Latin America: Its Rise and Progress

by Francisco García Calderón

RIVADAVIA.
President of Argentina (1826-1827).

This Brazilian victory aroused the indignation of the Argentine Unitarians; they overthrew Dorrego and elected General Lavalle to be Governor. A storm of tragedy broke over the divided city. Dorrego was shot by order of Lavalle, and then began the terrible war of hatred between federals and Unitarians—a Jacobin conflict.

The daring revolt of the provinces had coincided with the promulgation of the Constitution of 1826. Since 1820 the Argentine provinces had been in a state of revolt against the imposed or suggested rule of Buenos-Ayres; it was the period of caudillos. To the aristocratic presidency of Rivadavia they opposed the Terror. They represented the barbarian might of the provinces. They made federation a reality, cemented it by long quarrels, sanguinary hatreds, conventions, alliances, and friendships. The provinces fought within the nation; the cities within the province; within the city, the families. An inflexible individualism—the fundamental Spanish tradition—dissolved the provisional crystallisations of society and politics. It was not a simple federal disaggregation—a clash of ambitious overlords eager to surround their manors by new domains; it was a mystic barbarism, the leaders of which recalled the nomadic and fanatical Tamerlane. They were impelled by a strange, rude force, disordered and prodigious—the genius of the pampa, the instinct of a vagabond race.

General Quiroga, the "Facundo" of Sarmiento, was the prototype of these turbulent gauchos. By conquest or alliance he extended his government over several provinces. The paltry Bustos, the Reinafé family, the crafty Lopez, and Ferré were also among the Argentine caudillos; Lopez extended his rule over Entre-Rios, Santa-Fé, and Cordoba. Facundo dominated them all by the range of his deeds and his influence. He came from the Andes to the conquest of the seaboard and the great rivers; he reigned in Rio, Jujuy, Salta, Tucuman, Catamarca, San Juan, San Luis, and Mendoza; he grouped vast provinces together, and paved the way for unity in the future; he was the forerunner of Rosas. Cruel and loyal, noble and bloodthirsty, honest, frugal, and aggressive, a product of the pampa, he felt himself actuated by primitive forces, by simple passions and instincts, by heroism and the love of peril. Powerfully built, with an abundant shock of hair, bushy eyebrows, and the eyes of a ruler, he resembled one of those gloomy Khalifs who brought the mystic terror of the Orient to the West. On the standard which he raised against the liberalism of Rivadavia was the proclamation: "Liberty or death!" He was the "bad gaucho" the enemy of social discipline, who lives far from the city and its laws, conscious and proud of his barbarism. Sarmiento stated that he entertained "a great aversion for decent persons," and that he hated the lordly city of Buenos-Ayres. He fought with success against the Unitarian generals, Paz and La Madrid, and against such secondary leaders as Lopez and Reinafé. His life was a continual running hunt across the rugged mountains; his goal the city of Rivadavia and the Directory; his campaigns were bloody, and worthy of a chaotic period, during which barbarism changed only in kind from Buenos-Ayres to Rioja. He pillaged, executed, and triumphed in his rude insurrections at Tala, at Campana de Cuyo. He wrote to General Paz in 1830, in his downright manner: "In the advanced state of the provinces it is impossible to satisfy local pretensions except by the system of federation. The provinces will be cut to bits, perhaps, but conquered—never!" Assassinated at Barranco-Yaco by the treacherous hand of Reinafé, probably with the complicity of Rosas, he left his heritage to this last of the caudillos.

Rosas was one of those hyperborean beings upon whom Gobineau conferred a perdurable authority over the human herd. He possessed a coat of arms, blue eyes, and the spirit of a ruler. Sober, astute, proud, energetic, he combined all the characteristics of a great and imperious personality. He obeyed neither general conceptions nor vast political plans. He was a will served by ambitions. His authoritative character of a Spanish patrician made him the paterfamilias of the Argentine democracy. The pursuit of power was an instinct, a physiological need; he governed in the interests of federation, the concrete, practical idea, which he absorbed by contact with many regions, of the nomadic gaucho, the self-willed provincial; and he expounded it in 1824 in a famous letter to Quiroga. He was not content to work for the mere realisation of the North American ideal; his aim was national federation. He was persuaded of "the necessity of a general government, the only means of giving life and respectability" to a republic; but only the properly constituted states would accept this central authority. Of a federative republic he writes that nothing more chimerical and disastrous could be imagined when it is not composed of properly organised states. The anarchy of the Argentine was not a condition propitious to the foundation of federation or unity; Rosas affirmed, recalling the United States, that "the general government in a federative republic does not unite the federated peoples: it represents them when united." So he wished to unite the provinces: "the elements of discord among the peoples must be given time to destroy themselves, and each government must foster the spirit of peace and tranquillity."

Amid dogmatic governors and impenitent revolutionaries, this president who desired a real federation and accepted, as a factor of human conflicts, time, the creator of stable nations, seems a figure strangely out of place. Rosas left "the elements of discord time to destroy themselves"; an invulnerable dictator, he watched over the obscure process of national gestation, isolating his people, detesting the foreigner, as though he wished to prepare the way, free from all perturbing influences, for the fusion of antagonistic races, the purging of local hatreds, and the harmonious life of men, traditions, and provinces within a plastic and fruitful organism. From chaos a spontaneous federation was to spring, of the North American type; as in the formation of the United States, the provinces, in possession of their autonomy, concluded pacts of union. Such was the federal pact of 1831, between the provinces of the seaboard—Corrientes, Entre-Rios, Buenos-Ayres, and Santa-Fé; such, twenty years later, was the Constitution of 1853.

Pacts and charters recognised "the sovereignty, liberty, and independence of each of the provinces."

The work of Rosas was profoundly Argentine. It presents a triple civilising significance; it overcame the partial caudillos, conquered the wilderness, and founded an organic confederation. Traditional, for it respected ancient liberties; opportunist, adapted at the critical moment of national evolution, for it prevented the disaggregation of the provinces by the labours of unconscious leaders. Like Porfirio Diaz, Rosas destroyed the provincial caudillos; he was a Machiavelli of the pampas. He dissembled his unificatory aims; he caused division among the governors, stimulated their mutual hatred, presided over their quarrels; he grouped or isolated his disciples, who cut a lively figure on the hustings. When the power of Quiroga increased, he protected Lopez, and exposed the former to the hatred of the Reinafé; Quiroga once murdered, he had the latter accused. He expected the governors to submit to his exequatur; the demi-gods fell before the stroke of his imperial axe. "Rosas is the Louis XI. of Argentine history," said Ernesto Quesada, with justice; for over the heads of the feudal barons he raised a magnificent Unitarian structure; he was the creator of Argentine nationality.