Rojas Urtuguren, José Antonio de (1732–1817)

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Rojas Urtuguren, José Antonio de (1732–1817)

José Antonio de Rojas Urtuguren (b. 1732; d. 1817), a precursor of Chilean independence. Educated at the University of San Felipe in Santiago, Rojas spent the 1770s in Spain, where he eagerly imbibed the ideas of the Enlightenment. His involvement in a desultory plot against Spanish rule in Chile in 1780 was never proved, but he remained suspect, and in 1810 was arrested and deported to Peru. Too old to play much of a part in the independence governments of 1810–1814, Rojas, nonetheless, was one of those imprisoned on the Juan Fernández Islands in the South Pacific during the restored colonial regime (1814–1817), which hastened his death.

See alsoChile: Foundations Through Independence .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Additional Bibliography

Elliott, J. H. Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in the Americas, 1492–1830. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006.

                                          Simon Collier