[ Indistinct shouting ] -Throughout the ages, there have been great empires and civilizations that have risen up, their creators ruling nations, regions, and continents for hundreds, even thousands of years.

Some of the great legacies and accomplishments of these empires may be lost in the mists of time, but from what they have left behind in rock and ruin, we can trace remarkable stories.

♪♪ -Throughout its history, Mexico has been convulsed by a series of epic, violent, and bloody struggles that have defined the culture and identity of this complex nation.

-I think it was Edward Gibbon who said that history is mostly a record of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind, which is a bit of a downbeat view, but Mexican history has a lot of that.

-When Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés met Aztec chief Montezuma, they created a new nationality in the instant they met.

But in the following centuries, divisions ran deep and continue to this day between the indigenous and European peoples and between church and state.

After 300 years of Spanish occupation, Mexico would in the 19th century suffer five foreign invasions in less than 100 years from Spain and two each from France and the United States.

These influences have created a unique culture and nation that still struggles to break free from a troubled past.

♪♪ ♪♪ After the Spanish conquest at the turn of the 16th century and the defeat of the indigenous population by war and disease, a period of nearly 300 years of relative peace had ensued until the Spanish grip on their colonial empire began to slip.

♪♪ For 300 years, these barren desert lands of what is now the Southwestern United States were part of the Spanish Empire.

This remote and highly inhospitable region was part of what was known as New Spain.

Spanish conquistadors and friars established a network of missions and fortresses known as presidios across this vast land.

What is now Colorado, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and even part of Wyoming were Spanish.

But soon, events further south in the colonial heartlands of New Spain would mean they would become part of a new country -- Mexico.

In many respects, this vast country has been a prisoner of its own geography, which meant that, unlike its northern neighbor, it lacked two crucial things -- transport and water.

-It's shaped like a cornucopia.

If you look at the map, it starts quite wide as though it were the entrance to the cornucopia.

And then it would go like -- around like this in the Yucatán Peninsula.

It has the richest silver mines in the world.

It has some of the rivers -- the widest rivers.

The pastures in some part of the country, they can grow the largest amount of cattle on them.

The biodiversity is extraordinary.

I think it's the seventh-most biodiverse country in the world.

It has an incredible history and archaeology and natural resources, everything from uranium to petroleum to just about anything you want.

But it has some very serious problems.

One of them is still the problem of communications.

It's a very difficult country to move around in.

It also has very serious water problems, and the northern part of the country is very, very dry.

If you fly over it between here and Los Angeles, it's impressive the number of hours that you can be looking out of the plane window at desert.

-For decades, Spain's hold on the jewel in the crown of its Latin American empire had been in decline.

Now a new crisis would arrive on its own doorstep back in Europe which would lead to the empire's collapse.

-When the Spanish Bourbon dynasty abdicated in favor of Napoleon Bonaparte and his dynasty in the spring of 1808, that produced a crisis of legitimacy throughout the government, and the viceregal government in Mexico lost control of events.

-Basically the French Revolution playing out throughout Latin America, but in Mexico, it had particularly effective traction.

-Javier Garciadiego is one of Mexico's leading historians.

-This profound vein of Hispanophobia, the dislike of Spaniards.

300 years of them being the bosses.

The Spaniard is the person you owe money to.

He's running the store.

He's in charge of the work gangs...

Right up the social scale, Spaniards are getting preference in the royal administration, in the clergy, et cetera.

So Criollos, along with all the lower castes, kind of developed this very strong resentment of Europe, which translates at this time into anti-colonialism, because really that's what the wars of independence were.

♪♪ -This is the small town of Dolores Hidalgo, about two hours' drive from Mexico City.

It was a small place 200 years ago, and then it wasn't known as Dolores Hidalgo at all.

♪♪ It was from this church in 1810 that the local priest, Miguel Hidalgo, set off the rebellion with his grito, the fabled cry for independence that would change the course of Mexican history.

The town is now named after him.

Not far from Dolores Hidalgo is a much more recognizable place.

♪♪ Today, San Miguel de Allende is one of Mexico's most popular cities with international tourists.

But 200 years ago, it, too, was a center of rebellion, led by Ignacio Allende, after whom the city is named, who helped raise the citizen army to support Hidalgo.

Together, Hidalgo and Allende led a revolution that aimed to march to Mexico City.

♪♪ Here in Guanajuato, the independent uprising had dramatic effects.

♪♪ This giant structure, the Alhóndiga de Granaditas, was taken by the citizen army after a boy crawled with a rock on his back and set fire to the fortress.

This led to its seizure and the taking of the city.

El Pipita is honored on the mirador above Guanajuato.

What is less well-known is the carnage that followed the taking of the Alhóndiga.

-It was a shocking thing to have happened because, in one blow, quite a large section of the mine-owning elite, the decent people of Guanajuato, were massacred.

This caused Criollos, that is Mexicans born in Mexico, to draw away from any support they might have been giving to Hidalgo.

Because Hidalgo was a Criollo.

He was speaking in quite general terms of Criollos deserving power.

And at the beginning, Hidalgo had quite broad support, but once this massacre was committed, a lot of the better-off Mexicans drew back, and it left him as quite an isolated rump of peasants, a lot of small land owners, estate overseers, people who were regarded as being kind of trash by the Criollo elite.

And the massacre at the Alhóndiga of Guanajuato was treated by the conservative press as being an example of what happens when democracy got out of hand.

Spaniards are still not liked in Mexico.

They are called gachupínes, which is an Aztec term which means a spiky heel or spiky... Basically a description of how the conquistadores with the spurs would kick the faces of Indians as they marched into Mexico City.

And that name has stuck with Spaniards ever since.

Gachupínes.

-The building is now a museum with giant murals showcasing the heroics of the independence struggle.

♪♪ -As a priest who had originally sworn loyalty to the king, he was also therefore a heretic.

He had broken his faith as a priest, and the hierarchy, the ecclesiastical hierarchy in New Spain, were all Spanish, and they condemned his insurrection right out.

So when the Hidalgo insurrection was brutally defeated by the Royal Army just outside Guadalajara early in 1811, Hidalgo, Allende, and the other leaders had to flee out of the country.

And on their way, in Chihuahua, they were betrayed, caught, and brought to trial.

-After his capture, Hidalgo was taken hundreds of miles north to the desert city of Chihuahua, where he was held in a prison.

♪♪ It was here he met his gruesome fate.

♪♪ -In order to bring Hidalgo, who was still a priest, they had to defrock him first and hand him over to the secular authority to be shot.

And he was duly shot as a traitor in the back, along with Allende and other leaders.

-It was on these giant walls that the heads of Hidalgo, Allende, and others were displayed for ten years in a gruesome act of revenge after they were captured and executed.

-They wanted to make an example of Hidalgo, and so I believe they cut pieces of his body up and distributed them around various towns and hang them on spikes or hung them out outside the city walls, so to say, as a warning to anybody who went along that path of violent rebellion.

-The four heads of three other insurgents were placed in the four corners of the Alhóndiga.

♪♪ -Hidalgo and his fellow slain revolutionaries are honored here at the Alhóndiga, one of many memorials to the father of Mexican independence.

-The massacre in the Alhóndiga was a pretty shocking event and arguably caused the prolongation of the wars of independence because Criollo support was lost.

♪♪ -Morelia is another historic town from the Spanish period made almost entirely of stone.

Even during the Independence War, a sizable part of the population continued their allegiance to Spain and the church, a heritage still celebrated in Morelia today.

But Morelia was also home to another politicized priest who would soon assume the mantle of Hidalgo.

His name was José María Morelos.

-Now, Morelos was a more skilled general.

He understood military technique and tactics, and he began to organize a proper armed force to combat the Royal Army.

And he went through the South, recruiting the leading property owners of the fringe around the central valleys who were aggrieved at the penetration of the Spanish Peninsula merchants into their zone.

-But Morelos encountered less support from the Indian population.

-The Indian communities of the central valleys had not rallied initially to the Hidalgo rebellion and did not support Morelos, either, because, as privileged communities, they were part of the corporate structure of the old colonial regime, and the rebellion threatened their position.

-Today, many indigenous communities still practice their ancient cultural rituals at historic sites throughout the country just as they did hundreds of years ago.

-There were many privileges, including the maintenance of their own religious cults and so on, which encouraged Indian communities to put defense of their own community and their own inward-looking community first.

The appeal to the king, for instance, the sense of loyalty to the monarch as the fountain of justice, was very deeply rooted in Indian communities.

♪♪ ♪♪ -Morelos' hometown was also home to a royalist general who would play a key role in achieving independence for Mexico.

His name was Agustín de Iturbide, and he became known as "The Iron Dragon."

He was a brilliant horseman and strategist and an aggressive commander, and it was his forces who captured and executed Morelos.

♪♪ But as the rebellion dragged on, Iturbide reached out to the rebels he had been fighting.

They were now led by this man, Vicente Guerrero, who would in later years become Mexico's first president with indigenous blood.

But for now, Guerrero agreed with Iturbide's plan for a grand coalition comprising rebels who wanted independence and conservative forces who wanted some continuity but a break with the tottering regime in Spain.

The pragmatic Guerrero agreed to Iturbide becoming emperor of a newly independent Mexico.

♪♪ Paintings recall Iturbide's triumphant cavalry entrance into the city and the pomp and ceremony associated with his crowning as Emperor Agustín I.

♪♪ Rodrigo Moreno has studied the career of Mexico's first and only emperor.

-Iturbide was no doubt a devout nationalist credited with inventing the Mexican flag.

But despite this, divisions between Royalists and Republicans ran deep, and Iturbide was quickly deposed.

A power vacuum ensued, and he was exiled to Europe.

♪♪ There is very little trace anywhere of Mexico's first and only emperor, but on the wall of his old palace in Mexico City is this tiny plaque.

-He decided to come back to Mexico, and he landed near Tampico on the beach in Tamaulipas.

And the political authorities there, being liberal and Republican, immediately regarded him as a traitor and put him before a firing squad, and he was executed in 1824 on the beach in Tamaulipas.

♪♪ -The hero of Mexican conservatives was only 41 years old.

♪♪ Meanwhile, the Port of Veracruz continued to play a crucial role in Mexico's independence story.

The Spanish had not accepted defeat and into the 1820s was still in possession of the fort here.

-The Spaniards continued to be in the fort of San Juan de Ulúa until 1825, and they were bombarding the Port of Veracruz, which meant that ships coming in from Europe couldn't unload easily.

Spain's attitude towards Mexico made it more difficult for Mexico to get loans, to be recognized by other foreign governments, to re-establish commerce along normal pathways.

♪♪ -When Mexico declares its independence in 1821, it declares it unilaterally.

Spain doesn't recognize the independence of Mexico, and the Vatican does not.

Two very important players in Mexico's life.

And in terms of the church, that means that new priests could not be confirmed, new bishops could not be named.

In 1829, there's not one single bishop left in all of Mexico, which means that no priest could be ordained.

It was very difficult to confirm people.

Meantime, Spain tried to reconquer Mexico.

It sent an expedition from Cuba in 1829 to reconquer Mexico.

It was quite sure that Mexicans were fed up by then of their chaotic governments and that would welcome Spain with open arms.

Well, of course, that did not happen, and they were repulsed.

The invasion was repulsed.

-Mexico was instead proclaimed a republic.

Four years later, it was time for the swashbuckling Guerrero to assume the presidency.

His occupation of high office only lasted three years, but his great achievement was the abolition of slavery.

Guerrero, too, would join the long list of slain and humiliated leaders, executed in Acapulco in 1830 after falling into a conservative trap.

♪♪ ♪♪ -He was seen as being a dangerous example of somebody who had socially stepped out of line and was assuming powers that were not for that particular category of Mexican.

But the conservatives tended to play a lot on the great fear of tumultuous democracy, as they described it, of the people.

Everyone in Mexico had from 1821, in fact -- From 1813 -- Universal suffrage.

Everybody had -- Every male had the right to vote from the age of -- Initially, I think it was 21, then it was put back to 18.

So you have an extraordinary case of many countries in Latin America going for universal suffrage 40, 50, 60 years before European countries.

Conservative press painted people of lower status and caste as dangerous because they represented the impoverished rural masses.

-With divisions in Mexico running so deep, it wasn't surprising that the next man to dominate Mexican politics was an army general who had shown an uncanny ability to play both sides.

His name was Antonio López de Santa Anna.

-At a time when institutions fail and things aren't working and it can be an economic crisis, political crisis, people tend to look at the individual as an individual that can save them, a kind of messianic kind of and, of course, charismatic domination... always fails because there is no individual that can save the nation or any situation just by themselves.

But there is a propensity of people to look at that.

And you have to think Mexico becomes independent.

It tries a number of constitutions.

1824, 1836, 1842.

Doesn't even get approved.

1843.

And, yet, constantly, these governments fail -- these constitutions fail to last.

The governments are overthrown more often than not by coup d'etats or pronunciamientos, not by elections.

The systems, they have -- Even governments that are constitutionally elected resort to unconstitutional measures to stay in power.

And it is in that context that people seek -- see kind of the character of somebody like Santa Anna as somebody who can come in and save the day.

-He secured that the army... was protected.

its privileges were in place, the salaries were -- Or at least there was an attempt to pay salaries.

So the army saw him very much as their key defender, also very much an active general, not somebody who's sitting in an office kind of in Mexico City sending out troops kind of to fight wherever.

He's always somebody who prefers to go out and fight.

There is an image or an idea that the army is above the dirtiness, the cesspit of party politics, right, that what they are about is the nation.

They have fought for independence, and they have secured independence.

They are the guarantors of independence.

And also, if you are in the army, you traveled, you went to different parts of Mexico.

So if there is anybody who has a sense of the nation of what it is, certainly members of the army kind of fit that bill.

And they saw him as somebody who would kind of come and save the day.

They remembered his victories more than his defeats.

-Santa Anna had become a military hero when he defeated an ill-fated Spanish attempt to retake the country in 1829... then again during the so-called Pastry War with France when he lost his leg.

♪♪ -This is Santa Anna's hacienda in upland Veracruz.

♪♪ Santa Anna was foremost a military man, but he was also a businessman, entrepreneur, land owner, a fixer, a charmer, and sometimes chancer who liked the good life.

-All those kind of generals, they're all kind of pocketing money and they are all kind of buying haciendas.

And, yes, I mean, corruption is rife, but Santa Anna is spectacular.

Okay?

And his buddies are spectacular.

Statue of Santa Anna that they build with him pointing towards the north, basically supposedly to recover Texas, is facing the Ministry of Finance.

And so the big joke is, of course, he's pointing at the Treasury because that's where he's going to take the money, right?

So -- But like so many of Latin America's, sadly, maybe, but political figures, you have some great, great politicians who do great things but happen to be also extremely corrupt at the same time.

-Santa Anna bought El Lencero as a business for its strategic location, linking Mexico City with the Veracruz port, and he would often return here to escape the turbulence of Mexican politics.

♪♪ Juan Ortiz from Veracruz University has studied Santa Anna's connection with Veracruz State and its port city.

-He comes across as a man of the people, you know?

He goes to cockfights and mingles with the campesinos.

I mean, he's not kind of hierarchical like that.

And it's the same with the soldiers.

I mean, the soldiers love him in that sense -- or respect him.

He's kind of -- He plays that card.

He's from a kind of lower middle-class family, as well, so he's not kind of one of these posh kind of army officers.

So he has that side to him.

-Santa Anna is appealed to, both by liberal federalists and by centralists, to come in as the mediating figure, the person who stabilizes politics.

And he is a master of intrigue, and he will intrigue with any leader who will bring him back to power.

-The bucolic hills of Santa Anna's Veracruz were a world away from the volatile and unstable New Mexican republic, which had inherited the entirety of New Spain, including the vast territories in what is now the Southwest United States.

-There was a basic problem, and that is it couldn't be paid for.

the Spanish colonial government in the 18th century was faced with Indian wars up on that frontier beyond New Mexico and so on.

And it was rarely able or really willing to spend the money on effective force to bring this area under control.

-They inherited the missions like this one in Santa Barbara, California, established by the Spanish half a century earlier.

These settlements also included fortresses known as presidios and civic buildings.

But the newly Mexican population throughout these outlying territories was sparse.

In California, it was only about 3,500.

♪♪ Back then, these were remote outposts on the very edge of the empire, a lawless land subject to indigenous uprising by tribes such as the Apache and the Comanche.

But funding of a string of fortresses in the northern borderlands was withdrawn by the cash-strapped Mexican government.

Comanche raiding parties would make deep incursions into Mexican territory, sometimes over 100 kilometers or so, making off with livestock and horses.

-From the 1830s on, there was an increasing number of nomadic tribes coming into Northern Mexico and laying waste, really, to that area.

So the development that had been pretty much ascending during the entire 18th century came to a grinding halt in some areas during the 19th century simply because of the pressure of those nomadic tribes that were coming into the northern part of Mexico.

And the Spanish government traditionally had sent soldiers to try to control them, and they'd been very unsuccessful.

And that's why they established all of those missions in the northern part of Mexico and the southern part of what is now the United States in order to peaceably convince the people, evangelize them and convince them to not become -- to not be nomadic anymore, to be settled, to live in missions, to become agriculturalists.

-Maria Terrazas is a professor of history and has studied these nomadic Indian tribes.

-The Indians were eliminating the settlers, and the settlers were eliminating the Indians.

It worked both ways.

They were still taking Indians into slavery in spite of the fact that slavery was prohibited.

There was extreme discrimination against them.

They were taking their lands.

It was a two-way street.

The settlers were invading indigenous territory, and the Indians were defending themselves the best they could by stealing everything they could steal and killing as many settlers as they could kill.

-As the relationship deteriorated, the Mexicans ended up offering a bounty for the scalps of dead Apache warriors.

Bounty hunters took the money and scoured the borderlands.

Thousands on both sides were scalped.

♪♪ Increasingly, the presidios in the borderlands were tiny outposts in hostile land, fearing the Apache or defending against raids.

♪♪ ♪♪ Spain had already given up the state of Florida and parts of the South to the Americans and the French after the Napoleonic Wars.

♪♪ Now the Americans were coming west, settling in the previously remote desert outposts of New Spain in places like Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico.

♪♪ -Because of the expansion of the United States into Indian lands, the Comanches, for example, had been pushed away from their homeland in the north center, Lake Michigan area, down towards the territories of the Apaches in Texas and on the fringes of New Mexico.

And they had then begun to raid into Northern Mexico.

-People nowadays talk about a Comanche empire, which is probably overegging it a bit, but clearly there were very powerful Comanche states or groups who resisted both the Americans in the North and the Mexicans coming up from the South.

And it was for a while quite unclear as to who was going to win this battle.

-Many of the American settlers who came west were in favor of slavery, particularly in Texas.

♪♪ But in 1835, slavery had been outlawed in Mexico.

♪♪ The conflict over slavery led to even more vocal demands for Texan independence from Mexico.

♪♪ The revolts culminated with the American uprising being brutally put down by the Mexican army commanded by Santa Anna in 1836, culminating in the Battle of the Alamo, now an American legend.

♪♪ With a famous church tucked away in an inner courtyard, the Alamo comprised a large walled compound covering five acres.

Over nearly two weeks, the Texan forces held out, repelling two initial attacks by the Mexicans.

Unusually for the time, Santa Anna fought many of his battles at night, often taking heavy casualties.

And the Alamo was no different.

After several attempts, a third attack took place at 5:30 a.m. on the morning of March the 10th, with the Mexican army descending upon the Alamo from all sides under cover of darkness.

But the Texans defended their positions.

Because Texas was still part of Mexico, the Texans were regarded as traitors, and under Mexican law, all traitors were to be killed.

After identifying an opening in a poorly defended north wall, Mexican soldiers poured through.

Texan forces retreated to the barracks and chapel, with Davy Crockett and his men, the last in the open, famously defending the iconic church.

-The battle siege lasted 13 days, and at the end, not a single American was left alive.

-On securing the Alamo, Santa Anna followed orders.

No prisoners were to be taken.

The remaining Texans were summarily executed.

-The fact that the Mexicans had massacred the defenders, as Americans would see it -- The fact that the Mexicans had paid no heed to the desire of Texans to be independent strongly suggested to the American popular imagination that Texas belonged in the United States of America.

-The American President, Polk, wanted to expand American territory.

He was a Southern slave-owning Democrat, and many in his party saw the benefits of bringing more pro-slave states into the Union.

So Polk engineered a land dispute in the borderlands.

-And it was President Polk who took advantage of Mexico's situation to not just have a war, but to actually take a huge chunk of territory.

-The war was basically promoted by the South because the Southern states wanted to expand the number of slave states.

They wanted to acquire territory in Northern Mexico.

And, of course, they also wanted to purchase Cuba from Spain.

-In 1846, the two nations went to war, a war that would last two years.

As Polk and his supporters threw their weight around, cash-strapped Mexico was in turmoil.

In 1846 alone, the presidency changed hands four times, the War Ministry six times, and the Finance Ministry 16 times.

-Even after the fall of Monterrey, the United States got bogged down in that northern area, and it couldn't advance.

♪♪ It had to invade via Veracruz.

It had to take its army down by sea, bombard Veracruz, and advance up from Veracruz, because if it didn't advance quickly, the army would have come down with fever, as many armies before had in all that Caribbean and Gulf area.

Now, Santa Anna met that army in the hills above Veracruz, and there was a battle -- Cerro Gordo.

And Santa Anna was accused of botching it completely.

-The Mexicans were badly equipped.

Their armaments were inferior, and their logistics were bad.

They didn't have a very good supply system, which the Americans did have.

And so the the Mexican army was often fighting not having eaten for sort of two or three days.

♪♪ -Santa Anna had taken $10,000 from President Polk on a promise to negotiate peace.

He kept the money for himself and diverted a fraction to his cash-strapped army.

The advancing Americans would march along the route taken by Cortés when he invaded the country 300 years earlier.

After a series of battles, they then occupied Mexico City.

This is the Castillo de Chapultepec, situated on a hill a few kilometers from the center of the city.

It had become a favorite residence for Mexican presidents, but the castle on the hill would become the site of a heroic last stand by Mexican cadets who became known as the Nine Heroes, lionized here because they jumped to their deaths rather than surrender to the American forces.

-The resistance of the cadets there, many of whom died in the process, is one of the great heroic events celebrated in Mexico.

But it did not prevent, ultimately, the U.S. occupation of Mexico City.

-For Americans, the 18-month-long war ended up a divisive and costly affair.

The casualty rate was over 30%, with many soldiers dying of disease.

An American cemetery in Mexico City contains the remains of more than 750 of the 10,000 Americans who lost their lives here.

-It was not a very efficient army that faced the United States when it invaded in 1846, and it was facing people who had studied at West Point.

Mexico was kind of a... a review, sort of a first step, a rehearsal for the Civil War in the United States, because you had the generals who had studied tactics at West Point using those tactics here in Mexico against a very poorly armed and poorly organized and poorly financed army.

And they were seeing how these tactics worked.

And then, of course, later on, they worked -- they used them against each other, which is one of the reasons why the Civil War in the United States lasted for so long, because they were too equal in their abilities, in their capacities, and the training that they'd had.

They were all using the same textbook.

So Mexico was kind of a rehearsal for that.

But, anyway, it was very disastrous for Mexico.

-Abraham Lincoln, leader of the Republican Party, strongly opposed the war.

Another Civil War hero, General Ulysses Grant, was part of the eventual occupying force and would lead the Union forces in the Civil War, becoming a hero and eventually president.

He called the war...

Financially, the U.S. got a much better deal.

The U.S. took $15 million of Mexican debt for what was the third-biggest land acquisition in its history, after the Louisiana Purchase and the purchase of Alaska.

The war and the territorial bonanza was celebrated, particularly in the South, where it was thought more pro-slave states like Texas would tip the balance in favor of a continuation of slavery.

But, in fact, it deepened division, sowing the seeds for further conflict, which would have such tragic consequences in the American Civil War less than 15 years later.

The occupying Americans would now confront warring Indian tribes in the borderlands.

At the historic Yuma Crossing, they built this fortress to help them manage the problem.

The Apache or Indian Wars would last four more decades, with the Apache, led by chiefs such as Cochise and Geronimo, who would only give himself up in the 1880s.

Afterwards, Comanche and Apache raids worsened in the borderlands, for which the Mexicans blamed the Americans.

Cattle rustling became endemic.

Hundreds of thousands of cattle from Mexico would end up in markets in the United States.

-After its loss of territory and its humiliating defeats, Mexico once again descended into civil strife and civil war.

-I would say that the Mexican state throughout most of the 19th century, maybe until the 1880s, is a state that governs almost without a territory and without money.

It's constantly having to look for other resources, emergency resources.

So the Mexican government lives in a state of permanent crisis because it has no money.

It has no money to pay bureaucrats, has no money to pay the army, which is a big issue.

-Santa Anna, who had assumed the presidency no fewer than six times and just might hold the record for frequency of exile, was ousted for good in 1855.

He would forever be associated with the Alamo and Mexico's humiliating loss of almost half of its territory after the war of 1848.

Santa Anna has effectively been vaporized from Mexican history although undoubtedly a patriot, having defended his country against the Spanish invasion in 1829, Texan rebellion in 1836, a French invasion in 1837, and the 1846-48 American war.

Santa Anna's personal qualities ultimately caught up with him.

His great liberal adversary and soon-to-be Mexican leader, Benito Juárez, had been exiled by Santa Anna in the 1840s, and he now exiled Santa Anna for a final time.

His vast lands, including his treasured Veracruz hacienda, El Lencero, were confiscated by the state and eventually sold off.

Even today, evidence of the state's purchase of his assets can be seen.

Today the hacienda is surrounded by state land used as a police-vehicle graveyard, a fitting metaphor to the fall from grace of one of Mexico's most complex characters.

The story of Santa Anna's wooden leg is another metaphor for his role in Mexican history.

-They dig up the leg and drag it through the street, and I think they burn it or get rid of it.

And so the leg becomes this sort of symbol of Santa Anna.

And the wooden leg -- Interestingly -- He probably had more than one.

But the wooden leg is in an American military museum in Springfield, Ohio.

And that's because during the Mexican-American War, when the Americans invade Mexico, the Ohio Volunteers or something nearly captured Santa Anna.

He managed to get away, but they captured his wooden leg.

And allegedly they then had an improvised game of baseball using his leg as a bat, as a way of sort of further rubbing it in and, you know, being mean.

And somebody claims that's the first time baseball was ever played in Mexico.

-After the death of his tormentor, Juárez, Santa Anna was finally allowed back into Mexico after 16 years in exile.

He returned landless to Mexico City, where his second wife would ask members of the public to come to the house to applaud his achievements.

A tragic figure, Santa Anna would die aged 80.

-It is a kind of Shakespearean tragedy in the sense of, you know -- if we're talking about the fall of a great man, certainly, that is a kind of quite pathetic ending to somebody who at one point in time was kind of considered the greatest Mexican of all time.

-Next time, Mexico erupts into civil war as reformists take power... conservative forces in the church rebel, recruiting a European prince to take power, provoking further invasions and war.

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