Royalist Counterinsurgency and the Continuity of Rebellion: Guanajuato and Michoacán, 1813-20
1982; Duke University Press; Volume: 62; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1215/00182168-62.1.19
ISSN1527-1900
Autores Tópico(s)Politics and Society in Latin America
ResumoIN three pitched battles royalist commanders defeated the revolutionary movement led by Padre Miguel Hidalgo and Captain Ignacio Allende only four months after it had begun. Subsequently, between 1811 and 1814, the royalists, particularly in Puebla during the winter of 1811-12, held back Padre Jose Maria Morelos's attempts to revive the revolution by means of a different regional base. In 1814 and 1815 they began the process of expelling insurgent forces from the fringes of the central plateau. Following the defeats of Hidalgo and Morelos, the movement disintegrated into autonomous rebel bands. The remaining leadership singularly failed to establish any convincing provisional government. The defeat of these bands became the precondition of the revival of the political objectives of the Mexican elite, whose pressure in 1808 for autonomy within the Bourbon imperial framework had provoked the gachupin coup of September 15-16. In view of the absence of any principal rebel army after the elimination of Morelos in 1815, the term best applied to the struggle with government forces is insurgency. Rebel bands, frequently indistinguishable from bandit groups, sought to undermine local sources of royalist strength through guerrilla actions. These regional theaters of war required an opposing strategy on the part of the government, which involved the development of techniques of counterinsurgency.1 We shall examine here the struggle
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