.
He sent the Army of the Andes, commanded by San Martín, all the weapons and troops he could, as well as some prominent officers.
On the other hand, he carried out privateering campaigns around the world through the captains Hipólito Bouchard and Guillermo Brown.
His role in the recovery of Chile from the rule of the Spanish crown was very prominent, as was his collaboration in the organization of the army that made Peru independent, the epicenter of royalist power in South America.
San Martín permanently requested the Supreme Director, human and material resources for the Crossing of the Andes. In a letter dated November 1816, Pueyrredón wrote to him:
There's the 200 sables you asked for. There's 200 tents going, and there's no more. The world goes, the devil goes, the flesh goes. And I don't know how I'd go with the traps that I'm staying to pay for it all, well, I'm going to go, too, so you'll give me some of the puddle I command you, and fuck! Don't ask me again, if you don't want to receive the news that I've been hanged in a Fortress strap.
His internal government did not have the same brilliance as his policy in favor of South American independence. Among his numerous failed initiatives were the advance of the borders against the Indian to the south, the foundation of a national bank called " National Fund Box" and several repeated attempts to crown a European prince as king of the Río de la Plata. He also created the Colegio de la Unión del Sud on the basis of the old Colegio de San Carlos.
He persecuted the opposition, banishing several of its leaders, among them Manuel Dorrego, Vicente Pazos Kanki, Feliciano Chiclana, Manuel Moreno, Manuel Pagola and several others.
He attacked the supporters of federalism in the provinces in every way he could and left no attempt at autonomy: he appointed all their governors. Such was the original idea of the Lautaro Lodge: the creation of a constitutional, liberal and unitary state.
Since he could not defeat the federal leader of the Banda Oriental, José Artigas, in a campaign, he invited the Portuguese government to invade that province through ambassador Manuel José García. He was willing to lose a province in exchange for constituting the national union and being able to govern the others centrally. To ensure the unity of the state powers, he ordered the transfer of the Congress from Tucumán to Buenos Aires and expel from its bosom those deputies who They opposed that move.
After the Portuguese invasion, he replaced the federal governor of Córdoba with an addict, and sent a series of invasions to the federal provinces along the coast: two campaigns against Santa Fe, three against Entre Ríos, and one against the Banda Oriental. He explained to Artigas that he could not afford to expel the Portuguese because all the resources went to the Army of the Andes; but if he could send so many soldiers against the opposing provinces, he could well have tried something against the Lusitano-Brazilian advance. And even so, he failed to break the federal resistance on the coast.
In 1819, before the preparations for a Spanish military expedition of more than 20,000 men, with which King Ferdinand VII planned to recover Spanish sovereignty over the Río de la Plata, Pueyrredón commissioned two agents, Andrés Arguibel and Tomás Antonio de Lezica, so that they would promote an insurrection within the Spanish army and make all the necessary payments, which would be covered by the Argentine treasury. The operation was a success and facilitated Riego's pronouncement, which prevented the Spanish fleet from leaving.
After swearing in the Constitution of 1819, in the middle of that year, he resigned from the position of Supreme Director.
Last years
Juan Martín de Pueyrredón was replaced as Supreme Director of the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata by General José Rondeau, who continued his policy.
At the beginning of 1820, after the victory of the coastal caudillos in the Battle of Cepeda, the Directory, the Congress and the National Constitution fell. The national authorities were dissolved under the Anarchy of the Year XX. The provinces declared themselves autonomous from the central power. The governor of the new province of Buenos Aires, Manuel de Sarratea, had him arrested at the request of the federal leaders, to prosecute him for treason for his invasions of the provinces and for supporting the Portuguese invasion. But, hours later, Sarratea himself helped him escape, ending up in exile in Montevideo, under Portuguese protection.
He returned to Buenos Aires in March 1821 and two years later his third wife —Calixta Tellechea y Caviedes, daughter of one of those executed in 1812— gave him their only son, the painter and civil engineer Prilidiano Pueyrredón, born in Buenos Aires on January 24, 1823. He also had two daughters, Virginia, the daughter of his second marriage, and possibly his daughter, María de los Ángeles Pueyrredón, an extramarital daughter born in 1798 and raised by one of his sisters.
For the next several years he played only a minor role in politics. President Rivadavia accused him of falsifying his declaration of assets, but shortly after he appointed him a member of the Military Commission in charge of army reform.
In 1829 he tried unsuccessfully to mediate between Juan Lavalle and Juan Manuel de Rosas. When Rosas's second government began, in 1835, he went into exile in Bordeaux, Rio de Janeiro and Paris.
He returned to San Isidro in October 1849, and died there in March of the following year. His mortal remains rest in the Recoleta Cemetery in the City of Buenos Aires.