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send some troops at night to take possession of the principal points.- The object of Santa-Anna was to cause an alarm in the city by open- ing · fire against Lemaur's Spanish troops taking advantage of the darkness of the night and the confusion in order to assassinate General Echavarri. Everything happened as Santa Anna had calculated, ex- cept the assassination; because at the moment the assassin was going to shoot Echavarri, he leaned in order to speak with one of his assist- ants and the balls passed, killing a sergeant who was at his side. As Santa Anna is a man without education, without political prin- ciples or morals, his life is a web of inconsistencies and contradic- tions. And so hardly two months had passed since the termination of the campaign which resulted in the fall of the Empire and the establishment of the Republic, when he proclaimed himself Emperor under the name of Antonio I in San Luis Potosi, by the very soldiers whom he was commanding. But Public Spirit, which at that time was running very high in favor of Republican principles, was a barrier that he could not overcome, and he desisted immediately in his pre- tensions, adopting the opposite extreme. He declared himself protector of the federal system which was beginning to be general in the coun- try (1823) • Under the Presidency of General Victoria, Santa Anna had an un- ceasing and severe persecutor in the minister of War, General Pedraza, to which personage the wicked conduct of Santa Anna was not pleasing. So when in 1828 elections were held for President of the Republic and when Pedraza had obtained the legal majority of the votes, Santa Anna, uneasy lest a man whom he feared might be placed at the head of affairs, managed to seduce some troops in J alapa and with them took possession of the fortress of Perote and declared himself against the election that had just been held saying that General Guerrero should be the President and not Pedraza. The termination of this revolution was in conformity with what Santa Anna proclaimed, be- cause General Guerrero had a strong party in his favor, and in con- sequence Pedraza had to leave the country in the early part of 1829. Hardly a year had passed since Guerrero held the Presidency when Santa Anna, unmindful of what he owed to this singular man, in or- der to overthrow him started in the city of J alapa a revolution to which afterwards he gave his name, seduced the troops and in short, succeeded in carrying out the conspiracy against what he himself had done. a few months before. (December 1829) Although he had contributed powerfully in the elevation of Busta- mante, nevertheless he was not contented with the turn which affairs were taking and, as he saw that in the immediate election of Presi- dent, he himself was not considered, a thing to which he had aspired for a long time past, he started an open revolution against the ad- ministration of Bustamante in the City of Vera Cruz on the 2nd of January 1832. In his plan, he called to the nation to check .the backward movement of the government of Bustamante that was tending to destroy the fed- eral system. The basis of his revolution was the call of General Pe- draza as the legitimate President of the Republic. After a year of struggle, the revolution terminated with the triumph of the federal
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