On July 16, in the city of La Paz, as celebrations for the Virgin of Carmen were enfolding, a group of revolutionaries led by Colonel Pedro Domingo Murillo and other individuals besieged the city barracks and forced the governor, Tadeo Davila and the Bishop of La Paz, Remigio de la Santa y Ortega, to resign. It was on July 16, 1809 that mestizo Pedro Domingo Murillo famously said that the Bolivian revolution was igniting a lamp that nobody would be able to extinguish. Many historians agree that this marked the beginning of the Liberation of South America from Spain.