On June 12, 1833, the Mexico City newspaper La Antorcha announced the arrival of cholera in the provincial city of Tampico, northeast of the capital. The paper forewarned that compared to the myriad armed revolts taking place in the countryside at the time, and the death and destruction they produced, cholera posed a much greater threat to the nation's well-being. "Whereas in one battle, two or three thousand men may die," the paper reported, "in one day cholera could produce equally devastating results."¹

    Striking a foreboding note, the editors of the conservative paper predicted that despite any attempts to stop the disease's progress through the art of science, "el azote que hoy nos amaga" (the lashing that threatens us today) would produce thousands of deaths. Extrapolating the climbing death rate from cholera's first days in Tampico, the paper estimated that in Mexico City alone as many as 18,600 inhabitants could succumb to the disease; for the nation at large their estimate was proportionately higher at close to 800,000.²

    The best defense against cholera's onslaught (el furor del azote), the editors recommended, was "a prudent and moderate lifestyle, the avoidance of intoxicating drinks, and confidence in the Lord God and the Virgin of Anáhuac."³

    This essay will illustrate how attempts to understand the cholera epidemic of 1833 in Mexico were more often than not ideologically charged. It will demonstrate how the disease became a sort of metaphor for the characteristic instability of the nation at the time. Sources consulted include personal journals, newspapers and pamphlets published in Mexico City during the summer of 1833.

    Newspapers of the 1830s in Mexico were highly politicized, reflecting the journalistic revolution that had accompanied the movement toward independence a decade earlier. The same conditions applied to pamphlets. Many times anonymously penned, the latter often served as tracts for competing conservative and liberal interests.⁴

    Some of the most prolific pamphleteers of the time were politically active figures who made good use of public print to sway popular opinion.

    Cholera entered Mexico during the short-lived presidential administration of the radical, liberal statesman, Valentín Gómez Farías. Santa Anna had appointed him as president of the republic in the aftermath of his victory over the conservative and increasingly authoritarian general, Anastasio Bustamante. As this study will detail, many conservative reactionaries used the disease's successes to discredit the liberal reforms of Gómez Farías' federalist government. The Catholic Church in particular, which saw its wealth come under steady attack during his brief tenure in office, claimed that the disease was a divine punishment for the liberal policies pursued by the state.

    In the decades following Independence, the Catholic Church in Mexico continued to hold considerable influence (spiritual, political, and financial) among the Mexican conservative elite and masses, a condition which it guarded jealously. As one historian has argued, "it was a widely accepted fact that any political leader who threatened to lay a finger on the Church was met with anathemas and excommunications, with prophecies of divine vengeance and with the preaching of civil war."⁵

    In 1833, the Catholic Church was still the largest owner of land in Mexico, a fact that drew the attention of reform-minded liberals eager to break the economic depression that had effected Mexico since independence from Spain. A chief target of their liberal program was not only the landed wealth of the Church, but also the revenues collected from the tithe.

    For conservative interests in 1833, the Church was a symbol of the traditional stability many longed for in the troubled years after independence. Throughout the colonial period the Church had secured for itself many privileges by building strong ties to the elite classes. For example, it was the primary lender of money to creole interests, many of whom had second sons entering its service. It also dominated colonial education. As political thought polarized after independence, and the Mexican liberals leveled their sights on its wealth, the Church was quick to exploit the myriad relations that it enjoyed with the moneyed and propertied classes of Mexico. As one author has put it, "the clergy would not only keep their revenues and their privileges; they would also fight freedom of opinion, secular education, anything that might undermine the power which ignorance and superstition had given them over the masses."⁶

    In June of 1833, however, Gómez Farías' radical government made the first of several overt attempts to curb the power of the Church. "Recent appointments of canons were annulled, a papal-bull designating a new bishop for the Yucatán diocese was rejected, discussion of a law introducing minor changes in the clerical and military fueros [corporate privileges] was begun, and there were various proposals aimed at reducing Church influence in education."⁷

    Gómez Farías' attack on the Church's corporate and entailed properties was part and parcel of his economic liberalism. It also drew the most fire from the pulpit. Gómez Farías believed that land as a form of capital had to be freed from the hold of corporate privilege in order to promote economic progress. For him, ecclesiastical and aristocratic claims to property rights were contrary to the interests of the Mexican citizenry as a whole.⁸

    In response to such reforms, the conservative disunity that had characterized the Bustamante era was quick to coalesce. Within the traditionally conservative provinces, reaction to the anticlerical proposals took the form of armed insurrection by provincial generals determined to set the nation back on a more traditionalist path. The state of Michoacán, an area in which Spanish colonial society had sunk its roots deepest, was the first to produce a conservative-backed insurrection proclaiming fueros y religión. The once prosperous hacienda-based economy there had experienced a decline for nearly two decades, and this steady erosion of landed wealth had soured many property holders' opinion of the new liberalism entering the country. Correspondingly, the Church in Michoacán also experienced a sharp decline in revenues from the tithe during the 1820s and was unwilling to tolerate the increasingly anti-clerical policies of the capital.⁹

    On May 26, 1833, in the provincial capital of Morelia, Captain Ignacio Escalada pronounced against the federal government in Mexico City and pledged allegiance to the Church and its privileges. In doing so he appealed to Santa Anna in Mexico City to defend the cause through his office as supreme chief of the nation. Although Santa Anna tacitly declined to associate himself with Escalada's revolt, it soon became apparent that it was not an isolated event. On June 1, a similar pronunciamiento (military uprising) occurred in Tlalpan in the state of Puebla under the leadership of General Gabriel Durán.¹⁰

    The clergy and their supporters reacted by backing such movements. Their principal tactic was to foment disturbances among the still-very-Catholic masses from the pulpit as well as through the printed word. Their intent was to convince Santa Anna to abandon his support of Gómez Farías and dissolve his radical government, putting an end to the pronounced anti-clericalism of his regime.

    The numerous conservative revolts that appeared in the provinces throughout the summer of 1833 provided Gómez Farías with a pretext for even more laws aimed at eliminating his opposition. While the still pro-liberal Santa Anna busied himself with preparing to do battle against the opponents of his government, Gómez Farías accelerated the delivery of his reformist package. On June 8, the Mexican congress proclaimed Gómez Farías' right to resort to the use of facultades estraordinarias (extraordinary powers). On the same day the clergy and religious orders were expressly prohibited from engaging in political discourse.¹¹

    Two weeks later, on June 23, the government enacted the infamous ley del caso which effectively exiled a number of conservative opponents, many of them Spaniards with familial ties to creole interests. The result was that both Santa Anna and Gómez Farías were able to eliminate common enemies.

    In response to the news of Escalada's revolt, the official government paper El Telégrafo published an editorial written by the pro-Radical governor of the state of San Luís de Potosí, Vicente Romero. In it, Romero delivered a classic liberal condemnation of the pronunciamientos plaguing the countryside. He suggested that Escalada's revolt was part of a monarchist plot to redeliver Mexico into the hands of the king of Spain. Referring to Escalada, he stated:

This hypocritical soldier, supposing that we are living in the eighteenth century, is deluded and fancies himself a Mohammed promising to save the religion of Christ and the fueros of the Church and military. Could he be so impudent? When was Christ in need of such self-esteemed apostles to safeguard the religion of peace? Could anything be more insolent?¹²

    The most formidable of the conservative uprisings against Gómez Farías, however, was that of General Durán, now joined by his caudillo (military chieftain) cohort Mariano Arista, Santa Anna's traitorous deputy commander of the previous campaign. On August 2, 1833, El Demócrata published a dispatch that had been intercepted by the government's forces. Arista and Durán were reported to be operating in the vicinity of Querétaro, northwest of Mexico City. In collusion with Generals Palacios and Lázaro del Corral to the south near Cuernavaca, they were planning a two-pronged advance on Mexico City.¹³

    The following day the paper reported that Arista and Durán had sacked the town of San Juan del Río southeast of the capital in order to re-supply their insurgent troops. The editors of El Demócrata made quick use of the event to discredit the cause of the conservative insurrectionaries. They pointed out that

for as much as they profess and feign to pose as the defenders of religion, quite the opposite their perversities appear. Their deeds that become known with each step they take are nothing more than those of a large group of thugs and assassins that disturb the tranquillity of families, attack all classes of property, and rob even the goods of the Church whose cause they proclaim to defend.¹⁴

    Arista and Durán continued their marauding in the vicinity of Querétaro and were able to amass an army considerable enough to warrant Santa Anna's decision to lead a punitive force against it. As Santa Anna prepared to depart from Mexico City to engage the rebel force coming from the northwest, however, cholera entered the capital. After his departure, reports filtered in that the disease had struck his ranks. As the general later wrote in his autobiography:

In order to stop Arista's scandalous acts and to prevent their spreading further, I marched six thousand men to Guanajuato, where the rebel army was still in revolt. Cholera morbus had just entered Mexico, and a terrible epidemic struck my ranks while we were passing through the heavy rains in the Bajío. The dreaded disease ravaged and incapacitated a third of my force, causing me to delay back to Allende, where the epidemic had not reached. I remained in Allende during the worse part of the season, replenished my troops, and continued on to Guanajuato, which was also free of cholera.¹⁵

    Cholera also struck the forces of Arista and Durán. On August 6, El Demócrata reported that when Durán passed through Celaya, thirty miles west of Querétaro, he left behind "nine of his men who had fallen beneath their horses, stricken by cholera."¹⁶

    Throughout the month of August, cholera took a heavy toll on the opposing armies. One source has estimated that Santa Anna alone lost 1,000 men to the dreaded disease.¹⁷

    Arista and Durán suffered a similar fate; one paper reported that cholera was largely responsible for decimating their forces.¹⁸

    When the epidemic subsided, Santa Anna finally caught up with Arista in early October and soundly defeated him. Durán remained at large, but he subsequently posed no real threat to the government. Durán eventually escaped to Guatemala where he died in exile.¹⁹

    Against this backdrop of political division and military treason, cholera steadily wound its way toward Mexico City. Reports of the disease's progress in the provinces immediately became caught up in the rhetoric of the press. Throughout June, while cholera was claiming its first victims to the north in and around Tampico and to the south in the Yucatán, the conservative pro-clerical paper La Antorcha unleashed a steady stream of diatribes against the government. It linked the situation created by the anti-clerical Gómez Farías' administration with the impending threat of cholera on the Mexican nation and capital. Under the threat of censorship, however, papers such as La Antorcha were forced to couch the language of their politics in suggestive prose. On 17 June the editors sardonically wrote:

The time to speak is when there is freedom of the press, with all its guarantees as provided by the Constitution. The time to remain silent is when the drove of demagogues that abuse extraordinary faculties incite the masses to disorder and murder. La Antorcha cannot divulge upon such sad circumstances, and allow its editors their opinions on subjects concerning revolutions, but it will relate the official version of events and publish articles concerning politics and religion, that such might enable us to know the true and sole road down which our Republic marches, in order that we might not fall into the abyss of sin that others have precipitated; we will also relate the news of the cholera morbus, the lashing [el azote] by which God has already begun to punish us.²⁰

    The anonymous editors of La Antorcha continued their invective throughout the month of June. On June 19, the paper admonished the government for failing to supervise and enforce sanitation laws designed to halt the disease's spread. Even though the paper made sincere efforts to educate the public on cholera and its prevention by publishing translations of various European studies of the disease, it could not resist the urge to suggest to its readership that the disease's spread was Providential in origin, a sign of a "divine and just wrath" against the anticlericalism of the state. "To that which rewards morality and virtue," it suggested in an unsigned editorial, "it is certainly not strange nor shocking that which punishes the guilty."²¹

    The government responded to such innuendo by closing down the newspaper. In La Antorcha's second to last edition, the pro-clerical editors proudly proclaimed that

We have the sweet pleasure of making known to our readership (while at the same time protesting) that the closure of this paper is by no means a sign of weakness, nor selfishness, nor even a tacit confession of admittance of guilt -- or that we find ourselves guilty of the fact that we have given cause or reason -- for the outbreak of revolution, when our sole, faithful objective has been to avoid one. It has been well-noticed that in spite of the government's granting of extraordinary powers, that in spite of having been given notice on our part of the possibility of exile, we would have continued with the same moderation of those respectable men of society that abhor revolution.

    We are hombres de bien [men of means and interests] and in that we take pride. He have repeatedly excited our antagonists so that they may point out the articles that may qualify as insidious. We have narrowed down the questions, we have provoked a frank and liberal discussion.²²

    The Church continued throughout the summer of 1833 to goad and incite the public via the inflammatory language of religious pamphlets. In one such treatise the Dean of the Cathedral of Mexico City warned that:

Mexico that was in the past Catholic and religious, Mexico the favored vineyard of the Lord. How can it be that thou has become alien, foreign and odious for thy God? Alas Mexicans, in the last moments of your temporal existence when you are prostrate on your bed of pain, your limbs paralyzed and still, your eyes languid and filled with tears, your face darkened by the horrors of death, when you are abandoned by everything that now occupies you and charms you, your reason quieted, your passions silent, then the cries of your startled conscience will resound in the hollow of your heaving breast. And the respectable ministers of the Church, now despised, slandered and ridiculed, will surround you with holy zeal imploring the mercies of heaven.²³

   The government's response to such dire incantations included a decree on June 19 that prohibited the clergy from using the pulpit for any other purpose than to deliver the word of God. It also reminded them that their duty was to "inspire loyalty, in the spirit of peace, union and obedience, to the established authorities."²⁴

    The charge made by the editors of La Antorcha that the government was derelict in its duty of effectively instituting a sanitation program has some merit, but fails to appreciate the dismal fiscal conditions under which successive governments in Mexico were forced to operate during the Early Republic. To suggest that the Gómez Farías government stood idly by and allowed cholera to close in on the capital is inaccurate. To say that the government had the sufficient funds necessary to implement a sound program of public sanitation is also false. State revenues had rapidly diminished in the aftermath of independence.

    Although a good deal of the legislation directed at the Church was designed to limit cholera's advance, conservative propagandists interpreted all such laws as an unwarranted attack upon the Church's privileges. For example, a law that attempted to limit large groups of people from gathering in plazas and churches was immediately seen as anti-clerical, and hence radical in design. In arriving at their conclusions, clerical propagandists neglected the warnings put forth in the medical pamphlets current at the time that substantiated such legislation and warned against the gathering of large groups of people in crowded, unsanitary conditions. In addition, many conservative reactionaries failed to see the medical logic behind a law of April 23 that prohibited religious wakes and the ceremonious display of the corpses of distinguished individuals in churches, but urged instead for rapid burials.²⁵

    That the government's actions in fighting cholera became caught up in the religious and political controversies of the day should not come as a surprise. In its implementation of a coherent sanitation policy, certain funds that were made available by the government came from recently-expropriated properties of the Church, including entailed estates once held by the clergy. Indeed, it was a fact that the government was eager to indicate. Such was the case of the properties belonging to the estate of the Duke of Terranova y Monteleone, the Sicilian heir to Hernán Cortés.²⁶

    On June 27, La Antorcha reported that the municipal council had ordered that all funds earned from the returns and sale of said properties (located in the state of Mexico) would be utilized "exclusively to prevent the epidemic from reaching the capital, or to cure those towns of the Federal District that had already been stricken by its ravages."²⁷

    The secularization of the Californian missions in August 1833, during the height of the epidemic, was perhaps the most important piece of liberal reform against the holdings of the Church since the renewed attacks on the tithe. In turn, it served as yet another clarion for the conservative opposition and prompted renewed attacks by many pious souls convinced that cholera was surely the Lord's revenge. The government paper El Telégrafo justified the expropriation of Church property on the grounds that the missions were being run by "frail Spanish monks that governed despotically over the Indians and monopolized commerce, exacting hefty sums."²⁸

    As the cholera epidemic progressed during the summer of 1833, more published sermons and religious sonnets appeared in the city's streets, establishments and homes attacking the Radicals' policies and those who supported them. One such sonnet warned:

    Other sonnets, heavy with religious metaphor and symbolism, beseeched the populace to renew its faith in the wisdom of the Church.

    Perhaps no other individual strove as hard to discredit the regime of Valentín Gómez Farías as did the pro-clerical, conservative lawyer, Carlos María Bustamante. As a stalwart propagandist for the Conservatives and a personal enemy of Gómez Farías, Bustamante consistently used cholera as a weapon in his assault on the government. In his historical journal, Bustamante wrote that "the memory of the government of Gómez Farías struck fear in the hearts of Mexicans just as did Robespierre put fear in the hearts of the French."³¹

    "Extraordinary faculties and the ley del caso were the currency of the time."³²

    In his chronicle of the cholera epidemic, Bustamante portrays Gómez Farías as a blinded demagogue motivated by greed and vindictiveness. He wrote that

in the middle of this horrible confusion the only thing that remained firm and consistent were the principles of persecution of those that governed us; blindness accompanied reprobation. His hatred multiplied and doubled back on his efforts to sing a triumph over his enemies. Never have such measures been taken to gather wealth, to attack the sacred right of property and to mock the guarantees outlined in the constitution.³³

    Conservative diatribes such as those by Bustamante further strengthened the clergy's resolve to incite the lower classes against the radical policies of Gómez Farías. In his typically caustic, imaginative prose Bustamante claimed that in the midst of the epidemic's darkest days thousands of people flocked to the city's churches to renew their faith.

The capital found itself in such a state of commotion and upheaval that no one dared not to place themselves favorably in the eyes of God in case they should suffer His judgment. Former enemies reconciled their differences, broken marriages were mended, items stolen from Churches were returned to the hands of priests, and one noticed a great change in the comportment of persons formerly notorious and unruly. Confessors received from droves of penitents prohibited books in great volume whose indulgent passages had destroyed their morality; having been spared by the hand of cholera, one would put in the hands of their confessor a small key saying to him 'take from the drawer from which this key belongs the manuscripts that lie therein; take them and burn them, because they do not contain anything more than ridiculous plans and projects that I had invented to destroy the religion that I profess.'³⁴

    Despite the government's half-hearted attempts at prevention and the inflammatory prose of the opposition, cholera passed through Mexico City's gates on August 6, 1833. By the second week of August the disease had begun to take a heavy toll of life in the capital. Conservative reaction responded predictably. On August 12, 1833, La Columna published an article that refuted many widely shared observations and assumptions concerning the history, cause and cure of Asiatic cholera. Written by the Archbishop of Mexico City and heavy with religious connotations, this reactionary tract bluntly proclaimed that everything that had been written concerning cholera -- "esta peregrinan [sic] enfermedad" [this itinerant sickness] -- since its arrival in Mexico the previous spring was a complete lie, "round like a miller's wheel." He labeled recent tracts on the pathology of the disease as "pure charlatanism" written by "heretic doctors."³⁵

    Moreover, the Archbishop rejected outright the opinions and advice of the Mexican medical community of which Gómez Farías, a physician by training, was a member. Instead he asked:

How can these quacks -- profane men -- possibly know of the cure of a disease so celestial and divine in origin? Attacking the body, it is able to take from the streets the souls of a certain class of serpents that have introduced the pest into the Lord's flock. Their doctors maintain that their knowledge of the disease will naturally guide them to a discovery of a cure. We must pass judgment on them and ask, when have they communicated with God or been graced with the aid of His knowledge and the revelation that cholera morbus is not a disease of Asian origin, nor brought to Europe by the armies of the Holy Alliance, but rather el ángel esterminador del día [the exterminating angel of the day], sent by the fury of heaven justly irritated by the heretical, impious, blasphemous and non-Catholic way of life that has been introduced into our Republic?³⁶

    The Bishop's denunciations gathered momentum and quickly took the form of a diatribe against the radical policies of the Gómez Farías regime and the accepted science of the day. He retorted:

This disease does not call for healing potions but rather reform of the intellect and of the heart. Just as sin is born from sensuality, intellectual faculties have cooperated to pervert the religiosity and Catholicism of the Mexican people.

Those incredulous souls that read this piece will see that it is not only a well of evangelical doctrine but rather a most luminous treaty on spiritual pathology in which are described with mastery the diseases of our souls.³⁷

    Warning of impending damnation should the state continue on its present course, the Archbishop ended his tract with a summary of conservative, clerical thought against recent attacks on the Church's corporate rights and properties. Defending the right of the Church to hold property, he argued that the wealth that Cortés accumulated during the Conquest, "risking his life by spreading the Christian faith in the service of God, was his [and subsequently of his heirs, the Duke Of Terranova y Monteleone's] by divine right."³⁸

    In regard to the patronato (the secular government's disputed right to name bishops), he stated that it was the prerogative of the Pope and the Pope alone, and that "the wrath of God will fall upon any one who argues otherwise." "The Pope is not just the Bishop of Rome, as the impious refer to him," he adds, "but rather the Bishop of the Universal Church and only he can divide, donate or revoke the Church's properties."³⁹

   Concerning the issue of ecclesiastical privileges (the fueros), the Archbishop claimed that they too hailed from divine right with the purpose to serve the altar and defend the Church from heresy. In addition, he warned that "the civil powers that choose to abolish or modify such privileges, will choose to incur ecclesiastical and military indignation."⁴⁰

    Finally, in defense of the much besieged tithes, he claimed they were the exclusive property of the Church. "Anything to the contrary is anathema."⁴¹

    Over a month later on September 14, 1833, as cholera subsided from the capital, an anonymous editor of La Columna responded to the Archbishop by pointing out that everywhere cholera had gone it has produced such false prophets screaming of the Lord's revenge: in India, the Brakmanes; in Russia, the Greek Orthodox; in England, the Reformists; in Mexico, the Ultramontanes. "It is the pueblo [people] that is the victim," the writer claimed. "It is these same false prophets that seek to impose upon the nation a dictatorship that rules with an iron bar, to sustain the fueros and the Catholic, Apostolic, Roman religion."⁴²

    The specter of cholera and the manner in which it entered the political discourse during Gómez Farías' regime no doubt fueled the popular opposition that Santa Anna opportunistically began to sense against his appointed president.⁴³

    That cholera provided a pretext for Gómez Farías to enact anti-clerical measures, as many conservative detractors have argued, however, is difficult to prove. Gómez Farías' acceptance of extraordinary powers from the Mexican congress in early June, 1833, was part and parcel of the politics of the day. However, efforts by the clergy to incite the masses against his radicalism, and link the epidemic with the wrath of God, eventually produced the desired result. In the words of one student of Mexican history, "If the clergy were the propagandists and the paymasters of reaction, its chief source of power was the army."⁴⁴

   The growing indignation of the clergy and the wealthy creoles was unbounded, and army officers began to rebel, raising the cry of religión y fueros. The forces of nature [had] allied themselves with those of the Church and made it easy for the priests to arouse the superstitious.⁴⁵

    In rebuffing extremist claims that cholera's successes were the fault of the government, the liberal-backed paper El Demócrata alluded in several articles, throughout August and September that blame for the epidemic's steady advance and destruction could be placed squarely on the shoulders of the leaders of the conservative revolts that were continually being staged in the provinces. On August 1, the paper lamented that ultramontanes conspiring with ambitious generals were behind efforts to incite the masses to revolt.

   It is not the Mexican Church that raises the voice of rebellion; it is not the Church that indiscreetly incites those to revolt in order that they might follow a bloodied standard; it is those ambitious ones that cover themselves with vestments of hypocrisy, aspiring criminals that ingratiate and elevate themselves in order to attack and ruin the prosperity of the nation.⁴⁶

    Striking a middle note, the steadily more moderate paper La Columna, stressed that the epidemic's ravages served as a temperance of sort and was Providential in origin, serving to eliminate both the demagogues and the pseudo-prophets from Mexican society. As the epidemic's days came to an end, the editors reflected that

although it should not be permitted to rejoice or profit from such calamity, by the limited good that has resulted, we will console ourselves to say that such destructive catastrophes -- similar to volcanic eruptions that purify the air, that fertilize the soil -- bring forth the opportunity to diminish our vices and revitalize the morality of our ways due to the terror that they cause. We firmly believe that Providence, at times, sends forth such universal calamities in order to better a people.⁴⁷

    By looking at personal journals, newspapers and pamphlets published during Gómez Farías' administration, the historian is offered an unique and revealing window on Mexican society in the 1830s. Cholera was used as a tool by political factions of both liberal and conservative persuasion to influence public opinion and action. It provided quarreling factions with a strong symbol of the many ills afflicting Mexico at the time.

    Besides claiming an estimated 10,000 lives in Mexico City alone, the epidemic served to polarize and heighten tensions between conservative and liberal factions.⁴⁸

    Indeed, the study of the epidemic and the historical sources it produced provide rich insight into their respective ideologies. For many in Mexico in 1833, be they part of the ignorant masses, the pious clergy, the educated elite or the land-owning class, cholera's presence and its high human toll no doubt stirred their consciences and their souls. In terms of the liberal politics of the day, the disease's devastation demanded reflection on not only temporal concerns, but religious ones as well.

    Gómez-Farías' radical reformism, coupled with the epidemic's course, provided the initial impetus to the many conservative-backed revolts (pronunciamientos) that arose against his government. It can easily be surmised that the epidemic introduced into the Mexican political scene an additional element of instability at a time when governmental institutions and political alliances were at their weakest. The myriad uprisings that appeared in the provinces only compounded this fact. As a self-styled mediator and agent of stability, Santa Anna's altruistic claims to be uninterested in politics and the presidency of Mexico became less and less convincing after the summer of 1833. His resumption of his duties as president in 1834 marked a turning point in the political history of the Early Republic, as the country turned once more to centralism and caudillismo as an answer to its problems. Mexico was once again set upon a conservative, authoritarian path. In the words of one historian

Hailed as the savior of Mexico by the clergy, who pronounced his coup d'état to be 'the holiest revolution our republic has ever seen,' [Santa Anna] removed Farías from office, assumed dictatorial powers, repealed the anticlerical legislation, dismissed congress, locked the door of the Hall of Sessions, and put the key in his pocket.⁴⁹