Vicente Guerrero
Vicente Guerrero
Born 1782, died in political murder 1831, Guerrero was Commander in Chief of the Mexican army during the last three years of the 1810-1821 war for independence, was member of the three person junta that ruled Mexico for part of 1823-24, and was President 1829 into early 1830. Guerrero was raised in a traditionally Indigenous barrio of Tixtla, state of Guerrero. His ability to speak Indigenous languages helped him politically to push a broad "moreno" dark skinned majority rule for his nation.
Guerrero's political philosophy was capsulized in a speech he made just after assuming the presidency.
He said, in part, "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. If one can succeed in spreading the guarantees of the individual, if the equality before the law destroys the efforts of power and of gold, if the highest title between us is that of citizen, if the rewards we bestow are exclusively for talent and virtue, we have a republic, and she will be conserved by the universal suffrage of a people solid, free and happy."Equality in class as well as race was a goal of Guerrero. Two years after independence he declared it was time to build upon the victory over caste discrimination.
"We have defeated the colossus and we bath in the glow of new found happiness... (We now know) the way to genuine freedom... which is to live with a knowledge that no one is above anyone else, that there is no title more honored than that of the citizen, and that applies be the person in the military, a private worker, a government official, a cleric, a land owner, a laborer, a craftsman, or a writer... because the sacred belief in equality has leveled us before the law."