Children of Facundo: Caudillo and Gaucho Insurgency during the Argentine State-Formation Process (La Rioja, 1853-1870)
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Children of Facundo: Caudillo and Gaucho Insurgency during the Argentine State-Formation Process (La Rioja, 1853-1870)
264eBook
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Overview
La Rioja, a province in the northwest section of the country, was the land of the caudillos immortalized by Domingo F. Sarmiento, particularly in his foundational and controversial book Facundo. De la Fuente focuses on the repeated rebellions in this district during the 1860s, when Federalist caudillos and their followers, the gauchos, rose up against the new Unitarian government. In this social and cultural analysis, de la Fuente argues that the conflict was not a factional struggle between two ideologically identical sectors of the elite, as commonly depicted. Instead, he believes, the struggle should be seen from the perspective of the lower-class gauchos, for whom Unitarianism and Federalism were highly differentiated party identities that represented different experiences during the nineteenth century. To reconstruct this rural political culture de la Fuente relies on sources that heretofore have been little used in the study of nineteenth-century Latin American politics, most notably a rich folklore collection of popular political songs, folktales, testimonies, and superstitions passed down by old gauchos who had been witnesses or protagonists of the rebellions. Criminal trial records, private diaries, and land censuses add to the originality of de la Fuente’s study, while also providing a new perspective on Sarmiento’s works, including the classic Facundo.
This book will interest those specializing in Latin American history, literature, politics, and rural issues.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822380191 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/15/2000 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 264 |
| File size: | 507 KB |
About the Author
Ariel de la Fuente is Assistant Professor of History at Purdue University.
Read an Excerpt
Children of Facundo
Caudillo and Gaucho Insurgency during the Argentine State-Formation Process (La Rioja, 1853-1870)By ARIEL DE LA FUENTE
DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2000 Duke University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-2596-3
Chapter One
CAUDILLOS, PROVINCIAL ELITES, AND THE FORMATION OF THE NATIONAL STATE
From independence to 1862, the provinces had lived under a system that allowed them to maintain most of their sovereignty, and in which the only means available to interior elites for governing and administering these areas were the provincial states. The functioning of these provincial states affected members of the provincial elites in distinct ways, and this institutional experience became one of the factors that shaped their political affiliations and positions vis-à-vis the process of national state formation in the 1860s. Thus, in the 1860s, some members of the interior elite declared their support for a federal system of government, while others were convinced that a unitarian or centralized system was necessary.
The Provincial State
To understand the nature of the provincial state in La Rioja, it is essential to study public finances in the 1850s, using the budgets passed by the La Rioja legislature in various years of the decade. The provincial treasury's dire poverty is immediately evident. For example, the annual budgets for 1856, 1857, and1858 were, respectively, 18,986, 22,340, and 21,150 pesos. Meager though the allocations were, the anticipated revenues were even more paltry: mainly property taxes and commercial licenses, they totaled 10,667 pesos in 1856 and 11,085 pesos in 1858. These revenues were insufficient to cover even the most basic necessities; the deficit for 1856 was an estimated 10,65 pesos, almost half (48.5 percent) the budget. The deficit, it was hoped, would be covered by a subsidy from the government of the Argentine Confederation, itself on shaky financial ground.
The impoverished public finances of La Rioja would have surprised no one, since in the 1850s, even the most optimistic observers considered it to be the poorest of the fourteen provinces that became the Argentine republic in 1862. In contrast, the richest province, Buenos Aires, had allocated 3,961,260 pesos fuertes for 1859-that is, 187 times the budget of La Rioja. While the state of La Rioja was the worst off, the budgets and allocations of the other interior provinces were far from the resources and revenues of Buenos Aires. The income of Córdoba, the richest of them after Buenos Aires, ranged from 198,061 pesos in 1853 to 83,015 pesos in 1855. These resources did not cover the expenditures of the provincial state, forcing the government to expand its public debt.
The want of provincial monies throughout the nineteenth century in La Rioja and in other provinces has often been noted. Yet it is necessary to go further, analyzing the consequences of the poverty of the "state" in the daily life and politics of the province. As a first step, we will examine the budgets in more detail so as to gain a better understanding of where the sparse resources were (or hoped to be) spent.
According to the information available for the 1850s, 1858 was a prosperous year for the state of La Rioja. Of the 21,150 pesos in the budget, more than two-thirds (69 percent, or 14,652 pesos) were destined to pay the salaries of officials and employees of the state, an amount that went well beyond the expected revenues of 11,085 pesos. Receiving these salaries were a mere sixty-four people, from the governor to the three individuals who sounded the drums at the garrison. The remaining budget funds went to the maintenance and running of state offices.
The budget was divided into "portions" that corresponded roughly to the different powers and agencies of the state. The Department of Government received 21.5 percent of the total budget to cover its every expense, from the 3,000 pesos in salaries for the governor and Ministro General (2,000 and 1,000 pesos respectively) to 200 pesos in office expenses. The Department of Justice, with a total of fourteen employees (eight resided in the capital and six were judges in the rural departments), accounted for 22.7 percent of the budget. The legislature was assigned only 160 pesos, covering the salary of a clerk and maintenance expenses including the rental of a residence for the legislative body, whose members received no compensation for their work. Public Education received only 2,070 pesos, which was used to pay the salaries of the province's six teachers (one in each of the five rural departments and the other in the capital) and rent the houses used as schools, since the state did not have its own buildings for this purpose.
An important part of the budget (6,296 pesos, or 29.7 percent) went to the Department of Police and the Barracks of the Garrison, the agencies charged with maintaining public order. In the entire province, the Department of Police was represented by six agents: four in the capital and two in the town of Chilecito. The garrison, located in the city of La Rioja, was made up of twenty-two men, including the three drummers. Thus, the two provincial agencies of public order had at their disposal a force of twenty-eight. Their meager allotment allowed for the upkeep of three horses between the two agencies.
Finally, the Department of the Hacienda, which oversaw the public finances of the province, including tax collection, was allotted 856 pesos, which went almost entirely to the salaries of its two employees.
For the Federalists from the interior, the fiscal weakness of the provinces was intimately linked to the question of customs revenues collected in Buenos Aires. That city's monopolization of those revenues was responsible for the poverty of provincial states. As the Federalists argued, customs revenues were the product of the taxes paid by the inhabitants of all provinces. But this assertion made sense only for the littoral provinces, whose growing integration into the Atlantic market gained them nothing under the control and intervention of Buenos Aires. In the case of the interior provinces (with the exception of Córdoba), given their commercial integration with the Chilean and Bolivian economies, their ports in the Pacific, and at the same time, the weakness and irrelevance, if not the nonexistence, of articulations between most of them and the Atlantic market, this argument lacked legitimacy. The claim was a political appropriation of the littoral provinces' contention, through which the interior provinces sought to legitimate, and above all participate in, the benefits of an eventual nationalization of the revenues of the customhouse of Buenos Aires.
The Unitarians from the interior had a different rationale: they relied more on an analysis of the regional economies and tax bases of the provinces. Their diagnosis reproduced that of the Porteño Unitarians, as outlined by Régulo Martínez, who when visiting La Rioja in 1862, became convinced that "federation is not possible in [that] province," since most of its population paid "no sort of contribution." In this explanation, the fundamental problem was the poverty of the regional economies and consequent impossibility of the provincial states to collect enough taxes to maintain themselves. This certainly was not unique to La Rioja. Other Unitarians from the interior were convinced that the provinces "would never be able to sustain their basic costs," and so declared themselves "enemies of provincial sovereignties," which they judged to be "damned and evil." Others suggested that the scarce resources of the provinces be dedicated only to "municipal objectives" and "public instruction," while the administration of justice, police, military agencies, and elective positions be paid by the national government. This type of proposal implied the dismantling of provincial sovereignty and acceptance of national sovereignty as exclusive, and derived from the belief that only the economic resources of the national government could form a state apparatus capable of administering and efficiently controlling the interior. For the Unitarians, then, the conflict over the system of government was also a problem of scale: the federal system demanded resources that were above the economic reach of the provinces. As a Tucumán Unitarian, disillusioned by the difficulties that he found in administering his province, vividly expressed, "The provinces are smaller at close range than from a distance, and are foundering in the [oversized] dress we have put on them."
State, Clientalism, and Politics
The most important consequence of the lack of state funds in La Rioja was the state's inability to exercise a legitimate monopoly over violence. We have already seen that the budget approved for 1858 allocated funds for a combined "professional" public force of only twenty-eight. This small number was clearly not capable of maintaining order, especially in the countryside, and provincial authorities resorted to using citizens as more or less voluntary police.
As a result, the state could not impose limits on political competition and conflicts nor could it impose and uphold its own authority. The exercise of private violence was the only alternative that actors had to guarantee their political rights and participation. Private violence arose from the skills that conflicting parties showed in cultivating their clientele, that is to say, the parties' capacity to mobilize people.
In La Rioja, this ability to mobilize had transformed the Federalists in general and El Chacho in particular into arbiters of politics in the province. When rumors of a second uprising by Chacho abounded in July 1862, Sarmiento wrote to Mitre that the hearsay was that "Peñaloza, who has rounded up people [in the Llanos], has gone to [the city of] La Rioja to change the government.... It would be strange if it were otherwise. He has the people."
The decisive factor in the political life of the province was, indeed, "the people." This clientele gave Chacho the possibility to install and depose governors almost at will. And it did not take Chacho a lot to succeed in these local enterprises. In 1848, Chacho entered the city of La Rioja at the head of a group of twenty-five gauchos and started a rebellion that ended with the appointment of Federalist Manuel V. Bustos as governor. In 1856, now leading eighty gauchos, the caudillo from the Llanos deposed another governor and appointed Bustos again. And in 1860, Chacho mobilized his gauchos once more, this time to depose Bustos and appoint Ramón Angel, another Federalist, as governor.
The Unitarians of La Rioja tried to overcome their political limitations with a power whose base was outside the province, one that would not depend on their ability to mobilize the provincial population. The best alternative lay in the Buenos Aires political elites' ambition to take political control of the interior, following the fall of the confederation. According to General Paunero, the La Rioja Unitarians wished that "the army of Buenos Aires would make war [against Chacho] eternally, so that they, who have no following among the masses, might govern comfortably."
In this context, a federal political system that guaranteed provincial sovereignty made sense only for those whom provincial politics offered a real possibility to exercise their political rights and ensure their representation. Not coincidentally, a Unitarian from the provinces considered that "provincial sovereignties were tyrannies" of local power groups.
This provincial balance of power was significant in defining the position of both sectors of the La Rioja elite vis-à-vis the process of state formation led by the central government. In February 1862, when the Unitarian Porteño troops advanced on La Rioja, Lucas Llanos, an old rancher and Federalist caudillo from the Llanos, ordered a provincial representative to the city of La Rioja to support the governor, "so that he may freely proceed with all his administrative duties ... [and] all the authorities established by our government, civil as well as military, might continue in their positions."
In spite of these efforts, the Porteno troops occupied the province, and for some months, Unitarian officers exercised de facto control over the La Rioja government. The La Rioja Federalists clearly articulated their position in this respect. In May 1862, the Federalist caudillo Carlos Angel gave siege to the city where most of the Porteno troops and La Rioja Unitarians were located, informing them that he would lift the blockade only when Coronel Arredondo led his force "out of the city and out of the province." "With what right," the Federalist caudillo asked, "did Arredondo govern La Rioja, in the place of Senor Don Domingo Villafane, legal governor of the province?" A Federalist sympathizer was moved to remark, "One sees that the montoneros are not at all deficient in their understanding of public rights." Thus the defense of the "Code of May," as the 1853 constitution was popularly known, and provincial sovereignty became the main themes of the resistance of La Rioja and other provinces after the battle of Pavon, to the extent that both the Unitarians and Federalists themselves would call Federalism "the Constitutional Party."
The defense of the constitution and provincial sovereignty went along with a pronounced hostility to Buenos Aires. For instance, a Catamarca Federalist was outraged when he knew that a cabinet member in Buenos Aires had said, "The Argentine Republic is not formed, as people generally believed, by fourteen provinces; it is formed by thirteen provinces and one nation: that nation is Buenos Aires. 'Is this,' the Catamarqueno asked, 'the interprovincial equality sworn in the Constitution [of 1853] and in the [preexistent interprovincial] pacts?'" By the late 1860s, these anti-Porteno feelings would achieve a particularly intense bitterness. In the proclamation that the Federalist caudillo Felipe Varela addressed to his followers in the rebellion of 1867, defending the constitution of 1853 meant fighting against "the odious centralism of the spurious children of the cultured Buenos Aires," a centralism that had divided Argentine citizens into two categories: "To be a Porteno is to be an exclusivist citizen and to be a provinciano is to be a beggar, without homeland, without freedom, without rights."
But the La Rioja Unitarians had a different idea of the proper relation between the national government and their province. If the Porteño-controlled government had not yet decided to abolish the federal constitution, which largely preserved provincial sovereignty, it could at least do away with that institution in practice. Hence, a La Rioja Unitarian, who complained about the disturbing (but persuasive) presence of Chacho and his gauchos in the city of La Rioja when a new governor was about to be elected, and who declared himself to be "he who most belongs to the [Unitarian] cause in the province of La Rioja," indicated to General Paunero that "only the intervention of the national government, with whatever pretext or end, within the jurisdiction of the province could subordinate it to the triumph of Pavon."
The provincial states' weakness and local elites' varying capacities to mobilize gauchos allows us to understand why a sector of the regional elites was disposed to negotiate political autonomy, whether partial or total, de facto or constitutional. This is an important factor in an explanation of the form that Unitarianism took in the provinces of the interior during the state-formation process. In this respect, some of the proposals that interior Unitarians made to the national government in the 1860s are illuminating. For example, a Unitarian from Salta reminded General Paunero in 1862 of the necessity to create an army, "forever doing away with the gauchos, who have cost this country so many tears and so much blood." Undoubtedly, he said, the province of Salta had "the best men ... and could form an infantry of 500." Yet he hastened to add, "The resources of Salta would not be sufficient to finance this professional battalion"; this would require funds from the national government. While the proposal might have struck the government in Buenos Aires as onerous, the Unitarian pointed to the benefit it would bring: "Once formed, peace in the North would be an incontrovertible fact." Salta's Unitarians were not the only ones with such proposals. Unitarians from Tucumán also tried to convince the national government of the value of installing professional battalions in their province, which would serve, among other things, "to contain Salta and Catamarca, where the majority is mashorquera.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Children of Facundo by ARIEL DE LA FUENTE Copyright © 2000 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
Introduction1. Caudillos, Provincial Elites, and the Formation of the National State
2. Unitarians and Federalists in Famatina: The Agrarian Component of Political Conflict in a Valley of the Andean Interior
3. The Society of the Llanos
4. “Gauchos,” “Montoneros,” and “Montoneras”: Social Profile and Internal Workings of the Rebellions
5. Caudillos and Followers: The Forms of a Relationship
6. Facundo and Chacho in Songs and Stories: Oral Culture and the Representations of Leadership
7. Whites and Blacks, Masons and Christians: Ethnicity and Religion in the Political Identity of the Federalist Rebels
8. State-Formation and Party Identity: The New Meanings of Federalism in the 1860s