Rodolfo Terragno discovered the Maitland Plan by chance, while reviewing letters and documents from Scottish officers from the early 19th century in London, the city where he took refuge fleeing the dictatorship of Jorge Rafael Videla. The Argentine writer and politician was looking for any information about the possible contacts that the famous liberator of Argentina, Chile and Peru, José de San Martín, could have in Europe. «My goal was to find a needle in that haystack. To do this, he looked through the manuscripts in search of references to South America, in particular to the Río de la Plata,” he said in his book. ‘Maitland & San Martin’ (National University of Quilmes, 1998).
One of the archives found was the Steel-Maitland collection, made up of a series of private papers kept by the General Archives of Scotland. They cited several officials of the Maitland family, but at the time Terragno did not pay much attention to a certain Sir Thomas, who was one of the least relevant to his investigation. «One day in 1982, however, in the inventory I found something that moved me. It was a reference to 47 handwritten pages, undated, that an archive official had recorded with the following title: ‘Plan to capture Buenos Aires and Chile and then emancipate Peru and Mexico,'” he recalled.
Terragno was very interested in the document and asked to be allowed to consult it. Little did he know then that what he had in his hands, lost for almost two centuries among a pile of forgotten papers, was the plan that Great Britain designed to conquer or control the territories that Spain owned in America and thus take away its empire. It is strange that, despite its importance, the plan went unnoticed by many historians on both sides of the Atlantic.
Before exposing him, Terragno had to find out who Thomas Maitland was, who he was connected to, what led him to plan the control of South America and how he ended up becoming the shadow mastermind of the independence of Spanish America. For Cesáreo Jarabo Jordán, who has just published ‘The end of the Spanish Empire in America’ (Sekotia), the germ of hatred comes from afar: “It manifested itself for the first time when Philip II stopped being King of England and Ireland in 1558. The English then turned all their piracy on the Spanish and continued attacking them throughout the 18th century, although they did not come out well. During the Enlightenment they got involved in Spanish politics and, when Napoleon invaded Spain, they presented themselves as friends, but they dedicated themselves to destroying the country’s incipient industry in secret, with the excuse of war, and to protecting the independence leaders of America. .
Conspiracies against Spain
The Spanish researcher believes that “the Maitland Plan is the last episode of those conspiracies against Spain that occurred in previous centuries.” Possibly the most important. Jarabo Jordán defines it as a “improvement plan” of the ‘Proposal to humiliate Spain’, another pamphlet, this time by an unknown author, written in 1711 and published in London in 1739. It set out a detailed operation to militarily occupy the region of Buenos Aires and extract precious metals from the mines of Potosí, with the ultimate objective of opening a new commercial route to introduce slaves and own manufactures into South America. All this, of course, at the expense of the Spanish monopoly.
It was in 1799 when Thomas Maitland was commissioned to design a new plan to conquer the Spanish overseas territories. Maitland was only a brigadier general who knew the affairs of the Indies well, as he had participated in the invasion of the island of Hispaniola – the current Haiti area – which was mired in a war of independence. The operation failed, but he earned the respect of superiors such as MP Sir John Coxe Hippisley, who commissioned him to draft the document in a new era of war between Spain and England.
Maitland drew up a preliminary plan that suggested attacking the Río de la Plata with an army of 10,000 men. «Hippisley gave me several documents relating to the Spanish American colonies and asked me to examine them to analyze the possibility of carrying out an advantageous military operation in this part of the world. Now I express my opinion to you with complete conviction: without any risk, with very little expense and without diverting any important part of the available force, I believe that a blow could be dealt immediately as disadvantageous to the interests of Spain as it was beneficial to the political and commercial interests. of England.
“Bash”
The Secretary of State for War, Henry Dundas, received the plan and wanted to discuss it with the author, as he agreed with the importance of securing new markets, although he wanted to consider a larger operation to take “all of Latin America.” It was then that Maitland conceived the definitive operation, which was not intended to “deal a blow”, but to end the entire Spanish American empire. In that sense, the key was on the western coast. He maintained that, once the settlements on the Río de la Plata were taken, it would be enough to secure control of Peru to strip its eternal rival of all its power in America.
The 47 pages Terragno found in London had many corrections by the author. Everything indicated that they were the drafts of two letters preserved as copies. He later discovered that the mention of Mexico in the title was a mistake: the goal of the plan was actually to emancipate Peru and Quito, as Ecuador was then known. In fact, when presenting his project, Maitland crossed out the mentions of “Mexico” and wrote “Quito” underneath, but he forgot the heading and the conclusion.
Dundas received the final plan in 1800 and it consisted of eight steps: conquer Buenos Aires with 4,000 infantry and 1,500 cavalry, take positions in Mendoza to gain access to the Andes, carry out attacks to weaken the Spanish Army in Chile, cross the mountain range, defeat the enemy on the coast to finish controlling the country, continue by sea to Peru and emancipate said region along with Quito. “That is the end of our enterprise, which will dismantle the entire colonial system,” Maitland warned.
Saint Martin’s campaign
However, there was no time to approve it. After a series of scandals, King George III forced the resignation of the British Prime Minister, William Pitt ‘The Younger’, and Dudas went with him. Both returned to the Government for a brief period, but the latter’s accusation of corruption and the death of the former caused the plan to fall into oblivion. The original documents remained hidden for 181 years, until Terragno discovered them in London. Until that moment, there was not a single rumor about the Maitland Plan, nor any reference to its author, in all the literature on the independence of Latin America.
The curious thing is that, fifteen years after the document was lost, the famous Creole soldier José de San Martín carried out his successful campaign and made Argentina, Chile and Peru independent, for which he followed step by step what Maitland explained in his plan. : in 1814 he settled in Mendoza, then formed an army there, crossed the Andes mountain range, defeated the royalists in Chile, assembled a fleet, continued by sea to Peru, landed in Lima and, in In 1821, he took over the heart of the Spanish empire in America.
Some historians argue that the liberator could have known the document. How? After being born in Yapeyú (Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata), he had trained in Spain and fought against the French in the War of Independence, but in 1811 he returned to America, passing through London, with the intention of supporting the independentists. And although the truth is that San Martín was then unknown and his activities in London are not well documented, it is known that there he coincided with other Creole Spanish soldiers who were in favor of breaking the link with Madrid and that he had contact with decisive figures such as Hippisley himself. , which is likely to have kept the original writing.
«I discovered it when I started writing my work ‘1898. A milestone in the great betrayal’ (SND, 2022). When I read it, it shocked me,” Jarabo Jordán tells ABC, who concludes: “I believe that it has not been made more known because the London Government has not been interested. Without a doubt, Maitland’s proposal was decisive for British history, because when San Martín arrived in Buenos Aires in 1812, he followed it to the letter. In the short and medium term it meant the atomization of Spain, the creation of twenty republics and a monarchy that was economically submitted to Great Britain until today. In the long term, the consequence was the total submission of Hispanicity. Spain has not counted since the independence of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines in 1898, but already in the 19th century it only counted at the expense of the British. The consequences of the Maitland Plan last until 2023.
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