Template:On this day - March 2

José Martínez Ruiz "Azorín"

• 1561 – At the edge of the Andes mountain range (in present-day Argentina), Pedro del Castillo founds the village of Mendoza del Nuevo Valle de La Rioja (the present-day city of Mendoza).
• 1616 – In present-day Colombia, Francisco de Herrera Campuzano founds the village of San Lorenzo de Aburrá, which years later will become the city of Medellín.
• 1724 – Death of Joaquín Churriguera, Spanish architect, master builder of the New Cathedral of Salamanca (b. 1674).
• 1783 – Death of Francisco Salzillo, Spanish Baroque sculptor (b. 1707).
• 1811 – In Venezuela the First Congress is constituted, one year after the revolutionary movement of 1810.
• 1811 – In the waters of the Paraná River, off the village of San Nicolás de los Arroyos, 230 km north of Buenos Aires, a Spanish fleet defeats the Argentine one at the Battle of San Nicolás.
• 1821 – In Alicante (Spain), more than a thousand armed unemployed workers attack the textile factories of Alcoy and destroy their machines.
• 1821 – In Mexico, the royalist army commanded by Agustín de Iturbide swears the Plan of Iguala.
• 1822 – In Uruguay, the capitulation of the caudillo Fructuoso Rivera completes the consolidation of Portuguese rule over Uruguayan territory.
• 1836 – The Republic of Texas declares its independence from Mexico.
• 1906 – King Alfonso XIII of Spain inaugurates the works of the Aragon and Catalonia Canal.
• 1912 – In Spain, reading El Quijote is made compulsory in public schools.
• 1913 – In Madrid, Catholic protesters hold a rally against the Government's plan to make the teaching of the Catholic religion non-compulsory in schools.
• 1915 – In Uruguay, Feliciano Viera is elected president.
• 1916 – In New York, the Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez marries Zenobia Camprubí.
• 1925 – In Barcelona (Spain), the Austrian composer Richard Strauss begins conducting the Barcelona Municipal Band.
• 1928 – In Spain, King Alfonso XIII removes Miguel de Unamuno from his chair at the University of Salamanca.
• 1959 – In Cuba, Fidel Castro hands over land titles to 340 tobacco growers of Las Villas.
• 1961 – In Washington, President John F. Kennedy announces the United States embargo against Cuba.
• 1961 – In Ecuador, President José M. Velazco denounces that U.S. President John F. Kennedy was making a loan to his country conditional on its breaking off relations with Cuba.
• 1967 – Death of José Martínez Ruiz (Azorín), Spanish writer of the Generation of '98, who cultivated various literary genres and who, as a politician, held a seat as deputy in the Cortes five times during the Restoration (b. 1873).
• 1974 – The anarchist Salvador Puig Antich is executed by garrote, the last person executed in Spain by this method (b. 1948).
• 1991 – In Colombia, more than two thousand guerrillas of the Popular Liberation Army hand over their weapons.
• 1994 – The Queen of Spain, Sofía of Greece, receives the Wiesenthal Human Rights Award for her continuous commitment to tolerance and to the fight against antisemitism and racism.
• 2000 – In London (United Kingdom), the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet is released after 503 days of detention.
• 2011 – Death of José Rogelio Álvarez, Mexican writer, editor, historian and academic, director of the Enciclopedia de México (b. 1922).