CHENO DEFIED U.S. FORCES, RINCHES, 3 MEXICAN PRESIDENTS

 Special to El Rrun-Rrun

A man who was born in Camargo and inherited a large section of the Espiritu Santo Grant where Brownsville was built and Cameron County was founded defied three Mexican presidents, helped defeat and saw the execution of the Napoleon-installed Emperor Maximilian, and was banished from the U.S./Mexico border.

When Juan Nepomuceno "Cheno" Cortina was born in Camargo on May 16, 1824, Texas had not yet been established and was still part of Mexico. When he died in 1894 in Mexico City, he had fought on the Mexican side of the Mexican-American War at Palo Alto, fought against the French Imperialist invaders in Puebla, Mexico on Cinco de Mayo, and forged convenient alliances with both Union and Confederate forces holding Brownsville during the Civil War. 

Along the way, he occupied Brownsville for two days in September 1859, became military commander and political governor of Tamaulipas, and earned the enmity of the Texas settlers, eluded the Texas Rangers, Robert E. Lee, John "Rip" Ford, and the U.S. Army, making the new white settlers his lifelong enemies. As a result, local Mexican Texans and Mexicans on both sides of the border saw him as a champion of the Mexican name.

Land speculators like Charles Stillman and crooked lawyers like Basse and Hoard and Samuel Belden became his enemies because he saw them as "flocks of vampires, in the guise of men," who dispossessed land grant owners through fraud aided by friendly courts and the U.S. military and the Rangers.

The future Mexican president Sebastian Lerdo de Tejada was Benito Juarez's minister of foreign affairs, of the interior and of justice in Juárez's cabinet  and both were on the run from Imperial forces in northern Mexico during the U.S. Civil War when he first brushed with Cortina. 

Juarez– through Lerdo – had named another man (Manuel Ruiz) military governor of Tamaulipas in early 1867 while both fled from the Imperialists in northern Mexico, but Cortina had stubbornly refused to give up power.

Instead, he sent his brother Jose Maria with customs receipts from Puerto Bagdad to save the republic from collapse because Matamoros was the only port in the hands of the Liberals. Jose Maria on at least three occasions, delivered $20,000, $25,000 and another $40,000 acting as his brother's courier.

Without these funds, the Mexican republic would likely have collapsed and Mexico's existence as an independent country was in doubt. Realizing this, Juarez muted his dispute with Cortina, but Lerdo never forgot. Lerdo – citing the French intervention – issued a decree as the chief of the Mexican supreme court that allowed Juarez to remain president past his term's expiration until the end of the Empire.

After the intervention Lerdo and future dictator Porfirio Diaz  competed with Juarez for the presidential election of 1871, an election which Juarez won to great public discontent and which led Diaz to launch his revolution from Tuxtepec, Oaxaca, and was defeated there.

In 1872, Juarez died and in the following election Diaz lost to Lerdo and continued to attempt to overthrow the government.

The following year Cortina ran for mayor of Matamoros in Tamaulipas and beat out Manuel Treviño Canales, an election that was nullified by Tamaulipas Gov. Servando Canales, Treviño's kinsman. 

When Gov. Canales complained to Lerdo that Cortina was not accepting his constitutional order, Lerdo summoned Cortina to Mexico City, which Cortina refused to do. The two men, members of Mexican pioneer families in South Texas, became lifelong enemies.

Lerdo then ordered him arrested and Cortina spent more than 3 years in Santiago Tlatelolco Prison and under surveillance by secret police in Mexico City without trial before Diaz overthrew Lerdo and went into exile before he was allowed to leave for the border.

While Cortina was in prison, Diaz had had set up his military headquarters in Brownsville and – with Cortina's assistance through letters of recommendation and letters to his former military companions – took over Matamoros and was moving on Monterrey when he was defeated and returned to Oaxaca. When Diaz overthrew Lerdo, Cortina returned to the border, a move protested by Texas authorities and the U.S. Government who withheld recognition of Diaz's government in return.

The differences between Cortina and Diaz came to a head in 1877, when Diaz – facing mounting pressures from U.S. authorities to remove Cortina from the border or forego recognition of his government – ordered him arrested and he fell in the hands of his archenemy Servando Canales. Canales court-martialed Cortina and ordered his execution. 

But pleas by Cortina's half brother Sabas Cavazos, who was said to have loaned Diaz $50,000 in gold for his revolution, and his nephew – Mexican Army Col. Praxedis Cavazos – persuaded Diaz to order a halt to the execution and had him taken to Tlateloco Prison again. 

(Diaz, like Cortina, was present at Puebla during the defeat of the French at the Cinco de Mayo battle.)

From that year until his death in October 30, 1894, Cortina was held in the prison and later under house arrest to prevent him from returning to the border. He was never convicted of any crime. In all, he spent more than 20 years banished from his El Carmen Ranch and other ranches on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande.

(One of the ranches is El Tahuachal, which more than a century later was owned by Juan Nepomuceno Guerra – Cortina's namesake – who was well known in the region for heading the dominant smuggling organization in Tamaulipas and whose nephew, Juan Garcia Abrego, ran the Gulf Cartel.) 

Jerry Thompson, in his book "Cortina Defending the Mexican Name in Texas" sums up this man's amazing life like this:

"Friend or foe, on the border, Cortina's legacy would endure. He survived some of the most tumultuous and difficult times in the history of Texas and Mexico. He fought the Texas Rangers and blatantly defied authorities in Texas for two decades. He battled the U.S. Army, harassed the Confederate Army, ambushed foreign and Mexican imperialists, attacked Juarez's beleaguered Liberals, hanged countless unnamed bandits, and fought anyone who got in his way.

"Caught in the chronic instability of 19th Century Mexico, he defied one president, revolted against a second, and fell victim to the political power and intrigues of a third. He claimed to be a Mexican patriot...fought the U.S. Army, but formed an alliance with them only three years later. Although practically illiterate and lacking the ideological sophistication of many of his contemporaries, he rose to political and military heights of which the more literate could only dream."