Santa Anna Dictatorship
In his self-described revisionist biography Santa Anna of Mexico (2007), Will Fowler has courageously taken up the defense of the Mexico caudillo, fully aware that he is all but universally reviled in the historiography of the United States and Mexico. From the beginning, he made his intention clear to vindicate the reputation of a dictator whose "vilification has been so thorough and effective that the process of deconstructing the numerous lies that have been told and retold" is almost impossible.[footnoteRef:1] Timothy J. Henderson asserted that he had a great talent for exploiting and manipulating political divisions but none for governing a country. In U.S. history and popular culture, he has always been portrayed as a corrupt megalomaniac, the 'Napoleon of the West', responsible for the massacres at the Alamo and Goliad. As John Chasteen and James Wood put it, even his autobiography was an "extraordinary work of self-dramatization" by a dictator who put on a show of being a "vulnerable, introspective protagonist" but was in reality a power-hungry tyrant with "unmitigated vanity" and "obvious self-absorption."[footnoteRef:2] Fowler is not completely successful in redeeming his subject from all the negative historiography surrounding him, especially given Santa Anna's well-deserved reputation for corruption, nepotism and brutality, but he may well be correct that no one else could have done any better in Mexico under the circumstances. Fowler uses primary sources to disprove some of the most serious charges that Mexican historians have made against Santa Anna, such as that he was bribed to agree to the independence of Texas in 1836, and that even though he was also bribed by President James K. Polk when he was in exile in Havana in 1846, he nevertheless fought the Mexican War to win as soon as he returned, rather than as a gringo puppet and stooge.[footnoteRef:3] Given the very unfavorable political and economic situation in Mexico in the 1840s, Santa Anna also everything humanly possible to recover Texas and defend the country from a North American invasion. Fowler contends that he was not personally responsible for all the disasters that befell Mexico in this period, but rather the whole system was a failure. In trying to maintain order and hold the country together against all the centrifugal forces from within and within, he had no other option except to take authoritarian measures that went against his earlier liberal beliefs, but in this he was no different from other Latin American dictators then and later, including Simon Bolivar.[footnoteRef:4] [1: Will Fowler, Santa Anna of Mexico (University of Nebraska Press, 2007), p. x.] [2: "Protagonist on a National Stage" in John Charles Chasteen and James A. Wood (eds), Problems in Modern Latin American History: Sources and Interpretations (Scholarly Resources, Inc., 2005), p. 99.] [3: Fowler, p. xi.] [4: Fowler, p. 347.]
By the time Santa Anna died in Mexico City in 1876, disgraced and impoverished, the nation had had four constitutions in 1824, 1836, 1843 and 1857, was well as two empires in 1822-23 and 1863-67 and a number of dictatorial periods in which Santa Anna figured prominently. Very soon after his death, another caudillo, Porfirio Diaz, would take over the country in the name of Order and Progress and rule until he was overthrown in 1910. That event would be followed by ten years of revolutions, coups and civil wars that left millions dead and the country destroyed.[footnoteRef:5] During Santa Anna's lifetime, Mexico was involved in four major wars, losing half of its national territory in 1848, and Santa Anna was there fighting in every battle. Like most Santa Anna biographers and historians, Fowler points out that Vera Cruz was his powerbase and that he was dictator of that strategic province before taking over the rest of the country, as well as its "main provider of employment, produce, and patronage."[footnoteRef:6] He always packed the army with his Vera Cruz clients and allies, as well as the civil administration whenever he was in power. His strongest natural affinity was not for politics, however, but the army, which he first joined at the age of fourteen, fighting against revolutionaries demanding independence from Spain. Santa Anna was always the type of officer who marched towards the sound of the guns, as Napoleon advised. Although he lost some major battles like San Jacinto in 1836 and Cerro Gordo in 1847, he also defeated a Spanish invasion in 1829 and a French one in 1838.[footnoteRef:7] Richard Bruce Winders finds that he dominated the years 1821-54 so completely that it could well be "called the Era of Santa Anna," at least before he was completely discredited and removed from power because of the Gadsden...
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