Urriola Mutiny
Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found. The Urriola Mutiny was a revolutionary outburst provoked on April 20, 1851 by opponents to the regime of Manuel Bulnes.
History
The period leading up to the presidential elections of July 25 and 26, 1851 was characterized by political effervescence, reflected in countless conspiracies throughout the country.
Manuel Bulnes was in the presidency and had to endure all kinds of political movements. On November 7, 1850, a state of siege was declared and the participants of the conspiracy hatched in Aconcagua were arrested, and two days later the Society of Equality was banned.
The innumerable conspiracies that were hatched in the following months had their culmination in the military coup that broke out on April 20, 1851. At midnight on the 19th, Colonel Pedro Urriola Balbontín went to the Valdivia barracks (where the old National Congress building in Santiago stands today), supported by José Miguel Carrera Fontecilla, son of the independence leader; Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna, Francisco Bilbao and Manuel Recabarren Rencoret. The latter two had offered to send 5,000 men, of which only 15 arrived.
Urriola ordered Lieutenant Luis Herrera, in command of the Valdivia detachment, to go to take the civic barracks. As soon as Herrera left the square, a sergeant shot him under the orders of General Marcos Maturana who, being in command of the troops, put down the rebellion and went to the Mint to inform President Manuel Bulnes. The Chacabuco detachment was also defending the government, and Bulnes at La Moneda began the defense, spurred on by Maturana's effective defense in which his son, Marcos Segundo Maturana, also participated. Upon seeing him wounded, it is said that General Maturana exclaimed of the man who would later become Chief of Staff in the battles of Chorrillos and Miraflores in Lima in 1880, "I got a good boy".
At dawn, Urriola realized that he was in a very unfavorable position, as he had neither forces nor ammunition. In spite of this, at 7 o'clock in the morning he ordered an attack on the artillery barracks. This attack was repulsed several times.
In the middle of the fray, the mutineers replaced Urriola in the leadership by Colonel Justo Arteaga Cuevas. After a fight with no chance of victory and Urriola having died, hit by a bullet, Arteaga took refuge in the American legation.
At 11 o'clock in the morning, the mutiny was quelled. This action aggravated the tension between the government and the electorally defeated General José María de la Cruz, fearing a new pronunciamiento, which was to be, in effect, a few months later, first in the Cambiaso Mutiny in Punta Arenas and the Civil War of 1851.
