José de San Martín

When San Martín arrived in Buenos Aires in March 1812 aboard the British ship George Canning, he was viewed with a mixture of hope and deep suspicion. He was, after all, a man who had spent his entire adult life in the uniform of the Spanish Crown. To prove his loyalty and utility, he set about organizing the Regiment of Mounted Grenadiers, introducing rigorous European cavalry tactics, iron discipline, and a professional code of honor to a revolutionary army that had previously relied on enthusiastic but untrained militias. He married María de los Remedios de Escalada, a fourteen-year-old girl from a prominent patrician family, cementing his ties to the local elite. He also co-founded a local branch of the Lodge of Rational Knights with Carlos María de Alvear. This secret society quickly became the shadow engine of Argentine politics, orchestrating the overthrow of the First Triumvirate in October 1812 to install a government more dedicated to total independence. Yet, as Alvear and other Buenos Aires politicians became bogged down in provincial rivalries and internal civil wars against regional caudillos, San Martín grew disillusioned. He realized that the revolution was doomed if it remained provincial. The primary threat to South American liberty lay not in the local skirmishes of the Río de la Plata, but in the towering royalist stronghold of Peru, protected by the formidable geography of the Andes and the Pacific Ocean.

Taking command of the battered Army of the North in 1814, San Martín recognized that the traditional invasion route to Peru through the high, oxygen-depleted valleys of Upper Peru—modern-day Bolivia—was a graveyard for revolutionary armies. He formulated a radical, alternative strategy: he would withdraw, organize a new army in the western province of Cuyo, cross the treacherous, snow-choked passes of the Andes into Chile, liberate that territory, and then launch a maritime invasion northward to strike at the heart of Spanish power in Lima. For three years, as governor of Cuyo, San Martín lived in Mendoza, meticulously assembling the Army of the Andes. He built foundries to cast cannon, organized hospitals, mapped the mountain passes, and recruited a diverse force of Argentine gauchos, Chilean exiles, and liberated slaves. In January 1817, he began the crossing. Operating at altitudes of over twelve thousand feet, where the air was thin and the cold lethal, his columns moved in synchronized precision across multiple passes, completely baffling the Spanish defenders. The army descended into the central valley of Chile and shattered the royalist forces at the Battle of Chacabuco. Despite a subsequent setback, San Martín secured Chilean independence once and for all at the decisive Battle of Maipú in 1818.

The final phase of his grand strategy required a navy to transport his victorious army to Peru. Sailing north, San Martín landed on the Peruvian coast and gradually tightened a blockade around Lima. Rather than engaging in a bloody, head-on assault that might alienate the local population, he utilized psychological warfare, political negotiation, and minor skirmishes to pressure the Spanish Viceroy into evacuating the capital. On July 12, 1821, San Martín’s forces entered Lima, and on July 28, he officially declared the independence of Peru, accepting the title of "Protector." Yet, his position was precarious. Royalist armies still controlled the vast Peruvian highlands, his treasury was empty, and his troops were plagued by disease. It was at this critical juncture, in July 1822, that San Martín traveled to Guayaquil, Ecuador, for a private, closed-door meeting with Simón Bolívar, the charismatic liberator of the north. What passed between the two titans of South American independence remains one of the great mysteries of history. No witnesses were present, and no minutes were kept. When the doors opened, San Martín made a decision that astonished his contemporaries: he quietly returned to Lima, resigned his protectorate and his military command, and left the final liberation of Peru to Bolívar.

By 1824, San Martín had exiled himself to France, withdrawing entirely from the political and military arenas of the continent he had helped free. He lived out his remaining years in quiet obscurity, dying in Boulogne-sur-Mer in 1850. In the decades that followed, the nations he forged began to look back on his self-imposed exile not as a defeat, but as an act of supreme civic virtue—a refusal to participate in the fratricidal civil wars that tore post-colonial South America apart. Today, the Order of the Liberator General San Martín stands as Argentina’s highest national honor. He remains enshrined in the pantheon of the Americas as the stoic planner, the quiet strategist who looked at the impassable wall of the Andes, saw a highway to liberation, and then had the rare grace to walk away from the power he had won.