Manuel Rodriguez Was Shot by the Government He Saved

Chapters

1. 0:00 That file went missing
2. 0:27 The file on a killing
3. 0:42 Manuel Rodriguez
4. 1:04 Cancha Rayada, 19 March 1818
5. 1:29 The act of 23 March
6. 1:56 The Hussars of Death
7. 2:21 One afternoon
8. 2:43 Maipu, without the Hussars
9. 3:07 The Carrera brothers
10. 3:24 The San Pablo barracks
11. 3:53 Lieutenant Navarro
12. 4:17 The order, with the door closed
13. 5:02 The road to Quillota
14. 5:27 Tiltil, after dark
15. 5:50 Another colour
16. 6:16 The first file
17. 6:47 What the government said
18. 7:24 The auditor of war
19. 7:53 Marked reserved
20. 8:16 The second file
21. 8:48 The same way as the first
22. 9:27 What survived
23. 9:56 The body, and a third file
24. 10:23 It is the record
25. 10:50 Next: the receipt

Transcript

That file went missing 0:00

In the last week of May, eighteen eighteen, the most popular man in Chile was shot in the back, at night, by the soldiers escorting him. The government opened a file the next morning. That file went missing. Five years later a second government opened a second file. That one went missing too. What survives of both is a copy that a historian found in eighteen fifty-seven.

The file on a killing 0:27

The man was Manuel Rodriguez, and two months earlier he had held Santiago together for one afternoon. This episode is about the file on his killing: who wrote it, where it went, and why the second one ended the same way as the first.

Manuel Rodriguez 0:42

Rodriguez was a Santiago lawyer, born in seventeen eighty-five, and secretary to Jose Miguel Carrera in the first republic. After the Spanish reconquest he became San Martin's agent inside Chile. For two years he crossed the mountains, raided and vanished. After Chacabuco he was made a colonel.

Cancha Rayada, 19 March 1818 1:04

On the night of the nineteenth of March, eighteen eighteen, the patriot army was camped outside Talca, at Cancha Rayada. Around five thousand royalists attacked in the dark. Patriot units fired on each other. By morning the army had scattered and O'Higgins had been shot through the arm. In Santiago, people began packing for Mendoza.

The act of 23 March 1:29

On the twenty-third of March an open assembly met in the capital, and its act survives. The attention of a single man is not enough, it says. So the powers of the supreme director were declared delegated, whole and indivisible, in two citizens. Colonel Luis de la Cruz, and Lieutenant Colonel Manuel Rodriguez. It was read through the streets before two in the afternoon.

The Hussars of Death 1:56

That afternoon Rodriguez had the arsenal opened over the objection of its commander. He handed out muskets and sabres to anyone who would take them. There he founded a cavalry squadron and called it the Hussars of Death, with a white skull on black cloth for its badge. A return of the thirty-first of March counts it: two hundred men, two hundred carbines, two hundred sabres.

One afternoon 2:21

The story that grew from that afternoon made Rodriguez the man who rebuilt the army and saved Chile. The papers say something smaller. The government's letter book holds three orders signed by Cruz and Rodriguez, all dated the twenty-third. O'Higgins was back the next morning. Rodriguez governed for one afternoon.

Maipu, without the Hussars 2:43

On the fifth of April San Martin fought the battle of Maipu, south of the city, and won it. The Hussars of Death were not there. San Martin had refused to put an untrained squadron beside regular troops. O'Higgins had sent them to watch the fords of the Maipo river. The war was decided while the men with the skull on their caps watched a riverbank.

The Carrera brothers 3:07

Three days after the battle, two of Rodriguez's oldest allies were shot in Mendoza, across the mountains. Juan Jose and Luis Carrera, brothers of the man whose secretary he had been. Their father was later sent the bill for the trial.

The San Pablo barracks 3:24

On the eleventh of April O'Higgins, in bed with his wound, ordered the squadron disarmed. On the seventeenth an open meeting of the town council sent delegates to the palace to ask for a constitution. A crowd followed them to the door. Rodriguez rode into the palace courtyard, shouting. The director's aides arrested him and sent him to the San Pablo barracks, home of an infantry battalion, the Cazadores de los Andes.

Lieutenant Navarro 3:53

The plan on paper was exile: the first ship for the United States or Europe. His guard was given to a first lieutenant of the battalion, Antonio Navarro. A Spaniard who had reached Buenos Aires the year before, running from a failed plot in Barcelona. A quiet man, people said, who believed his origin made him suspect to his own comrades.

The order, with the door closed 4:17

In the middle of May the battalion was ordered to Quillota, and Rodriguez was to go with it. What happened next comes from Navarro himself, in a statement given five years later. He was called to the house of his commander, Colonel Rudecindo Alvarado. The auditor of war, Bernardo Monteagudo, was there. With the door closed they told him he answered for the prisoner with his life and his post. At ten that night he was called back and told the rest. The government had consented to the extermination of that subject, for the public tranquillity and the preservation of the army. He said he would obey. Then he told two other officers. Nobody would get involved.

The road to Quillota 5:02

The battalion left Santiago on the morning of the twenty-third of May and camped near Lampa. Alvarado had ordered the picket guarding Rodriguez to march apart from the column and camp apart from it. Rodriguez either was warned or worked it out. On Sunday the twenty-fourth the battalion stopped at Polpaico. The picket went on, a little west of the village of Tiltil.

Tiltil, after dark 5:27

Soon after dark one of the guards invited him to walk around the hut where he was lodged. He was shot from behind, below the right arm, and then finished with blades, most likely bayonets. One wound to the head, one to the throat. The moon was waning and had not risen. The only witnesses were the men who did it.

Another colour 5:50

Navarro sent word that the prisoner had escaped. That was the order he had been given that morning. Alvarado posted lookouts along the road, to make it look real. Then, Navarro said, he read the faces of the soldiers and changed his mind. This needed another colour, he said. The story would be that Rodriguez had tried to flee and the guard had been forced to fire.

The first file 6:16

So the first file was written by the man who had given the order. Alvarado opened an inquiry on the road and closed it on the twenty-sixth of May. It found riders near the camp, an attempt to escape, and a guard forced to fire. He sent it to Santiago unsealed. The twenty-sixth is the date most sources give for the death. Barros Arana, working from the papers, puts the killing on the night of the twenty-fourth. Both dates stay.

What the government said 6:47

On the twenty-seventh O'Higgins wrote privately to San Martin. Rodriguez has died on the road, he wrote, from a pistol shot by the officer conducting him, whom he had tried to kill, as appears from the process. The next day Alvarado wrote from Quillota: the inquiry clearly shows the good conduct of the officer and the intentions of said colonel. The official gazette, the only newspaper in the country, printed nothing at all. The city did not believe it. A former captain of the Hussars rode out to Tiltil, found the grave, and examined the wounds.

The auditor of war 7:24

Two days after the killing, by Navarro's account, Alvarado told him that to protect the government each man had to make a statement. Navarro says he told the truth, was told to change it, and refused. He was sent to Santiago, where the case passed to the auditor of war. That was Bernardo Monteagudo, the man who had been in the room when the order was given. Navarro was held four months in a barracks, free to walk about at all hours.

Marked reserved 7:53

In January eighteen nineteen O'Higgins wrote to San Martin, marked reserved, asking him to move Navarro across the mountains to another army. Nothing results against his good name, the letter says. It is only a precaution. Navarro went to Mendoza and stayed there as a shop clerk. The file stayed with the auditor of war.

The second file 8:16

On the twenty-eighth of January, eighteen twenty-three, O'Higgins gave up the government. Eight days later Navarro walked into Santiago, not knowing. Two men found him, one of them a former lieutenant of the Hussars of Death. They handed him to the courts, and the second file was opened. In July the prosecutor asked O'Higgins where the inquiry of eighteen eighteen was. It had gone to the auditor of war, O'Higgins answered, and been lost in the movements of the army.

The same way as the first 8:48

The second file was written by the victim's own side, after the government that buried the first one had fallen. It ended the same way. Navarro denied firing the shot and named a corporal and two soldiers. He admitted one thing: he had taken the gold watch Rodriguez was wearing, and sold it. The prosecutor found no conclusive proof, only hearsay, and wrote that Navarro was in any case a subordinate carrying out orders. Navarro was moved from the jail to a barracks, walked out, and went back to Mendoza. Then the second file disappeared too.

What survived 9:27

What we know of both files is the copy Barros Arana found in eighteen fifty-seven. Nobody was ever tried. O'Higgins, asked about it in old age, is reported to have answered with one sentence: that was a painful error of the Lautaro lodge. Monteagudo was stabbed to death in a street in Lima in eighteen twenty-five. Alvarado became a grand marshal of Peru and died in his bed in eighteen seventy-two.

The body, and a third file 9:56

The body is a separate question. In eighteen ninety-four remains believed to be his were found in the chapel at Tiltil and moved to the General Cemetery in Santiago. In two thousand twenty-one a criminal judge in Santiago opened an investigation. The resolution uses a modern phrase for what happened on that road: forced disappearance. Two hundred and three years after the first file, there is a third.

It is the record 10:23

The killing has a monument at Tiltil, a tomb in the capital, and a face on a banknote. What it does not have is a file. The first was written by the man who gave the order and lost by the man who was in the room. The second was written by the victim's friends and lost by the state that inherited it. The men who did it were never questioned. That is not a gap in the record. It is the record.

Next: the receipt 10:50

One document from this story is still in a family's papers. In eighteen nineteen Mendoza sent the father of the Carrera brothers the bill for their trial and execution, and he paid it. Two years later the same province shot his third son in the same square. Next episode: the family the revolution executed one brother at a time, and the receipt.

Description and sources

Manuel Rodriguez was the lawyer who ran San Martin's war inside Chile, and after the night defeat at Cancha Rayada on 19 March 1818 he was the man Santiago turned to. On 23 March an open assembly delegated the supreme director's powers to him and to Colonel Luis de la Cruz; that afternoon he opened the arsenal, handed out muskets and sabres, and founded a cavalry squadron he called the Hussars of Death. The legend made him the man who saved Chile. The papers say something smaller: three orders with his signature, all dated the 23rd, and O'Higgins back in the government the next morning. The Hussars were not at Maipu.

On 17 April he rode shouting into the palace courtyard and was arrested. In the middle of May the battalion holding him, the Cazadores de los Andes, was ordered to Quillota, and he went with it. What happened on the road comes from the lieutenant who guarded him, Antonio Navarro, in a statement given in 1823: he was called to the house of Colonel Rudecindo Alvarado, with the auditor of war Bernardo Monteagudo present, and told that the government had consented to the extermination of that subject. On the night of Sunday 24 May, near Tiltil, Rodriguez was shot from behind and finished with bayonets. Navarro reported an escape; Alvarado, reading the soldiers' faces, gave the story another colour: shot while trying to flee.

That is the version the first file carried. Alvarado wrote it on the road and closed it on 26 May - the date most sources give for the death. O'Higgins repeated it to San Martin the next day. The official gazette printed nothing. The case then passed to the auditor of war - Monteagudo - and when a prosecutor asked for it in 1823, after O'Higgins had fallen, it could not be found. The second file, opened by the victim's own side, ended the same way: no conclusive proof, a subordinate carrying out orders, the chief commanding an army in Peru, and the accused walking out of a barracks and back to Mendoza. Then the second file disappeared too.

What we know of both is the copy Barros Arana found in 1857. Nobody was ever tried. In 2021 a criminal judge in Santiago opened a third investigation, at the family's request, and the resolution uses a modern phrase for that road: forced disappearance.

PRINT-READY, FROM THIS CHANNEL

The Document Set, Vol. 01 — Cajamarca 1532 and Buenos Aires 1595-1680 — the documents at reading size, with author, date, archive and licence

https://therepository.gumroad.com/l/document-set

SOURCES — every image in this video is a public-domain document.

Each plate below is listed with its author, date, holding archive and licence.

• LFR - Luis Fernando Rojas — 1904 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
• Narcisse Edmond Joseph Desmadryl — 1854 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
• Diego Barros Arana — 1892 | Internet Archive (Google Books scan) | Public domain
• Luis Fernando Rojas — between 1895 and 1898 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
• Diego Barros Arana — 1892 | Internet Archive (Google Books scan) | Public domain
• H. Meyer — 19th century | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
• Manuel Rodriguez abre carruaje a Casimiro Marcó del Pont | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
• Gillet, H. C.. Auteur du texte — 2nd millennium | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
• Bacler d’Albe, Joseph Albert, 1789-1824 - Dibujado por Luis Vergara B. — 19th century | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
• José Gil de Castro — 1820 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
• Ernest Charton — circa 1850 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
• José Gil de Castro — 19th century | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
• Luis Fernando Rojas — 1904 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
• George Johann Scharf — 1824 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
• Robert Cooper. — Londres, 1821. | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
• Johann Moritz Rugendas — circa 1837 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain

... and 19 more plates, each credited on screen in the video and listed in this project's manifest.