Paredes y Arrillaga, Mariano (1797–1849)

Mariano Paredes y Arrillaga (b. 6 January 1797; d. 7 September 1849), Mexican general and politician. Born in Mexico City, Paredes was briefly president of Mexico in 1846. He had fought for the royalists in the War of Independence and supported Agustín de Iturbide's Plan of Iguala in 1821. A career army officer, he held various military posts in the 1820s but was slow to rise through the ranks. Favored by the regime of Anastasio Bustamante, Paredes was promoted to colonel in 1831 and the following year, at the age of thirty-five, to general. He served as minister of war for a few days in 1838. For the next several years, his base became Guadalajara of which he was made commander general. From 1841, Paredes participated in several rebellions on the side of General Antonio López de Santa Anna, but in 1844 he backed a successful revolt against him. The next year, he rebelled against President José Joaquín de Herrera and assumed the presidency on 4 January 1846. On 28 July he was forced from office. He participated or was otherwise involved in further revolts until his death in Mexico City.

Paredes, who married into a wealthy Guadalajara family, was both an ardent centralist, supporting the restoration of a monarchy at one point in his career, and a fervent reactionary conservative, once warning Santa Anna of the dangers posed by "los terribles y perniciosos proletarios" (the dreadful and pernicious proletariat). Strongly proclerical, he believed that a liberal democracy and federal structure were inappropriate for Mexico in its then state of development, and that the country could be governed only by the army in alliance with the educated and affluent elite.

See alsoMexico: 1810–1910 .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

See Frank D. Robertson, "The Military and Political Career of Mariano Paredes y Arrillaga, 1797–1849" (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas, 1955).

Additional Bibliography

Andrews, Catherine. The Political and Military Career of General Anastasio Bustamante (1780–1853). St. Andrews, Scotland: C. Andrews, 2001.

Krauze, Enrique. Mexico: Biography of Power: A History of Modern Mexico, 1810–1996. New York: Harper Perennial, 1998.

                                Michael P. Costeloe