Lucas Alaman

Lucas Ignacio José Joaquín Pedro de Alcántara Juan Bautista Francisco de Paula Alamán y Escalada (Guanajuato, Guanajuato, October 18, 1792-Mexico City, June 2, 1853), known as < b>Lucas Alamán, was a Mexican businessman, naturalist, historian, writer and politician who served as a member of the triumvirate of Mexico together with Pedro Vélez and Luis Quintanar from December 23 to 31, 1829.

He also served as Secretary of State and the Office of Foreign and Interior Relations in the governments of the Supreme Executive Branch, Guadalupe Victoria and Anastasio Bustamante.

Early life and education

Alamán was part of a prestigious and wealthy Spanish family. His parents were Juan Vicente Alamán and María Ignacia de Escalada y Madroñero, a descendant of the Marquises of San Clemente.

He studied at the Royal Mining Seminary of New Spain, where he excelled in disciplines such as mineralogy, physics, chemistry, and botany. He traveled frequently through various and different countries participating as a scientist and diplomat, becoming one of the men with the best education in the viceroyalty. He left Veracruz in January 1814, arriving in Cádiz, in the Kingdom of Spain, to later deal with people of political weight of his time as the Dominican Servando Teresa de Mier. The relationships he had established abroad allowed him to be a cultured man who was critical of his New Spanish reality. In the same way, relationships opened spaces for him in public positions of great importance.

Lucas Alamán's youth also has a historical event that marked him to define his ideals in his future life. In 1810 the insurgent troops of Miguel Hidalgo managed to reach Guanajuato to attack the Alhóndiga de Granaditas where wealthy families were sheltering. The riots were near his house, which was not attacked on Miguel Hidalgo's orders, witnessing the looting and high level of violence by some members of the insurgent army.

Life as a politician

In 1821, before the consummation of the independence of Mexico, Alamán was deputy before the courts of the Liberal Triennium (the Spanish national parliament) with the representation of the province of Nueva Galicia (currently: Jalisco, San Luis Potosí, Nayarit, Sonora, Sinaloa, among other states) in New Spain. To carry out this position, he had to travel to the Iberian Peninsula. The time he was there, he wrote one of the most important texts of his career: Essay on the decline of mining in New Spain . This caused some decrees to be issued that would benefit the country in the mining aspect by the Provisional Government Board.

He also proposed that the Spanish crown should establish itself as an empire in order to grow, allowing princes of Spanish lineage to take the throne in Mexico, Peru and New Granada. This was one of the reasons why a place at court was proposed to him but he did not accept it. He traveled to Paris, then to London, and there he founded the United Mining Company, which began mining in Durango, on Cerro del Mercado.

After the independence of New Spain, Alamán returned to Mexico and became one of the most influential politicians in the nascent country. He was a co-founder and permanent member of the Mexican Conservative Party, which supported the centralist organization of Mexico. It was said that he had been one of the organizers of the assassination of the independence hero Vicente Guerrero, but he was brought to trial and it was found that he was unfairly accused, so he was released.

In the junta that governed Mexico after the fall of Emperor Agustín de Iturbide, from 1823 to 1825 Alamán held the post of Minister of the Interior and Foreign Relations. He was a member of the junta that governed briefly in 1829, after the Plan of Jalapa was executed, which had as its objective the installation of Anastasio Bustamante as president. After what was seen as the Texas dispossession disaster of 1836, Alamán largely withdrew from politics, although he continued to promote the interests of the country as director of the Junta de Fomento de la Industria (Dirección de la Promoción de la Industria). Industry) from 1839 until his death.

In the 1840s he devoted himself primarily to writing the history of Mexico from the perspective of a conservative. His main works were Dissertations on the History of the Mexican Republic in three volumes, written and published from 1844 to 1849, and his five volumes of History of Mexico, from the first movements that prepared the independence in the year 1808 to the present time, understanding by present time the stage in which the author lived, who published said volumes in Mexico from 1849 to 1852. This story was one of the great intellectual productions of the Party Conservative of Mexico from the XIX century which, together with the works of Carlos Pereyra, already in the XX, is one of the few stories written by Mexican authors who view the Spanish presence in the country favorably.

Other jobs and death

Although Alamán was a staunch conservative in the political sphere, in the industrial and economic spheres, on the other hand, he behaved like a true progressive, developing extensive activity in such spheres. After a long time he presented the following:

One of its representative contributions was the well-known “Family Pact”, an integration project whose purpose was to strengthen the region's position in the world. The objective was to rekindle continental solidarity and promote a new Spanish-American assembly as a fundamental space for reaching agreements. Lucas Alamán sent two plenipotentiaries —Manuel Díez de Bonilla and Juan de Dios Cañedo— to Central and South America. The "Family Pact" was the essence of an ambitious regional proposal that meant the conversion of Mexico into the "Metropolis of all America." His intention was to send plenipotentiaries to the countries of the South to invite them to participate in the formation of a Spanish-American system that would allow them to face common problems, that would increase the weight of the group of countries on the international scene and that would strengthen their ties in a permanent through cooperation.

He founded several newspapers, among which were El Tiempo and El Universal, organs that served to form a conservative ideology in Mexico and that appeared precisely at the time in which Alamán composed his History of Mexico (the name of the country: Mexico, was written like that in those years). He also wrote the text Portraits and ideas .

Among his most important actions are the creation in Mexico City, from the Natural History Cabinet, of the "Museo Nacional Mexicano" (today long since split into two separate museums: the Museo de Historia Natural Museum and the National Museum of Anthropology) and the foundation of the General Archive of the Nation. The latter has been very important for learning about historical events in Mexico and understanding the political processes of the Mexican Republic. He also founded and directed a mining company, established the first independent smelter in Mexico in 1825, managed the estates of the descendants of Hernán Cortés, and served as governor of Mexico City in 1849.

Alamán sent to Congress a new project that contemplated the creation of a bank specially designed to promote the national industry: Banco de Avío. Banco de Avío's operations would offer loans to companies or individuals at reasonable interest. He was convinced of the need to build a national industry as a necessary way to consolidate independence and walk the path of progress.

Industrial strengthening for Lucas Alamán was closely linked to his idea of national sovereignty. Unfortunately, the failure of Banco de Avío can be explained by various reasons, among which are the lack of experience of its directors and the precarious situation of the Public Treasury.

He returned to national public service in 1851, when Santa Anna appointed him for the last time to the position of Secretary of Foreign Relations, in which he carried out his work until the day of his death (due to pneumonia), on September 2. June 1853.

Eponymy

Gender

• (Orchidaceae) Alamania The Key & Lex.

Species

• (Asteraceae) Perezia alamani var. adnata Bacig.
• (Euphorbiaceae) Jatropha alamanii Müll.Arg.
• (Rhamnaceae) Colubrina alamanii G.Don