On December 9, 1824, troops led by General Antonio José de Sucre defeated the royalist army at the Battle of Ayacucho. For historians it was the decisive battle of Latin American liberation. After Ayacucho there were some small skirmishes and in one of them -the combat of Tumusla in Bolivian territory- royalist general Pedro Antonio Olañeta, the head of the last focus of monarchist resistance, was killed. Olañeta was executed by one of his officers because, precisely, after Ayacucho, royalist soldiers and officers began to desert a cause that had lost goals and destiny. Ayacucho then was the battle that put an end to the resistance of the royalist armies to the liberation processes initiated in 1810 in different parts of the Spanish-American domain. Both armies reached the limit of their strength in this battle. The Creoles had suffered defeats and internal rebellions that foreshadowed new storms in the future; the royalists, for their part, projected onto these lands the political dissensions of the peninsula and the testimony of these discords was expressed in the recent armed confrontations between the liberal troops of Viceroy José de la Serna and those led by absolutist general Pedro Antonio Olañeta.
Capitulation of Ayacucho The battle of Ayacucho began around eleven in the morning and before two in the afternoon the royalists were defeated and their top leader arrested and seriously wounded. The battle did not have a prefigured outcome. The armies were led by lucid and brave generals, although it is probable that the royalists, as a consequence of their recent internal wars, have witnessed the combat somewhat weaker. to the liberal rebellion led by General Rafael de Riego in Spain, in 1824 the international scene became complicated again when Ferdinand VII defeated and executed Riego thanks to the support and intervention of the armies of the Holy Alliance. As in 1814, this scoundrel and miserable king who was Ferdinand VII installed the absolute monarchy, repealed the liberal constitution of Cadiz and put all liberal dissidents to the sword. This combat between liberals and absolutists is the one that is waged in Peru and Upper Peru between the Spanish troops, a conflict for which we should be grateful because the Creole victory could take place thanks to this fracture. The hero of Ayacucho was General Sucre. For those who understand military strategy, it is estimated that the battle plan drawn up by this brave soldier was a work of art, a harmonious and synchronized deployment of the right and left wings and an offensive in the center that tore the Spanish troops to pieces. Sucre was not yet thirty years old. Among his antecedents was the victory of Pichincha, his participation in innumerable combats in Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru and his loyal adherence to the leadership of Simón Bolívar. After Ayacucho, Sucre was the forger of Bolivia and one of the military chiefs who most enthusiastically defended a political project with a far-reaching territorial scope. None of these merits prevented him from being assassinated in an ambush set by his enemies on June 4, 1830 in the framework of the fierce civil wars unleashed after the defeat of the royalists. The battle of Ayacucho concluded with an agreement signed in the same battlefield by the Spanish chiefs and General Sucre and his staff. There the royalists ended the war, for its part Peru undertook to pay for the services provided by the other countries in the liberating feat and the victors took charge of respecting the physical and moral integrity of the defeated soldiers and officers. Years later , some historians have said that the battle of Ayacucho was preceded by an agreement of Freemasonry consisting of feigning an armed confrontation with a result agreed in advance. It was assumed that the Spanish liberals led by José de la Serna had more points in common with the patriots than with their absolutist countrymen, followers of Ferdinand VII and sympathizers of the executions that the king perpetrated in Spain. This hypothesis is not proven, but it circulates in certain environments as if it were legal currency. Those who have enthusiastically refuted it have been the Spanish officers themselves when they returned to Europe and were reproached for this fault. It was not be for lowerly. In Ayacucho around two thousand soldiers died, many Americans, but also Spaniards, so it is hardly believable that a mock battle with such human costs has been mounted. Battle of Ayacucho-Pampa de la Quinua Much more interesting and macabre was the fate of the American officers who participated in Ayacucho. Sucre -we said- was killed in an ambush and his body was left at the mercy of vermin for days. To this day, the exact cause and the real authors of his death are not known. Ayacucho's hero, General José María Córdova, the man whose inspired decisions on the battlefield guaranteed victory, was assassinated in 1829 on the outskirts of Bogotá by an English officer. General Agustín Gamarra, chief of staff, was another of the soldiers consumed at the stake of civil wars and political intrigues. Gamarra perished in combat in Bolivian territory in 1841, after trying once again to annex Bolivia to Peru. General Simón Bolívar died in 1830, alone, depressed and overwhelmed by illness and guilt. One of his last thoughts on the matter was "I have been the victim of my persecutors who have led me to the gates of the grave." Finally, General José Francisco de San Martín had already been in Europe for a few months in 1824, an exile that would last for more than twenty-five years, that is, until his death. A separate chapter deserves the English general Guillermo Miller, a soldier from Hundreds of combats in Europe and America, in 1817 he joined the Army of the Andes led by San Martín and, after his heroic performance in Cancha Rayada, he was appointed aide-de-camp to the general. From there, a lasting friendship began between the two that would later be expressed through correspondence and would be recorded in the book of Memoirs that Miller would write years later in England. Miller does not die young, nor on the battlefield. He is also not executed. But he somehow he is also a victim of the civil wars. When he returns to America, after a stay in the Old World, he ends up entangled in that inferno of intrigues that were Bolivia and Peru and, as a consequence, he is demoted and his name disappears from all the official files. Miller died in 1861 poor and forgotten. Sensing the time of death he demanded to die on a British ship. When they later did the autopsy, they discovered that in his body there were two bullets "won" in some of the innumerable battles that had him as a protagonist at a time when the military led cavalry charges and hand-to-hand combat. Like Napoleon, General Miller bragged about the number of horses he felt die under his legs as he rode across the battlefield. Sucre's army in Ayacucho was made up of soldiers and officers from various parts of the Americas and Europe. Something similar could be said of the troops of José de la Serna. In the case of the Creoles, we should highlight the participation of our horse grenadiers, whose bravery in combat had already been praised by Bolívar and Sucre in Junín. The "horseback grenadiers" lined up under the orders of the French general Alejo Bruix, but in practical terms the one who led them was the officer José Félix Bogado, the same one who, after Ayacucho, would return a year and a half later to Buenos Aires at the head of around one hundred grenadiers, some of whom had fought from the baptism of fire of San Lorenzo to Ayacucho, without missing any appointment where the fate of the emancipatory cause was at stake. The grenadiers arrived in Buenos Aires in February 1826, but No one was waiting for them there and no one was willing to pay homage or honor to those who arrived after having fought for thirteen years and participated in more than a hundred combats defending the cause of American emancipation as San Martín had taught them. But that is another story.
SOURCE:Ellitoral.com