Don Juan’s date with destiny – Frank McNally on another great liberator with Kerry roots

In his ancestral Kerry, he would have been plain John O'Donoghue. But fate (and the Battle of the Boyne) dictated that he was born instead in Seville. And when he died in Mexico, 200 years ago today, it was as Don Juan O'Donoju that he went down in history.

What the Spanish Conquistador Hernán Cortés had done in central America three centuries earlier, it fell to O'Donoju to undo. "Cortez the Killer" (as the former was characterised in the Neil Young song), completed his conquest of the Aztec Empire in August 1521.

Three centuries later, O’Donoju may not have been the anti-Cortés exactly. But he was the man who, as a Spanish army officer and last Viceroy of “New Spain”, negotiated the agreement by which Mexico became independent. The treaty was signed on August 24th, 1821, 300 years to the month after the conquest.

Unfortunately, O'Donoju did not live long to enjoy his distinction. The deal was in any case unpopular with the Spanish military and with many in Spain, including the government, which accused him of treachery.

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But shortly after signing it, he fell ill and died on October 8th, 1821. The official cause of was pleurisy, although suspicion remains that he was poisoned, perhaps by the rebel leader with whom he had struck the agreement, Agustín de Iturbide.

Don Juan was Irish on both sides of a family that had emigrated in the 1720s. His full name was Juan José Rafael Teodomiro de O'Donoju y O'Ryan, the last bit acquired via his mother, Alice Ryan from Tipperary. Perhaps unusually for his background, he was a freemason and of liberal politics, which periodically landed him in trouble as power shifted one way or the other in the country of his birth.

But he was regarded as a hero by Irish nationalists, who followed his rise and occasional falls, through the Napoleonic Wars and later, with avid interest. Here, for example, from 1816, is a grisly account in the Freeman's Journal of his predicament when implicated in a left-wing coup attempt by a "despicable enthusiast" called Vincente Richard, who "on the rack" named him as an accomplice: "Ex-General Renorales, Don Ramon Calatrava, and Don Juan O'Donoju, unsuspicious of an accusation so completely groundless, were arrested and thrown into dungeons. They were then put to the torture, to extort confessions from them. O'Donoju had the nails of his hands and feet torn off by the roots. His life is despaired of."

His life survived that ordeal, somehow, although it may have been shortened in the process. Permanently disfigured, he went on to earn his greatest fame in Mexico. But that was traumatic too. Nearly a century after his death, in 1914, the Skibbereen Eagle cast its famous eye backward on the way Spain had mistreated him then. In a piece by Thomas Concannon, originally written for the Cork Free Press, it portrayed the Madrid authorities of 1821 in sarcastic light: "The Spanish Government, true to its traditions and principles (like that Christian nation on the other side of St George's Channel), disavowed and rejected the treaty and heaped indignities and disgrace upon Don Juan on his return to Spain."

This last detail at least seems to be an embellishment, because according to Tim Fanning's more sober account, in the book Paisanos – The Forgotten Irish Who Changed the Face of Latin America (2016) – O'Donoju could not and did not return to Spain after the treaty. He was seen as a traitor there, "for having seemingly, without a thought, given away most of Spain's remaining American possessions". Nor, despite his popularity in Mexico, could he accept a role under Iturbide, whose conservative, land-owner politics were at odds with his own.

He may have had little choice in granting the country’s liberty anyway. Spain had all but lost control of Mexico by then. But he had no regrets about the deal. According to Fanning: “He himself was convinced that he had acted correctly, inspired by a political view that held the liberty of the people as sacred. He wrote that […] every society had the right ‘to declare its liberty and defend at the same time the life of the individual’, and that any efforts made to oppose that sacred torrent, once its majestic and sublime course had begun,’ were useless.”

Iturbide’s regime did not last long before he too met a premature end. And Mexico in general had many turbulent decades ahead. But O’Donoju, 59 when he died, had secured an honoured place in the country’s history. His body was embalmed and still rests today in the vault of the Spanish viceroys under Mexico City cathedral’s baroque masterpiece, the Altar of the Kings.