people? Was victory ever awarded to him who does not persevere? Indeed, are we to abandon one of the most privileged soils of America to the ravages of barbarism and have a hundred navigable rivers abandoned to the water-birds that are in calm possession and wander them ab initio?
Are we voluntarily to close the door on European immigration, which knocks repeatedly on it to people our deserts, and make us, in the shadow of our flag, a people as innumerable as the sands on the shore? Are we to leave aside, illusory and vain, the dreams of development, power, and glory with which we have been lulled since childhood, the forecasts that are enviously directed at us by those in Europe who study the needs of humanity? After Europe, is there any uninhabited Christian world that can be civilized other than America? Are there in America many peoples who are, like the Argentine people, called on to receive the European population that overflows like liquid in a glass? Do you not ultimately want us to invoke science and industry to our assistance, to call to them with all our might to come and sit in our midst, the one free from any obstacle to thought, the other safe from all violence and all coercion? Oh! This future is not so easily relinquished! It is not relinquished because an army of twenty thousand men guards the gateway to the fatherland: soldiers die in combat, desert, or switch flags. It is not relinquished because fortune has favored a tyrant for long and heavy years: fortune is blind, and the day she does not happen to find her favorite amid the dense smoke and suffocating dust of combat, farewell tyrant! farewell tyranny! It is not relinquished because all the brutal and ignorant colonial traditions have accomplished more, in a time of irrationality, in the mind of the unskilled masses: political upheavals also bring experience and light, and it is a law of humanity that new interests, fertile ideas, and progress will ultimately triumph over antiquated
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traditions, ignorant habits, and stagnant concerns. It is not relinquished because there are thousands of guileless men in a people, who take good for evil, selfish men who profit from it, indifferent men who see it but take no interest, timid men who do not dare to fight it, corrupt men, in short, who unknowingly deliver themselves to it out of an inclination to evil, out of depravity: there has always been all this in every people, and never has evil definitively triumphed. It is not relinquished because the other American peoples cannot lend us their aid, because governments see from afar only the glint of organized power and cannot distinguish in the humble and desolate darkness of revolutions the great elements that are struggling to develop; because the so-called liberal opposition abjures its principles, imposes silence on its conscience, and, to squash an importunate insect underfoot, stamps the noble sole the insect was attached to. It is not relinquished because the peoples en masse turn their backs on us on account of our miseries and our greatnesses being too far away from their sight to affect them. No! a future so immense, a mission so lofty, is not relinquished because of such a series of contradictions and difficulties: difficulties are vanquished, contradictions end by dint of contradiction!
From Chile, we cannot give anything to those who persevere in the struggle under all the hardships of privations and with the exterminating blade, which, like the sword of Damocles, hangs above their heads at all times. Nothing! save ideas, consolations, encouragement; no weapon is allowed the combatants save the one that the free press of Chile supplies to all free men. The press! The press! Here then, tyrant, is the enemy you suffocated among us. Here then is the golden fleece we try to conquer. Here then is how the press of France, England, Brazil, Montevideo, Chile, and Corrientes will disturb your sleep amid your victims’ sepulchral silence; here then is the fact that you have felt compelled to steal the gift of tongues in order to palliate evil, a gift given only to preach goodness. Here then is the fact that you stoop to justify yourself and go among all the European and American peoples begging a venal, fratricidal pen, so that, by means of the press, it will defend him who has put it in chains! Why do you not allow in your homeland the discussion you keep up in all other peoples? For what, then, so many thousands of victims sacrificed by the dagger; for what so many battles, if, after all, you were to end up in the peaceful discussion of the press?
He who has read the foregoing pages may think it is my intention to
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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
