President Vicente Guerrero

President Vicente Guerrero (1782-1831), Mexican military leader and politician. Vicente Ramón Guerrero Saldaña was born in Tixtla, a small town in southwestern Mexico, to a working-class family of African, Native American and Spanish ancestry. He received little formal education and worked as a mule driver in his early adulthood. When a rebellion against Spanish rule began in 1810, Guerrero was one of the first to join, seeing independence as a way to end slavery, racism and class discrimination. His knowledge of the land, ability to speak Native languages, and innate understanding of tactics made him a natural military leader. By 1815, however, nearly all of the other leaders had been killed or captured, and General Guerrero was now the top-ranked officer in the Mexican Revolution. Despite being outnumbered, he fought a successful guerilla war in the south and won numerous victories. The Spanish commander Agustín de Iturbide enlisted his Guerrero’s own father to try to convince him to surrender, but the son answered “The will of my father is for me sacred, but my Motherland is first.” Finally, Iturbide called for a peace treaty, promising to help create an independent government that guaranteed racial equality. The two generals joined forces in 1821, and in September, the Spanish government finally agreed to recognize Mexico’s independence. Guerrero, who became a high-ranking official in the new government, declared that “We have defeated the colossus, and we bathe in the glow of new found happiness…living with a knowledge that no one is above anyone else, and that there is no title more honored than that of the citizen.” 

Iturbide, however, declared himself emperor and refused to act on his earlier promises, so Guerrero led the effort to force him out of power. In 1828, he himself decided to run for president. His opponent was declared the winner, but Guerrero claimed that the election results were fraudulent and carried out a coup d’état in April 1829, thus becoming Mexico’s first and only black president. In his first address to Congress, President Guerrero announced that “The administration is obliged to procure the widest possible benefits and apply them from the palace of the rich to the wooden shack of the humble laborer.” He abolished the death penalty, raised taxes to assist the poor, and in September 1829 abolished slavery, ending the enslavement of Africans after 300 years. He also successfully defended the country against a Spanish invasion. These policies, however, put him at odds with conservative landowners. In December, an uprising began under his vice-president, and he was forced to leave Mexico City and flee to the south. Several months later, he was betrayed by a former ally, captured, and executed by a firing squad. Although he was only the latest political leader to be forced out of power in a time of great instability, most others sent into exile, not killed; his black ancestry and poor background, though, made him a greater threat. As one historian has written, “Guerrero's execution was perhaps a warning to men considered as socially and ethnically inferior not to dare to dream of becoming president.” In 1925, his remains were reburied, along with those of thirteen other revolutionary leaders, at the Columna de la Independencia memorial in downtown Mexico City. The state of Guerrero, which includes his hometown, is named in his honor; it is the only of Mexico’s thirty-two states named for a former president. He remains one of the most widely known patriotic heroes in a country where people of African descent are often overlooked, ignored or simply forgotten altogether.

©David Brodnax, Sr.