The real Argentine: Notes and Impressions of a Year in the Argentine and Uruguay

by J. A. Hammerton

It is an undeniable fact, and well-known that Dr. José Pedro Ramírez in 1873 purchased the vote of the Deputy Isaac de Tezanos for the sum of 40,000 pesos, in favour of the candidature for the Presidency of the Republic of his father-in-law, Dr. Don José María Muñoz.

It seems very probable that the same occurred with regard to the votes of the deputies Hermógenes Formoso and Vicente Garzón.

From publications in El Siglo of that period, it would seem that at the same time as he was thus purchasing these, Dr. José Pedro Ramírez was accusing the Gomensor faction of having offered nearly three times as much for the votes of the same deputies—which he well knew to be a calumny, since he himself had purchased them for much less.

The result of these infamies was the military mutiny of 1875, and five lustres of misfortunes for the country.

All this notwithstanding, the Nationalist Party, the Constitutionalists that still remain, and a few disaffected Colorados are rendering homage to Dr. Ramírez, whom they proclaim as the first, or one of the first citizens of the Republic.

Those who so act are corrupting public morals and robbing themselves of authority and prestige.

This extraordinary presidential-journalistic attack on an aged politician, then so feeble and near his end that he died a few months later, was occasioned chiefly because the journal El Siglo, one of the most influential of the Colorado newspapers, with which Dr. Ramírez, as a young man, was connected, and with which certain of his relatives are now associated, had, in common with the entire press of the country, strongly opposed the President’s suggested reform. For nearly forty years the country had chosen to forget that Dr. Ramírez had so acted in 1873, and he himself at that time publicly made confession of what he had done, and withdrew from his journalistic post as an act of penance, although assuredly he had in no wise sinned against the spirit of that time. The spectacle of the President of the Republic using the columns of his own private journal thus to attack the aged publicist who, in the forty years following this admitted transgression, had done much to merit the good opinion and win the homage of his fellow-countrymen, ranged every journalist of any prestige against President Batlle and brought, as I well remember, streams of telegrams from distant parts of South America, from eminent statesmen and the leading newspapers, sympathising with the victim of the President’s attack.

What may be the ultimate outcome of those strange events of the summer of 1913, I do not know, but perhaps I have said sufficient about the politics of the country to show that there is room for improvement. At the same time, to do justice to Señor Batlle y Ordóñez, I recognise in him a really strong man, and regret that his second term of office should have been so marred by ill-considered and anti-democratic suggestions of constitutional change. He had previously won a reputation for political honesty which, even among his bitterest enemies, I never heard called in question, and much that he did, even during his second stormy administration, was entirely for the good of the country. I remember that at the height of his battle with the Chambers and the public, he promulgated a new law for the protection of animals, accompanied by a presidential message worthy to be printed in letters of gold by the R.S.P.C.A. and circulated throughout all Latin-America. He even went so far as to prohibit boxing matches, as el box, a growing passion in the Argentine, was beginning to acquire popularity in Uruguay. Had his energies been more wisely directed and his undoubted strength of character applied to the furtherance of certain much-needed public improvements and to the real widening of the democratic basis of the Constitution, he might have made his second administration a landmark in Uruguayan progress.

Progress is inevitable, and if it has been retarded in Uruguay by the frequent revolutionary disturbances, it has been none the less real. As a matter of fact, we are apt to overestimate the importance of these revolutions. Before the dawn of the modern commercial era, which has so greatly developed the capital city, revolutions were doubtless vastly disturbing and made the life of the community somewhat burdensome. But it is surprising to note how large a proportion of the population have survived these supposedly sanguinary affairs. You will see far more elderly people in Montevideo than in Buenos Ayres, where men of over fifty-five are rarities in the streets. The fact is that Uruguayan revolutions have degenerated into something very much akin to the duel in France, and they are usually fought where there is likely to be the least danger to property, as Whites and Reds alike have come to appreciate the advantages of modern domestic comfort, and the more beautiful villas there are erected in the suburbs and surroundings of Montevideo, the less likely are revolutions to occur. Most of those of recent date have been really very little more serious than the old election rioting that used to accompany political changes in our own country.