Sour Grapes of Wrath

[Urbane Guerrilla]

First Chilean head of state, won his head-of-state spurs by victory in the Battle of Chacabuco (Feb. 12, 1817) against the royalists. Might have done better as "Interim Supreme Director of Chile" had he been able to get along better with the aristocracy and the Church, though admittedly these were tenaciously clinging to exactly what is wrong with Latin American economies generally: being colonized by a sprinkling of large property owners replicating the economy of medieval Spain rather than the American-style flood-tide of smallholders that constituted a middle class without hardly trying, a byproduct of each running his own small show.

O'Higgins got himself exiled for his pains, spending his last couple of decades in Peru, dying in 1842 in the month of October.