most sacred laws; the impunity of the most atrocious crimes is a consequence of the installation, and, under this protection, the constitution, the public faith, whatever is respectable and holy is abused, not only without fear of punishment but instead certain of reward. The important jobs, the positions of trust, the revenues are concentrated in the hands of the agitators. The press is in their pay and at their service; anarchic writings are financed, bought, lavished profusely with public wealth; those who courageously support social rights are tenaciously pursued. In this way, they want to keep the nation chained in order to devour it in peace.
If factions are always harmful, they are much more so in a people who, just having emerged from slavery and devastated by it, need to see as evident the advantages of the new government in order to become enthusiastic about it and love it sincerely; but if instead of the magnificent promises that were made to them, they see only discord, injustices, maltreatment, disrepute (in a very great way we have fallen compared with all nations), burdens, and misery, results inseparable from the factions, it follows that a sense of emptiness and despair is engendered in spirits, which scorns a system that the unwise common man regards as the source of woes and which gives rise to the natural desire to change it, intending to improve it. So broken laws are viewed with disdain, the authorities, whose prestige consists entirely in observing them, become suspect and distrusted in their handling of things, obedience is undermined, impunity encourages insubordination, and as it progresses, there is not yet energy or resolve that might contain it. The contagion progresses rapidly, and the government, attacked on all sides, succumbs or, what is the same, makes concessions to the troublemakers, and the nation terrifyingly plunges into anarchy.
If the Mexican nation has an enemy that watches it, this is the moment that it awaited to clinch its chains and shackle it, perhaps forever, to its bloody cart. The people, plagued and aggravated by the greatest of
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misfortunes, which is anarchy, prefer to be victims of one despot and not of thousands; they prefer to fear one who can never do them as much harm as a swarm of demagogues who humiliate and destroy them in a thousand ways. Although one exhorts them then to take up arms and repel the invader, they will respond indignantly: “Execrable traitors of the patria, you have reduced us to the unhappy extreme of seeing despotism as a relief from the horrible ills with which your ambition and immorality have crushed and exhausted us. Will we consume the miserable scraps of our fortune that you have eradicated, and will we spill the blood that has escaped your cruelty to defend your power that you have used only to sacrifice us? What benefit could we expect from our efforts? That you surely continue your revenges and pillages, and that you will indefinitely prolong your exterminating rule! But you have not left us a glimmer of hope, and you have cruelly extirpated us and made the patria disappear. We no longer have it! And this is, barbarians, all the benefit we owe you. You are tranquil, and your decision is made: you will fly to meet the tyrant and, prostrated despicably, you will worship his footsteps; you will buy with the most ignominious prostitution a smile from the idol, and, infamous informers, you will top off all your crimes by slandering your brothers to ingratiate yourselves with your masters.”
May the peoples of Anáhuac reflect on, confront, and apply these truths, may they look attentively at the terrifying aspect that the Republic presents in all its affairs; confidence has fled, and peace is about to flee a country that seeks it and roots out all of its supports. Already Europe, which had admired us, announces our downfall; and the complexity and clashes of our affairs and the scorn in which the laws are seen must hasten it. Our independence is threatened, our liberty abused, our property badly secured, and we sleep in a fatal confidence! But there is still time to save the patria that appeals forcefully to us. Let us not feign ignorance because time flies, and if we do not make the most vehement efforts and all the sacrifices it demands of us, a piercing regret will torment us much more than the loss of the precious goods of which we are going to be stripped.
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| LORENZO DE ZAVALA |
Lorenzo de Zavala (1788–1836), a politician and historian, was born in Yucatán. He studied in the city of Mérida at the seminary of San Ildefonso. He became active in revolutionary politics, and in 1814 he was imprisoned by the Spanish authorities. Once released, Zavala returned to Yucatán, where he edited a newspaper. He was elected deputy for Yucatán to the Spanish Cortes1 in 1820 and took his seat in 1821.
However, he promptly returned to Mexico, where the military leader (and later emperor) Agustín de Iturbide (1783–1824) had won independence for Mexico after entering Mexico City with his troops on September 27, 1821. Zavala was a member of the first constituent congress, in 1822, and was elected senator in 1825. He was active in the founding of the Lodge of York in Mexico. In 1827 Zavala was elected governor of the state of Mexico. In the 1828 election the yorkino candidate, General Vicente Guerrero (1782–1831), lost the election. Nevertheless, Zavala and others maneuvered to seat Guerrero in the presidential chair, and subsequently Guerrero appointed Zavala as a minister in his cabinet. When an opposing faction deposed Guerrero in 1830, Zavala went into exile in the United States and Europe. While in exile he wrote Ensayo histórico de las revoluciones de México, desde 1808 hasta 1830. A changing political situation allowed him to return to Mexico and reassume his office as governor in 1833.
Zavala worked with the reformist administration of Gómez Farías, and when the government was toppled at the end of 1833 went again into exile in Europe. Later, he returned to America and went to Texas, where he had land grants. There he sided with the colonists and supported Texas’s independence from
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Mexico. He signed the Texas declaration of independence and was elected vice president in 1836.
We present the introduction and conclusion of Zavala’s Ensayo histórico as well as his individual vote in Congress regarding the separation of Guatemala from Mexico.
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| 1 | Introduction to Historical Essay on the Mexican Revolutions from 1808 to 1830 * |
In undertaking the publication of Ensayo histórico de la últimas revoluciones de México, I intend to elucidate the character, customs, and different situation of the people involved rather than to create weary narratives in which, as Mr. Sismondi says so well, one encounters only a repetition of the same acts of cruelty, evil deeds, and baseness that fatigue the spirit, cause boredom in the reader, and, in a certain way, degrade the man who spends a large amount of time going over the horrors and havoc of parties and factions. “The history of peoples,” says this same writer, “commences only with the beginning of life, with the spirit that animates nations.” As the time prior to the events of 1808 is a period of silence, sleepiness, and monotony, with the exception of some glimmers that appear from time to time breathing liberty, the interesting history of Mexico truly commences only in that memorable year. But it is more advisable that readers, in order to begin reading this Ensayo histórico with understanding, be instructed about the customs of the inhabitants and of their condition before the referenced epoch.
The discovery of the Americas that Christopher Columbus made at the end of the fifteenth century and the conquest of those regions carried out a short time later are among those events that, to a large degree, have contributed to changing the political course of societies. My goal is not to speak of the influence these events have exercised on Europe, but rather of the course that political
