Carrera's Father Paid the Bill for His Sons' Execution

Chapters

1. 0:00 Four pesos
2. 0:20 Reading the bill backwards
3. 0:41 The Carreras
4. 1:11 Two faces that are not theirs
5. 1:44 The first trial
6. 2:13 My father must provide the money
7. 2:38 25 February 1818
8. 3:05 Twelve men
9. 3:33 Luis confesses
10. 3:57 Cancha Rayada reaches Mendoza
11. 4:27 Exile or death
12. 5:00 Three lawyers
13. 5:28 Execute at five
14. 6:00 The last hours
15. 6:27 A little past six
16. 6:53 The message from Maipu
17. 7:27 Two in the afternoon
18. 7:53 San Martin's draft
19. 8:16 The bill
20. 8:44 The notary's line
21. 9:07 The father pays
22. 9:35 El Araucano, 1834
23. 9:58 Authentic, and legal
24. 10:33 The receipt
25. 10:56 Next: Monteagudo

Transcript

Four pesos 0:00

The bill came to four hundred and fifty-three pesos and four reales. One line on it reads: for witnessing the sentence and its execution, and other notices, four pesos. It was addressed to a father. The two men the money had been spent on were his sons. He paid it.

Reading the bill backwards 0:20

The sons were Juan Jose and Luis Carrera, shot in the main square of Mendoza on the eighth of April, eighteen eighteen. This episode reads that bill backwards. Every line on it is a step of the trial. And one of the steps is a rider carrying an order that arrived a few hours too late.

The Carreras 0:41

The Carreras were the most powerful family of the first Chilean revolution. Their brother Jose Miguel had ruled the country from eighteen eleven to eighteen fourteen. After the royalists retook Chile, the family crossed the Andes into exile, and quarrelled with San Martin almost on arrival. In the middle of eighteen seventeen, Juan Jose and Luis tried to slip back into Chile to bring down the new government. They were caught, and locked in the jail of Mendoza.

Two faces that are not theirs 1:11

Before going on, look at their faces, because neither is really theirs. In eighteen fifty-seven, the first book on the family explained where each portrait came from. Juan Jose was drawn from the profile of his sister, Javiera, whom he was said to resemble. Luis was taken from a painting his sister owned: Telemachus telling Calypso about his shipwreck. She thought the young hero looked like her brother. The two men this story is about left no likeness at all.

The first trial 1:44

The first trial went nowhere. Neither Chile nor Buenos Aires was in a hurry to sentence the brothers. They wanted them far from Chile. In January eighteen eighteen, San Martin refused to form the military court. His quarrel with the Carreras was public, he wrote, and any sentence would look like his. Two days later he wrote to the governor of Mendoza: redouble your vigilance, they will try to escape.

My father must provide the money 2:13

He was right. From Montevideo, Jose Miguel had written to Juan Jose's wife, Ana Maria Cotapos. Ask to visit your husband, the letter says. Bring four thousand pesos to buy an officer of the guard, and saws to cut the pins of the shackles. And then one sentence that matters later. My father must provide the money.

25 February 1818 2:38

The attempt came on the night of the twenty-fifth of February. Its centre was Manuel Solis, a Chilean shoemaker serving in the militia, who would be corporal of the guard that night. That afternoon, a neighbour he had talked to went to the governor. Toribio de Luzuriaga walked into the jail with a picket of veterans and arrested the guard. A second trial began the next morning, and this one belonged to Mendoza.

Twelve men 3:05

Some of the governor's friends thought he had wasted the chance. On the ninth of March, the lawyer who had prosecuted the first case wrote to San Martin. Luzuriaga should have let them out, he said. He should have posted twelve men nearby, and shot them and the guard that ran with them. Prompt justice, in the act itself. The letter is signed Juan de la Cruz Vargas. Remember the name.

Luis confesses 3:33

On the seventh of March, Luis confessed, on condition that the soldiers he had recruited were spared. His brother's only part, he said, was not reporting him. The plan went far beyond an escape: take the barracks, seize the governor, raise a force, cross into Chile. The case was complete. And then the government of Mendoza waited.

Cancha Rayada reaches Mendoza 3:57

On the night of the twenty-fourth of March, an artillery officer rode into Mendoza from Chile. The patriot army had been surprised in the dark at Cancha Rayada. Everything in Chile is lost, he said. By morning more fugitives arrived, and the city believed him. There were rumours of Spanish prisoners rising, and of royalist columns coming over the southern passes. Barros Arana, who checked, says the rumours had no serious foundation.

Exile or death 4:27

The brothers' lawyer did not deny the facts. He asked for exile: taking Chile from them, he wrote, is the greatest punishment there is. The prosecutor, Lieutenant Colonel Manuel Corvalan, was one of the men the plot would have arrested. His indictment, on the fourth of April, calls the brothers Catilines. The sacrifice of these victims, he wrote, must be decreed to preserve the health of others. Two days later the town council demanded a prompt sentence.

Three lawyers 5:00

Luzuriaga hesitated. Sentencing a case of state without appeal was not really his to do. He had asked Buenos Aires, and the answer would take eighteen or twenty days. So on the sixth of April he asked three lawyers instead. One was Vargas, the author of the letter about twelve men. Another had just arrived among the fugitives of Cancha Rayada. His name was Bernardo Monteagudo.

Execute at five 5:28

On the seventh of April the lawyers advised that the governor could sentence and execute without consulting anyone. On the eighth, at half past two in the afternoon, their second opinion arrived. Death, to be carried out at once, notwithstanding appeal. Monteagudo wrote it. Vargas did not sign: the trial named him as one of the plot's targets. Luzuriaga signed his order the moment it reached him. Execute at five in the afternoon.

The last hours 6:00

At three, the notary Cristobal Barcala read the sentence to them in the jail. At four, they dictated their last wishes onto a single sheet of paper. Juan Jose asked that his wife's dowry, twenty-four thousand pesos, be returned to her. Luis asked his father to pay his debts from his inheritance: nine thousand eight hundred pesos. Both requests go to the family's money.

A little past six 6:27

Two benches were set against a low wall of the jail, on the east side of the square. A little before six, the brothers were led out in their best clothes, with irons on their feet. The notary recorded it in one sentence. Being a little past six in the afternoon, the sentence was executed. They were buried in the ground kept for the executed, and for those whose families could not pay.

The message from Maipu 6:53

Three days earlier, on the fifth of April, the patriot army had won the war at Maipu. San Martin sent the news across the Andes with Lieutenant Colonel Manuel Escalada. Forty-one years later, Escalada told Barros Arana he was also carrying a verbal message. Tell Luzuriaga to suspend all proceedings against the Carreras, until he receives new instructions. Escalada rode for three days. He reached Mendoza late on the eighth, and learned the brothers had just been shot.

Two in the afternoon 7:27

One document tells it differently. In the governor's letter book, a note dated the eighth says the victory dispatch arrived at two in the afternoon. If that hour is true, the news was in Mendoza before the shooting. Barros Arana saw the book and believed the hour was written later: the note names the wrong Escalada. Both versions are here. The episode does not choose.

San Martin's draft 7:53

In Chile, the news caused an uproar. Later, San Martin drafted an answer to Jose Miguel's accusations, and never published it. I did not order your brothers executed, he wrote. I asked for their pardon. And then: if I had been governor of Mendoza, they would have been executed much earlier.

The bill 8:16

Now the bill. The brothers' prison meals and trial costs had been paid out of the money taken from them. When that ran out, money sent from Chile was spent, kept by a family friend, Manuel Munoz Urzua. The same man Jose Miguel's letter had named to direct the escape. In March eighteen nineteen, Luzuriaga sent three accounts to Chile: four hundred and fifty-three pesos and four reales.

The notary's line 8:44

One of the three accounts is the trial costs, one hundred and ninety-five pesos and seven reales. It is signed by Cristobal Barcala, the same notary who read them the sentence and certified the shooting. He billed for that too. Proceedings of witnessing the sentence and its execution, and other notices. Four pesos.

The father pays 9:07

O'Higgins decreed that the bill be passed to Ignacio de la Carrera, as holder of his sons' property, for him to pay. He paid it on the twenty-second of April. The page that prints this gives the governor's letter as March, eighteen nineteen, and the decree as the twenty-ninth of January. Those two dates cannot both be right. One of them is a misprint, and there is no way to tell which from the page.

El Araucano, 1834 9:35

Fifteen years later, in eighteen thirty-four, Manuel Jose Gandarillas printed it in El Araucano, as part of a campaign against O'Higgins. A monster of cruelty, the argument went. His grudge went so far that he made the old father pay for his sons' execution. Others tried to deny that the bill had ever existed.

Authentic, and legal 9:58

Barros Arana settled the first question. The bill is authentic, he wrote. The original is among the Carrera family's papers. Then he settled the second, and it is the uncomfortable one. The law in force made a convicted man pay the costs of his own trial, if he had the means. Chile's penal code still said so when he wrote. This is the same historian who calls the execution violence, and useless. The cruelty was not in the bill. The bill was the ordinary part.

The receipt 10:33

Three years later, the same province shot the third brother, Jose Miguel, in the same square. In eighteen sixty-one an earthquake levelled the city, and the square became ruins. What survives of the eighth of April is a notary's three lines, two portraits of other people, and a receipt. The receipt is the one the family kept.

Next: Monteagudo 10:56

The man who wrote the opinion that killed them did not outlive them long. In eighteen twenty-five, Bernardo Monteagudo was stabbed in a street in Lima. Two men were convicted, and Simon Bolivar went to question one of them alone. Nobody ever wrote down what he heard. Next episode: the murder of Monteagudo, and the interrogation with no record.

Description and sources

The Carrera brothers had been held in the jail of Mendoza since 1817, after trying to slip back into Chile to overthrow its government. The first trial went nowhere: San Martin refused to form the military court, and neither Chile nor Buenos Aires wanted a sentence, only the brothers far away. On the night of 25 February 1818 an escape and rising were betrayed; Luis confessed on 7 March. Then, on 24 March, a fugitive officer brought the news of the defeat at Cancha Rayada, and Mendoza panicked.

The prosecutor, one of the men the plot would have arrested, asked for death. The town council demanded a prompt sentence. The governor, Toribio de Luzuriaga, asked three lawyers - one of them Bernardo Monteagudo, just arrived among the fugitives of Cancha Rayada. At half past two on 8 April their opinion arrived: death, notwithstanding appeal. At three the notary Cristobal Barcala read the sentence; a little past six, by his own record, it was executed.

Three days earlier the war had been won at Maipu. The officer who carried the news, Manuel Escalada, told the historian Diego Barros Arana in 1859 that San Martin had also given him a verbal message: tell Luzuriaga to suspend all proceedings against the Carreras. He reached Mendoza late on the 8th. A note in the governor's letter book says the victory dispatch arrived at two in the afternoon; Barros Arana believed that hour was written later. Both versions are in the episode.

In 1819 Luzuriaga sent Chile three accounts for the prison and the trial: 453 pesos 4 reales, to be paid from the brothers' property. One was signed by Barcala, and billed four pesos for witnessing the execution. O'Higgins decreed that the father pay. In 1834 the bill was printed as proof of cruelty. Barros Arana, who condemned the execution as violence and useless, found it authentic - and legal: a convicted man with means paid the costs of his own trial.

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.

• Diego Barros Arana — 1892 | Internet Archive (Google Books scan) | Public domain
• Antón Goering — between 1881 and 1886 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
• M. Digout — 1857 | Internet Archive (Google Books scan) | Public domain
• Lithograph in El ostracismo de los Carreras — 1857 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
• Diego Barros Arana — 1892 | Internet Archive (Google Books scan) | Public domain
• H. Meyer — 19th century | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
• Giulio Nanetti — 1820 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
• Peter Schmidtmeyer Agostino Aglio — 1824 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
• M. Digout — 1857 | Internet Archive (Google Books scan) | Public domain
• Vicuña Mackenna, Benjamín, 1831-1886 — 1857 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
• Benjamin Vicuna Mackenna — 1857 | Internet Archive (Google Books scan) | Public domain
• Attributed to Jean Baptiste Madou — c. 1828 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
• Peter Schmidtmeyer Agostino Aglio — 1824 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
• Diego Barros Arana — 1892 | Internet Archive (Google Books scan) | Public domain
• Benjamin Vicuna Mackenna — 1857 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
• Peter Schmidtmeyer George Johann Scharf — 1824 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
• Portrait of Toribio de Luzuriaga, artist not recorded — 19th century | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
• Diego Barros Arana — 1892 | Internet Archive (Google Books scan) | Public domain
• Peter Schmidtmeyer — 1820 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
• Bacler d'Albe, redrawn by Luis Vergara B. — 19th century | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
• Agostino Aglio — 1824 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain

... and 13 more plates, each credited on screen in the video and listed in this project's manifest.