While Cartagena was being besieged, a Spanish army advanced along the Venezuelan Andes to the Granadan border and climbed to the Pamplona plateau. There they defeated the local patriots, and the latter fled from the province after killing all the Spanish non-combatants on whom they could lay hands. Desperately alarmed, the congress at Bogota made Camilo Torres dictator, and he resolutely advanced with twenty-five hundred recruits against Pamplona. The Spanish general retreated to Ocana, with the patriots following, but receiving reinforcements, turned upon Torres, and on the 22nd of February, 1816, utterly defeated him. The revolution lay helpless at Morillo's feet. The royalist forces promptly occupied the great plateau provinces of Pamplona and Socorro, as well as Antioquia. Bogota had in fact long been disaffected to the insurgent cause and now became openly royalist. Torres resigned, and when Madrid, whom the revolutionary chiefs appointed in his place, called for volunteers only six men presented themselves. Congress dissolved, and the dictator and a few determined leaders, with a remnant of the army, fled north to Popayan. There they joined a band of local patriots under Mejia, and gave unsuccessful battle to General Samano, who had advanced from Quito. This fight of Tambo seemed the revolution's _coup de grace_ in New Granada, Ecuador, and Venezuela. Only on the plains of eastern Venezuela, and in the llanos on the Apure and Casanare headwaters, did a few guerrilla bands maintain themselves. In far away Argentina, the town of Buenos Aires and the gauchos were still defiant, but elsewhere in all Spanish South America resistance to the King's generals had ceased.