Liberal Thought in Argentina, 1837–1940. Группа авторов

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      paint an impassioned picture of the acts of barbarism that have dishonored the name of Don Juan Manuel de Rosas. Let them be reassured, those who nurture any such fear. The last page of this immoral biography has not yet been written; the measure is not yet full; the days of its hero have not yet been counted. Moreover, the passions he arouses in his enemies are still too rancorous for themselves to put faith in their impartiality or their justice. It is with another character that I must occupy myself: Facundo Quiroga is the caudillo whose deeds I wish to record on paper.

      For ten years now the Earth has covered his ashes, and very cruel and poisoned would seem the calumny that went to dig the graves in search of victims. Who fired the official bullet that halted his career? Did it come from Buenos Aires or Córdoba? History will explain this mystery. Yet Facundo Quiroga is the most naïve type of character from the Argentine Republic’s civil war; he is the most American figure presented by the revolution. Facundo Quiroga links and connects together all the elements of disorder that, even before his appearance, were stirring separately in each province; he transforms a local war into a national, Argentine war, and triumphantly presents, after ten years’ work, devastation, and fighting, the result that only he who assassinated him was able to exploit.

      I believe I will explain the Argentine revolution through the biography of Juan Facundo Quiroga, for I believe that he adequately explains one of the tendencies, one of the two different sides that vie within that unique society.

      I have therefore evoked my memories and completed them by searching for details provided by men who knew him in his childhood, who were his supporters or his enemies, who have witnessed with their own eyes some events, heard about others, and had exact knowledge of a particular period or situation. I still hope for more details than I have, which are already plentiful. If a few inaccuracies have escaped me, I beg those who spot them to inform me of them; for in Facundo Quiroga I do not see simply a caudillo, but an expression of Argentine life, as colonization and the special characteristics of the land have made it, to which I feel the need to devote some serious attention, for without this, the life and deeds of Facundo Quiroga are vulgarities that did not deserve to enter the domain of history, save episodically. But Facundo, in relation to the physiognomy of the grandly savage nature that prevails in the vast

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      extent of the Argentine Republic; Facundo, the faithful expression of the way of being of a people, of their concerns and instincts; Facundo, in short, being what he was not by an accident of character but by inescapable precedents beyond his will, is the most singular, most notable historical character that can be presented to the contemplation of men who understand that a caudillo at the head of a large social movement is no more than the mirror in which the beliefs, needs, concerns, and habits of a nation are reflected, in colossal dimensions, at a given time in its history. Alexander is the image, the reflection of warlike, literary, political, and artistic Greece; of skeptical, philosophical, and enterprising Greece, pouring across Asia to extend the sphere of its civilizing action.

      That is why we need to pause over the details of the inner life of the Argentine people, to understand its ideal, its personification.

      Without these precedents, nobody will understand Facundo Quiroga, as no one, in my view, has yet understood the immortal Bolívar⁹ on account of the incompetence of the biographers who have traced the picture of his life. In the Enciclopedia nueva I have read a brilliant work on General Bolívar that does that American caudillo all the justice he deserves for his talents and his genius; but in that biography, as in all the others that have been written about him, I saw the European general, the marshals of the empire, a less colossal Napoleon; but I did not see the American caudillo, the head of an uprising of the masses; I see a pale imitation of Europe, and nothing that reveals America to me.

      Colombia has plains, pastoral life, pure, barbarous, American life, and from there the great Bolívar set out; from that mud he built his glorious edifice. How is it, then, that his biography likens him to any European general in his illustrious garb? It is because the classic European concerns of the writer distort the hero, removing his poncho in order to present him from day one in tails, exactly as the lithographers of Buenos Aires have painted Facundo in a frock coat, believing his jacket, which he never took off, inappropriate. Well: they have made a general, but Facundo disappears. They can study Bolívar’s war in France in that of the Chouans: Bolívar is a Charette¹⁰ of broader dimensions. Had the

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      Spaniards penetrated into the Argentine Republic in 1811, our Bolívar would perhaps have been Artigas,¹¹ had this caudillo been so lavishly endowed by nature and education.

      The treatment of the history of Bolívar by the European and American writers is more suitable for San Martín¹² and others of his kind. San Martín was not a popular caudillo; he was really a general. He had been educated in Europe and came to America, where the government was a revolutionary one, and he could easily form the European army, discipline it, and wage regular battles according to the rules of science. His expedition on Chile is truly a conquest, like that of Italy by Napoleon. But had San Martín been obliged to be at the head of Montoneras,¹³ to be defeated here, to go then and muster a group of plainsmen from somewhere, they would have hanged him at his second try.

      Bolívar’s drama consists, then, of other elements besides those we know about today: it is necessary to place the American scenery and costumes first in order to subsequently show the character. Bolívar is, still today, a tale wrought on true information: Bolívar, the real Bolívar, is not yet known to the world, and it is very likely that, when they translate him into his native language, he shall appear more surprising and greater still.

      Reasons of this sort have moved me to divide this hastily written work into two parts: one in which I map out the terrain, the landscape, the theater on which the scene is to be performed; the other in which the character appears, with his costume, his ideas, his system of action; in such a way that the former will be already revealing the latter, without need for comment or explanation.