Juana Azurduythe ForgeESTP

In the mid-1820s, at about 45, Juana Azurduy sat down in the city of Salta, a long way from home, to ask the authorities for help. She had no money, no protector and no way back across the mountains.

She was a lieutenant colonel of the wars of independence. She had led guerrillas in the Andes and broken up royalist forces more than once. Now she needed the fare home.

She was born in 1780 at Toroca, in the high country then called Upper Peru, which is now Bolivia. Orphaned young, she was placed in the convent of Santa Teresa in Chuquisaca, the start of a quiet life inside walls. She left it at 17. At 19 she married Manuel Ascencio Padilla.

When the wars against Spanish rule reached Upper Peru, husband and wife fought side by side as guerrilla commanders in the mountains. It was a marriage of comrades. In August 1816 the patriot government in Buenos Aires made her a lieutenant colonel.

A month later, Padilla was captured and killed by royalist troops.

Losing a partner in the middle of a crisis hits Forges hard, because the partner is part of how the work gets done. She did what Forges tend to do with grief. She carried it into the next fight, now under the command of Martín Miguel de Güemes.

One scrap of paper from those years, by one account, records her accepting an advance of fifteen pesos. She signed on the back in her own spelling: Juana Asurdui. No complaint, no speech. She took what was offered and went on fighting.

Then the war moved on without her. Güemes died in 1821. She had lost her husband, and now her commander, and she was left in Salta, a city that was not hers.

So she wrote and asked. In her petition, as it survives in later copies, she said she had already been repaid in victories. What she needed now was simple: the means to get home.

What she got was four mules and a little money for the road. It would be easy to read the mules as an insult. They were also exactly what she had asked for. Even poor, she asked for the practical thing.

For a while there was a pension. In 1825 Bolívar's government granted her sixty pesos a month. The payments stopped around 1830, and in 1857 the pension was formally withdrawn. She died in Sucre, the old Chuquisaca, on 25 May 1862, at 81, and was buried in a common grave.

The bronze came later. In 2009 Argentina made her a general, and in 2015 a giant statue of her went up in Buenos Aires where a statue of Columbus had stood. While she was alive, all she had asked for was the fare home.