Martin Guemes was born on February 8, 1785 in Salta, Viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata (Now Argentina); the son of Gabriel de Guemes Montero and Maria Magdalena de Goyechea y la Corte. His sisters were Macacha Guemes and Francisca Guemes.
Guemes attended school until the age of 20, when he was transferred as a military cadet to Buenos Aires at the Royal College of San Carlos.
Until 1814 his military career, while successful, was somewhat commonplace. In that year he was assigned by Gen. Jose de San Martin to take charge of the irregular resistance to the Spanish in Upper Peru (modern Bolivia). The base of his subsequent career was again the city of Salta. It was from this command that Guemes acquired real historical importance.
Prior to the arrival of Guemes in 1814, resistance to Spanish invasions had become a part of the existence of the ordinary citizen of the province and city of Salta. When Guemes arrived, he took general command of the groups of gauchos. Guemes's first task was to organize these groups and to coordinate their efforts. His next was to defeat the royalist army of Joaquin Pezuela, which was currently occupying the city of Salta with over 3, 000 Spanish troops. If this force had been permitted to push on, there would have been no effective force of patriots between Salta and Buenos Aires. Thus began the Gaucho War.
The basic stratagem of Guemes and his gaucho followers was to cut the Spanish forces off from any supply of cattle and horses. All herds were driven south of the city into territory controlled by the gauchos, and any Spanish attempt to obtain them was greeted with wild cavalry charges by the gauchos, repeated as often as 12 times an hour. The inevitable result was the return of the Spanish empty-handed to an army already short of supplies. So successful were these tactics that Pezuela evacuated the city in June 1814 and retreated to Upper Peru.
After a short interlude with an Argentine invasion of Upper Peru, Guemes returned to Salta. He was elected governor of the province and assumed political as well as military responsibility. Between 1815 and 1821 Guemes and the people of Salta defeated four more Spanish invasions. Their courage gained them the title "Bulwark of the North" and made Argentina's fragile independence secure from the Spanish in Peru.
On June 7, 1821, however, a royalist column penetrated the city, and Guemes was killed, but his death did not prevent the Saltenos from again repelling the invader.
His particular contribution was as leader of the crucial Gaucho War in northwestern Argentina from 1814 to 1821.
Guemes and the people of Salta had accomplished a great deal against the Spanish. They had provided a shield behind which San Martin could build and train the Army of the Andes, eventual conquerors of the Spanish in Peru. They had closed to the Spanish the vital gateway into the Argentine heartland, making all Spanish attempts to reconquer the Platine region dependent on a maritime power that Spain did not possess.
