José de San Martín

José de San Martín was an Argentine general who led the independence struggle in the southern half of South America. After two decades as an officer in the Spanish army, he returned to the Río de la Plata in 1812, led an army across the Andes to free Chile, and then invaded Peru, the heart of Spanish power on the continent, where he declared independence in 1821. After a meeting with Simón Bolívar in 1822 he withdrew from public life, and he died in exile in France. Argentina honours him as its founding hero, and Chile and Peru count him among their liberators.

San Martín was born in Yapeyú, a former Jesuit mission among the Guaraní people on the Uruguay River, in what is now the Argentine province of Corrientes. The usual date given is 25 February 1778, though surviving documents point to either 1777 or 1778. His father, Juan de San Martín, was a Spanish officer serving as governor of the district, part of the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata within the Spanish Empire. In 1784 the family returned to Spain, and San Martín grew up in Málaga.

At eleven he became a cadet in the Murcia infantry regiment. Over the next two decades he fought the Moors in North Africa at Melilla and Oran, served against Britain and Portugal, and gained a solid professional education. When Napoleon's armies invaded Spain in 1808, setting off the Peninsular War, part of the Napoleonic Wars, San Martín fought against the French and distinguished himself at the Battle of Bailén in July 1808, a rare defeat for a French army, and later at Albuera in 1811.

The French occupation broke the authority of the Spanish crown across its empire, and from 1810 juntas in the Americas began to govern themselves. In Cádiz, San Martín had come into contact with liberal and American circles and joined a secret society working for South American independence. In 1811 he resigned his commission, travelled to London, where he met other exiled patriots, and in March 1812 arrived in Buenos Aires.

The revolutionary government gave him the task of forming a cavalry regiment, the Mounted Grenadiers, which won its first action at San Lorenzo on the Paraná in February 1813. In September 1812 he had married María de los Remedios de Escalada, the young daughter of a wealthy Buenos Aires family. With other officers he founded the Lautaro Lodge, a secret political society named after a Mapuche leader who had fought the Spanish conquest, which became a powerful force in the politics of the independence movement.

Sent in 1814 to command the Army of the North, San Martín concluded that attacking the royalist stronghold of Upper Peru, today's Bolivia, overland was hopeless. He proposed a different route: build an army in the western province of Cuyo, cross the Andes to Chile, where the royalists had just restored their rule after defeating the patriots at Rancagua, and then go by sea to Lima. Appointed governor of Cuyo, he spent nearly three years in Mendoza raising and drilling the Army of the Andes, financing it with heavy local taxes and recruiting soldiers who included Chilean exiles and many freed enslaved men of African descent. In 1816 he pressed the congress of Tucumán to declare the independence of the United Provinces of South America.

In January 1817 the army, about 5,000 men, crossed the Andes in several columns through passes around 4,000 metres high, one of the great feats of military logistics of the age. On 12 February it defeated the royalists at Chacabuco and entered Santiago. San Martín refused the offer to govern Chile and backed his ally Bernardo O'Higgins as supreme director. Chile declared independence in February 1818. A month later a royalist night attack scattered the patriot army at Cancha Rayada, but San Martín regrouped and on 5 April 1818 won a decisive victory at Maipú, which secured Chile's independence. The period also had a darker side: the Carrera brothers, rivals of O'Higgins, were executed in Mendoza, and the guerrilla leader Manuel Rodríguez was killed in custody, deaths in which the Lautaro Lodge may have had a hand.

With a fleet raised in Chile and commanded by the British admiral Thomas Cochrane, San Martín landed on the Peruvian coast in September 1820 with about 4,000 men, far fewer than the royalist forces in the Viceroyalty of Peru. Rather than risk a battle, he encouraged uprisings in the countryside, negotiated, and blockaded Lima. In July 1821 the viceroy abandoned the city, and on 28 July San Martín proclaimed the independence of Peru. He took the title of Protector, abolished Indigenous tribute and forced labour, declared that children born to enslaved mothers would be free, and founded a national library. He favoured a constitutional monarchy under a European prince, believing it would bring stability and foreign recognition, a view that made him enemies among Peruvian republicans. His relations with Cochrane collapsed, and the royalist army remained intact in the highlands.

In July 1822 San Martín met Simón Bolívar at Guayaquil, which Bolívar had just annexed to Gran Colombia. The two men talked in private and no record survives, so what was said remains one of the most debated questions in South American history. They probably disagreed about Guayaquil, about the form of government, and about who would command the final campaign in Peru. Whatever happened, San Martín returned to Lima, resigned as Protector in September 1822 and left Bolívar to finish the war, which ended with the royalist defeat at Ayacucho in 1824.

His wife died in 1823, and Argentina was falling into civil war between Buenos Aires and the provinces. In 1824 San Martín sailed for Europe with his daughter Mercedes. He lived in Brussels and then near Paris, refusing to take sides in Argentine factional conflicts, though in old age he admired the governor Juan Manuel de Rosas for resisting French and British blockades and left him his sabre. He died at Boulogne-sur-Mer on 17 August 1850. In 1880 his remains were brought back to Buenos Aires and placed in the cathedral.

In Argentina San Martín is the Father of the Nation, the subject of countless statues, streets and the national day of 17 August, and he is revered in Chile and Peru too. His reputation rests on the combination of strategic vision and restraint: he planned and carried out the continental strategy that broke Spanish power in the south of the Spanish American wars of independence, and he repeatedly declined to take power for himself. Historians also note that the official cult built by the nineteenth-century historian and president Bartolomé Mitre smoothed away his monarchist politics, the harsh taxation behind his armies and the violence of the Lautaro Lodge's rivalries.