Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Buenos Aires en armas: La revolución de 1880

2010; Duke University Press; Volume: 90; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2009-162

1527-1900

David Rock,

Latin American Literature Studies

This book stands out among the best in recent years on nineteenth-century Argentina, remarkable for its detail and documentation and for its literary clarity. It narrates the immediate causes and the events of the brief civil war of 1880, which originated as a dispute over the status of Buenos Aires in the national union and over the presidential succession, and resulted in the designation of the city of Buenos Aires as the federal capital. Hilda Sabato’s narrative addresses a ten-month period starting in late 1879, focusing on a conflict pitching the forces of President Nicolás Avellaneda and his successor, General Julio A. Roca, against those of Carlos Tejedor, the governor of Buenos Aires. The conflict climaxed in mid-June 1880 in two battles at Puente Alsina and Los Corrales on the southwest side of Buenos Aires, when the regular army fought the provincial militia hand to hand, leaving some two thousand men dead over two days.As the first (and by far the best) author for some time to write up a history of the episode, Sabato tells her story exceptionally well, tracing step by step how a political and constitutional dispute lurched with seemingly inexorable certainty into an armed clash the province appeared destined to lose. She has drawn upon private papers, contemporary newspapers, many other archival sources, and numerous secondary sources, including eight short inserts on such issues as the regular army and the provincial militias, patriotic sentiment in Buenos Aires, and the nature of “revolution.”To my surprise, the narrative dwells very little on the figure of Bartolomé Mitre, the foremost porteño politician in the late nineteenth century. Mitre renounced his candidacy for the presidency in 1880 (leaving the field to Tejedor), having failed to win the election of 1874 and having then led an unsuccessful rebellion. In Sabato’s account, questions linger about Mitre’s background role in 1880 and the extent to which the rebellion represented a form of mitrismo, particularly since a substantial proportion of Tejedor’s followers had mitrista origins. Mitre’s position raises the related question of the continuities between the 1880 movement and those of 1852, 1861 (in the battle of Pavón), 1874, and 1890, in which Mitre played a crucial role. Sabato’s constrained chronological focus prevents her from depicting the broader tapestry of porteño politics in order to display Mitre’s position more comprehensively. Taking a broader view would shed still more light on some of the author’s favorite topics: the organization and composition of political factions; the formation of factional alliances; the instances when party feuds degenerated into violence and progressed into so-called revolutions; the broader relationship between Buenos Aires and the provinces; and the influence of other key figures like Adolfo Alsina, who died in 1877 and played no part in the events of 1880.When seen as part of a recurrent pattern, the 1880 movement appears neither unusual nor unique, since Mitre and his proxies spent almost 40 years plotting rebellions, raising supporters, and carrying them out. Nearly all the “revolutions” of 1852–90 followed a similar course. They originated in the “rights” (meaning privileges) of Buenos Aires, by far the largest and richest of the provinces, within the emergent national union. They provoked escalating political confrontation lasting up to a year that ended in military mobilization. They culminated in fighting and in substantial loss of life (as in 1861, 1874, and 1890). The “violence” of 1880 should come as little surprise since the use of force had become a routine ingredient of politics. Sabato explains the violence of 1880 as stemming from a mythic concept of unity in Buenos Aires (p. 296), but her argument remains ethereal and unconvincing. Moreover, a broader focus, not necessarily at the expense of a detailed study of 1880, would have shown how many of the issues that arose in Buenos Aires under Tejedor were rooted in the political failures of mitrismo in the 1860s.The book lapses at times into an unnecessarily prolix précis of newspaper articles. As an alternative, Sabato might have analyzed further some of the peculiarities of politics in Buenos Aires. The tactic of “abstention” (refusing to vote in elections), for example, developed before 1880 and remains inexplicable in the narrow framework of her analysis. (Mitre borrowed the ruse from Leon Gambetta under the French Third Republic.) Political coercion in rural and small-town areas through the juez de paz, a method widely used by Tejedor to pack the provincial legislature in 1880, has a long history that this study might have better helped to address. Local government stands out as one of the crucial agencies of “top-down” politics in Argentina almost throughout the country’s history. The etymology of the term “revolution,” meaning the right of resistance to threats against rights, also requires broader discussion.By definition, a book titled Buenos Aires en armas does not address the Argentine Republic in its entirety. Still, a complete account of the 1880 rebellion would include a wider analysis of the regional bases of power outside Buenos Aires that produced the institutional oxymoron known as the Partido Autonomista Nacional. In 1880 Tejedor (like Mitre before him) controlled the allegiances of Buenos Aires only in part, with the remainder supporting outside provincial politicians headed by Avellaneda and Roca. So-called autonomismo, a movement pledged to the local rights of Buenos Aires but opposed to Mitre, whose members were willing to make deals with outside provincial leaders, represents a major part of the story in 1880, although in Sabato’s account the identity and objectives of autonomistas remain unclear. The author scarcely mentions the “Conquest of the Desert” led by Roca in 1879, which strengthened affiliations between many autonomistas and the leaders in the outer provinces. In a period of economic expansion assisted by railroad building, many porteño entrepreneurs were looking for opportunities to buy and speculate in land in the newly conquered territory beyond Buenos Aires and therefore rejected the myopic allegiances represented by Tejedor. These issues bore strongly on the formation of political alliances in 1880 and on the rebellion’s outcome.