Page:Historia Verdadera del Mexico profundo.djvu/234

same fate as Hidalgo. On November 5, 1815 he was decisively defeated at Temazcala, where he was apprehended. He was taken to Mexico, where he is publicly degraded of his priestly investiture and was sentenced to death. On 22 December he was taken to San Cristóbal Ecatepec, where he faced a firing squad.

Vicente Guerrero Saldaña (1782-1831) takes the insurgent torch, maintaining a squalid insurgent presence. Guerrero without weapons, trained soldiers, with little economic support and after 11 painful years of insurrection, decided to negotiate with Augustin de Iturbide Arámburu (1783-1824), who at the time, has been appointed by viceroy Juan Ruiz de Apodaca (1754-1835) as head of a numerous army that will definitively end the waning insurgency in the south. The peninsular spaniards seeing that Liberals were dangerously gained ground in power in Spain, to take distance from the liberal government in Spain, decide to join the independence, proposing that the nation remained catholic, that a "moderate" monarchy headed by Fernando VII or one of his sons governed and to declare the creoles and peninsular gachupines with equal rights. In this way Vicente Guerrero through the "Acatempan hug", agrees to join up with Agustín de Iturbide and the two armies, return to the city of Mexico and consummate the independence. As can be seen, the independence war can be tracked through castes. The creoles were Hidalgo and Iturbide, and mestizos Morelos and Guerrero.

The war of independence emerged as a struggle of economic and political power between the spanish creole and peninsular spaniards. The indigenous mass was used as cannon fodder and it was the mestizos, who gave a real independent sense to the insurrection. Finally, it was a creole who betrayed the peninsular and the same creoles, when naming himself emperor. Indigenous peoples only served as an armed mob, for both sides.