174 CHAPTER 8 THE INDEPENDENCE OF LATIN AMERICA
land reform. In a “plan” found among his papers,
he proposed the division of all haciendas greater
than two leagues into smaller plots, denounced a
situation in which “a single individual owns vast
extents of uncultivated land and enslaves thou-
sands of people who must work the land as gañanes
[peons] or slaves,” and proclaimed the social bene-
fi ts of the small landholding. But Morelos’s freedom
of action was restrained by his links with the creole
landowning elite, some of whom were his lieuten-
ants and whose property he promised to respect.
A brilliant guerrilla leader who substituted
strict discipline, training, and centralized direction
for the loose methods of Hidalgo, Morelos, hav-
ing established a fi rm base in the Pacifi c lowlands,
advanced toward the strategic central highlands
and the capital. His thrust into the rich sugar-
producing area (modern Morelos) just south of
Mexico City failed to gain suffi cient support from
the local indigenous communities, which retained
substantial landholdings, and he was forced to re-
treat southward into the rugged mountainous re-
gion of Oaxaca. His military efforts were hampered
by differences with fractious civilian allies and by
his decision to establish a representative govern-
ment at a time when his military situation was
turning precarious. In the fall of 1813, a congress
he had convened at Chilpancingo declared Mexi-
co’s independence, enacted Morelos’s social re-
forms, and vested him with supreme military and
executive power. But in the months that followed,
the tide of war turned against the insurgent cause,
in part because of tactical mistakes by Morelos that
involved abandonment of fl uid guerrilla warfare
in favor of fi xed-position warfare, illustrated by his
prolonged siege of the fortress of Acapulco. In late
1813, Morelos suffered several defeats at the hands
of royalist forces directed by the able and aggres-
sive viceroy Felix Calleja.
The defeat of Napoleon and the return of
the ferociously reactionary Ferdinand VII to the
throne of Spain in 1814 released thousands of sol-
diers who could be sent overseas to suppress the
Spanish American revolts. The congress of Chil-
pancingo, put to fl ight, became a wandering body
whose squabbling and need for protection diverted
Morelos’s attention from the all-important military
problem. Hoping to revitalize the rebel cause and
gain creole elite support by offering an alterna-
tive to Ferdinand’s brutal despotism, the congress
met at Apatzingan and drafted a liberal constitu-
tion (October 1814) that provided for a republican
frame of government and included an article that
proclaimed the equality of citizens before the law
and freedom of speech and the press. In the course
of the year 1815, unrelenting royalist pressure
forced the congress to fl ee from place to place. In
November, fi ghting a rear-guard action that en-
abled the congress to escape, Morelos was captured
by a royalist force and brought to the capital. Like
Hidalgo, he was found guilty by an Inquisition
court of heresy and treason; he was shot by a fi ring
squad on December 22, 1815.
The great guerrilla leader had died, but the
revolutionary movement, although fragmented,
continued. Indeed, the struggle between numer-
ous insurgent bands and the Spanish counter-
insurgency reached new heights of virulence
between 1815 and 1820. Avoiding the mistakes
of Hidalgo and even Morelos, the rebel leaders
shunned pitched battles and made no effort to cap-
ture large population centers. Instead, they con-
ducted a fl uid warfare in which small units sacked
and destroyed loyalist haciendas, disrupted or lev-
ied tolls on trade, severed communications, and
controlled large stretches of the countryside. They
fl ed when pursued by counterinsurgent forces and
reappeared when the overextended Spanish troops
had departed. The destructive effects of a hopeless
war on the economy, the heavy taxes imposed on
all inhabitants by regional commanders and local
juntas for the support of that war, and the harsh
treatment meted out not only to insurgents but
also to high-ranking creoles who favored compro-
mise and autonomy alienated even the most loyal
elements of the creole elite.
These elements, as well as many conservative
Spaniards, sought a way out of the impasse that
would avoid radical social change under a repub-
lican regime of the kind Morelos had proposed. A
way out seemed to appear in 1820, when a liberal
revolt in Spain forced Ferdinand VII to accept the
constitution of 1812. Mexican deputies elected
to the Spanish Cortes, or parliament, proposed a