But the ambitious attempts at reform met with immediate and successful opposition. The country was full of Spanish office-holders who saw in them their dismissal and the death blow to their spoils system. In the short struggle that followed, the success of the royal forces was almost universal. The colonists had had no training in warfare, nor had they yet developed as a people the unity of purpose and sturdy self-dependence which was eventually to bring them their freedom. The _junta_ governments were everywhere effectively suppressed, except in Bogotá and Buenos Aires, where the fires of revolution smouldered during the succeeding years of Peninsula chaos that preceded Waterloo, and the colonists, with eyes opened at last to the true and only remedy for their ills, were formulating their great resolve to separate themselves entirely from the mother country; for, while their measures of reform had been suppressed, the ideas that called them into being could not be obliterated. Furthermore their unsuccessful clash with the viceroys and lesser officials brought even more glaringly before their eyes the extortions and brutal indifference of the ruling class. The attitude of the Peninsulares toward the creoles and _mestizos_ of the colonies had always been contemptuous, and now at last the creoles, being for the most part of unmixed Spanish descent (they were called creoles only because born in America) found their resentment of that attitude more than they could endure. The series of military successes that was destined to lead to the desired result began with the fights at Tucumán in the northern part of Argentina, in the fall of 1812, and at Salta, a little farther north, in February, 1813. By these battles the persistent efforts of the royalist forces in Peru to put an end, to the _junta_ government of 1810 in the Plata settlements, were checked under the leadership of Manuel Belgrano. But on the first of October following, the Royalists, in violation of the armistice entered into after Salta, almost destroyed Belgrano’s army at Vilcapujio. Disastrous as was the reverse for the time-being, this before long proved a distinct service to the colonists, for it placed in command of the remnants of Belgrano’s army General José de San Martín, one of the two great patriots who finally brought the war to a successful issue, and who had then just returned with the experience and prestige acquired by twenty years’ service in the Peninsula armies against Napoleon’s famous marshals. The other of these great patriots was Simon Bolívar.