Vicente Guerrero

Vicente Ramón Guerrero Saldaña was born on the tenth of August 1782 in Tixtla, in the southern Pacific region of the Viceroyalty of New Spain that is now the state of Guerrero. His father Pedro was a mestizo small farmer; his mother Guadalupe Saldaña was of African and indigenous descent. The family worked the muleteer trade between Acapulco and the highlands, and Guerrero entered the independence war as a captain of muleteers under José María Morelos in 1810.

After the executions of Morelos in 1815 and the collapse of the first phase of the independence movement, Guerrero refused all amnesty offers and sustained guerrilla operations in the Sierra Madre del Sur of southern Mexico for the next five years — almost single-handedly keeping the insurgency alive. When in 1820 the royalist colonel Agustín de Iturbide was sent to crush him, Guerrero negotiated rather than fought: the resulting Plan of Iguala of 1821 — drafted in part on Guerrero's terms — secured Mexican independence within months under the joint signature of the two men.

He served as second vice-president under Guadalupe Victoria and was elected the second president of Mexico in April 1829. His four-month presidency saw two decrees of lasting historical consequence: the abolition of slavery throughout the Mexican Republic, signed on the fifteenth of September 1829 — thirty-four years before the Emancipation Proclamation — and the repulse of the Spanish reconquest attempt at Tampico under General Isidro Barradas.

He was overthrown by his vice-president Anastasio Bustamante in December 1829, retreated to the southern mountains, was captured by treachery in February 1831 and executed by firing squad on the fourteenth of February 1831 at Cuilapan in Oaxaca, at forty-eight. The state of Guerrero is named after him.

He is honored here as the second president of Mexico and the Afro-mestizo emancipator of Mexican slaves.