Agustín de Iturbide

Agustín de Iturbide was a former Spanish army officer who led Mexico’s independence movement and then turned its power vacuum to his own advantage. His rise—from publishing a plan for an independent constitutional monarchy to declaring himself emperor, dismissing Congress, and ruling as a dictator—shows how independence could alter who held power without establishing institutions strong enough to constrain it.

From royal crisis to independence

In 1820, a Spanish army assembled in Cádiz to sail to the Americas and restore royal authority mutinied against Ferdinand VII. The revolt spread to other army units, forcing Ferdinand to restore the Cádiz Constitution and recall the Cortes. More radical than the assembly that had drafted the constitution, the new Cortes proposed abolishing coercive labor and challenged privileges such as the military’s right to try its members in its own courts. Faced with the prospect that these measures would also be imposed in Mexico, Mexican elites chose independence rather than accept changes they regarded as threats to their status.

Iturbide led that movement. On February 24, 1821, he published the Plan de Iguala, which proposed an independent Mexico under a constitutional monarchy with a Mexican emperor. The plan removed provisions of the Cádiz Constitution that Mexican elites found threatening to their privileges, and it won immediate support. Spain soon recognized that it could not stop secession. Independence thus emerged not only from opposition to Spanish rule but also from elite resistance to a more radical reordering of political and social privileges.

Emperor and dictator

Iturbide did more than organize Mexico’s break with Spain. With military backing and a power vacuum at hand, he had himself declared emperor. The book captures the coercive basis of this authority through Simón Bolívar’s description of it as “by the grace of God and of bayonets.” Unlike presidents in the United States, Iturbide was not constrained by comparable political institutions; military force helped him claim the throne and left him with little institutional restraint.

By October 1822, Iturbide had dismissed the constitutionally sanctioned congress and replaced it with a junta of his choosing. The sequence—from an independence plan framed as constitutional monarchy to the removal of the constitutional legislature—marks the sharpest reversal in his political trajectory. The new order did not simply vest sovereignty in Mexico: it concentrated power in the hands of the leader who had organized secession.

Political legacy

Iturbide did not last long, but the book presents his seizure of power as a recurring pattern rather than an isolated episode. Like Antonio López de Santa Anna and Porfirio Díaz, he began as a military commander and entered politics through force. Mexico did have nineteenth-century constitutions, yet they imposed few effective constraints on these leaders; they could be removed only by the same means by which they had risen to power.

The contrast with the United States is institutional, not simply a matter of military backgrounds. American generals such as George Washington, Ulysses S. Grant, and Dwight D. Eisenhower also became presidents, but the book stresses that they neither used force to gain office nor used it to avoid relinquishing power. They abided by the Constitution. Iturbide’s brief imperial rule, by contrast, illustrates how a constitutional design could be proposed and a congress legally sanctioned, yet both remain vulnerable when political authority ultimately rests on military backing.