José de San Martín Manuel Rodríguez had returned to Chile before the crossing, and began a guerrilla war in Santiago de Chile against the royalists, in support of the upcoming army. He was supported in the south of the city and the countryside. The strategy was to occupy nearby villages, seize the royalists' weapons and flee. The attacks on Melipilla and San Fernando, and a failed one at Curicó, demoralized the royalists. The columns that crossed the Andes began to take military actions. The column in the north led by Cabot defeated the royalists in Salala, seized Coquimbo and then Copiapó. In the south,
Martha de San Bernardo Martha de San Bernardo Martha de San Bernardo, P.C.C., was a 17th-century Colettine Poor Clare who was first Filipino woman to become a Roman Catholic nun and renowned Catholic pending for the cause for Beatification alongside with Maddalena de la Concepcion, a religious from the Poor Clares. While her birth name is lost, it is recorded that she was a "ladina" (a Spanish-speaking native of the Philippines who had no Spanish ancestry) who belonged to an affluent and influential family from Pampanga on the island of Luzon, then part of the Spanish East Indies. Inspired by the lives of the