Colonel Martín Miguel de Güemes and the foreigners

Abstract

The unity that Spain wanted to maintain in its colonies on three fronts: political, economic and religious, gave rise to its authorities to dictate a series of provisions aimed at preventing the entry of foreigners into the territory of the Republic, or to place them in a situation inferior to the Spaniards and the inhabitants born in the country. There did not exist, then, in those colonial times, the principles of civil equality that govern us today, and that seem so obvious and so natural to us, that they are not even discussed. The plane in which the foreigners were placed by a warrior who acted effectively in the liberating campaign, not in Buenos Aires, not in the littoral, but in the northern provinces of Salta and Jujuy. Such a character is none other than Colonel Don Martin Güemes, the famous chief of the gauchos, and governor of Salta.