Politics & Society
Player Submission
🔥 2
Chilpancingo, Mexico, December 1835 · The Shattered Congress
By player
General Juan Alvarez, caudillo of the southern state of Guerrero, has denounced the ratification of the Siete Leyes and calls for the restoration of 1824 Constitution.
“We cannot simply throw out our founding documents and re-write the government whenever a President does something unpopular,” Alvarez pronounces, doing Farias and the liberal Intelligentsia no favors despite ostensibly having common cause. “The corrective for a bad Administration is to recall them at election, not change the rules until elections no longer matter.”
“I will defend the freely elected Assembly of the State of Guerrero from any efforts to usurp it. The state will continue to continue to operate as it always has as a free, equal member of the United Mexican States. I call on all Assemblies of our great Republic to resist and turn away any illegitimate appointees sent from the occupied Capital.”
Sure enough the government appointees sent to convert the State of Guerrero into a French-style “department” are unable to assume their new offices in any practical sense. Guerrero effectively has two governing bodies: the local Assembly that is not acknowledged by the Central government; and a Barragan-appointed governor and cabinet still residing in Mexico City, issuing edicts that go unenforced. The state is isolated by the impasse, and as time rolls on the Assembly and Alvarez’s men will struggle to maintain order and basic services.
The Barragan government, now officially calling itself the Centralist Republic of Mexico, continues to implement the new Leyes in the rest of the country. Protests and acts of disobedience continue everywhere, but no other military men take up Alvarez’s call for resistance; and even sympathizers wonder if his defiance is doing more harm than good.
