Ignacio Comonfort
(Puebla, 1812-near Chamacuero, 1863) Military and Mexican politician, president of the Republic between 1855 and 1857.Son of a royalist officer, he studied at the Carolino College of his native city.In 1832 he joined the movement of General Antonio López de Santa Anna against Anastasio Bustamante, reaching the rank of cavalry captain.At the end of this campaign and until 1834 he was the military commander of the Izúcar de Matamoros district.Later he faced Santa Anna, whose policy he rejected, and was a deputy to the Congress of the Union.In 1847 he was an assistant to the army throughout the Valley campaign.
Ignacio Comonfort
In 1854 Comonfort joined the old insurgent Juan Álvarez and the exiled liberals of New Orleans to proclaim the Ayutla Plan, which would end with the overthrow of Santa Anna.General Juan Álvarez assumed the presidency of the Republic and appointed Comonfort Minister of War and Navy, a position he held until December 10, 1855.After Álvarez's resignation, Comonfort assumed the presidency as a substitute, and remained in it.until November 30, 1857.
Comonfort ended up assuming that the constitution was inapplicable due to the opposition it aroused and decided to ignore it: if public opinion was contrary to him, he, as a democrat, could not impose it by the force.With the support of Comonfort himself, Zuloaga proclaimed the Plan of Tacubaya, which annulled the constitution and left Comonfort in the presidency, although under the requirement to form a transitional cabinet.At the same time he imprisoned Juárez, who, as president of the Supreme Court of Justice, was vice president of the Republic.
But Zuloaga did not take long to betray his friend Comonfort.On January 2, 1858, he rose up in the Citadel, turned the capital into a battlefield, and did not give in until Comonfort left on his way from exile to New York.The coalition of liberal governors of Aguascalientes, Colima, Guanajuato, Jalisco, Michoacán, Querétaro and Zacatecas decreed that, when Comonfort fell, the legitimate president was Benito Juárez, who took office in Guanajuato.In this way Comonfort's vacillations, inspired by the desire to avoid more chaos and more blood, would in practice lead to the bloody war of the Reform (1858-1860), and later to the fight against the French and Maximilian I (1863-1867).
In 1863, Juárez accepted his help to fight the French invasion and appointed him Minister of War and head of the Army of the Center.Comonfort failed in his attempts to help General Jesús González Ortega with arms and ammunition in the second siege of Puebla by the French.On March 13, 1863, between San Miguel Allende and Chamacuero, he was assaulted by the Troncoso brothers, hitmen in the service of the conservatives, who broke his head with a machete.
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