Study guide for Friday's readings (on caudillos)

Please read these carefully and come prepared to talk. We are finally moving into interesting terrain and I want the class to be more like a seminar, where we can have a conversation, rather than a lecture series. This is an extensive study guide that I wrote that should really help you understand what is going on in the texts. As always, e-mail me with questions.

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The readings for this week are both about caudillos. After independence was achieved in Latin America, the caudillo became the dominant sort of political and military leader in the countryside, which was still the most typical environment in the pre-modern era. A caudillo, broadly defined, was any rural stongman who wielded a great deal of influence on his followers, and who relied on military prowess to guarantee his power. His military followers were called his montonera.  A caudillo could be a patron who operated a hacienda, or a military general that was given land and power after helping secure independence, or the owner of a cattle estancia who fought in the revolution, or even a powerful landowner who had rejected the revolution.  The things they had in common were that they wielded great power, lived in the countryside, relied on a vast network of support (through peasants, gauchos, etc), protected their supporters (usually called clients by historians), had a tremendous amount of military support which they commanded personally (often those same clients), and MOST IMPORTANTLY, that they did so not only to achieve power and dominate their rural base, but also to guarantee that their own personal interests would be secure. As we will see in class, sometimes this meant unifying the nation through force and terror, as Juan Manuel de Rosas did in Argentina, or rejecting independence and moving to return to the perceived peaceful tranquility of the early colonial period, as José Tomás Boves attempted in Venezuela.  Some, like “Dr. Francia” in Paraguay, took control of the entire nation by force and imposed a series of political and economic controls; others, like the numerous coronels in Brazil, ruled locally so that emperors Pedro I and Pedro II could preserve the stability of the state.

The caudillo is the single-most important figure in the 19^th century, serving as a bridge between the independence era and the modern period. In some cases, such as Brazil, it can be argued that caudillos helped maintain the stability of the state. In others, like Venezuela and throughout Central America, the actions of caudillos set a number of dangerous precedents that would reappear (and continue to appear today) over time, which are rural violence, corruption, the use of physical force, imposed political ideologies, and factionalism. In Argentina, there has been a debate since the age of caudillos as to their function in the state. Their supporters point to the fact that they forged stability and order, albeit through the use of terror, to foster economic success and national unification during tumultuous times. Their opponents point to the violence and corruption that began after independence and see caudillos as the originators of the sort of military authoritarianism that came to dominate Argentina and many other Latin American nations during the second half of the 20^th century.

The writing by de la Fuente is about a particular caudillo, named Chaco Peñaloza, who was a Federalist, which is one of the two major political parties that emerged after independence in Argentina. Federalists tended to be rural folk who distrusted big government, industrialization, and liberalism, and preferred to promote agricultural interests and Catholic ideals. Their opponents, the Unitarians, were usually Europhilic urban dwellers, who were liberals interested in industry and modernization. Whereas Unitarians were open to foreign investment and free trade, Federalists tended to be nativists who promoted folk culture and national traditions over foreign ideas. Unitarians would have embraced the Enlightenment, while Federalists would have preferred the traditions of the Catholic Church. The dichotomy that I have described is generally true, but as we will see, many rural folks were federalists, and not all urbanites were Unitarists.

In the chapters you are reading from Children of Facundo, Ariel de la Fuente looks at a variety of popular sources to see why Chaco was so popular amongst gauchos and other rural types. De la Fuente is writing against a common belief among historians that caudillos either forced their followers into joining them through terror, or coerced them to do so with the promise of quick rewards. While he does find that the promise of rewards and other factors were important, there is something deeper going on that he wants to uncover. Pay attention to the sources he uses and the arguments he makes. Why were caudillos appealing to gauchos? Did gauchos have political ideas of their own, or did they follow leaders blindly? What personal qualities about a gaucho helped garner support? Why did gauchos tend to follow Federalists in general, and not Unitarians?

The other reading is by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, a man who became president of Argentina from 1868-1874. When he was a young man, caudillos like Chaco dominated the political scene in Argentina. Like other urban Unitarists (mostly found in Buenos Aires), Sarmiento viewed caudillos as a brutish vestige of the colonial period, and evidence that Argentina was not modern like France, England, and the United States. While these societies were undergoing rapid industrialization and building massive cities, Argentina was still characterized by rural violence and corruption. Sarmiento wanted Argentina to become civilized, Europeanized, and modern. In 1845 he wrote Facundo, a story about one of the most notorious gauchos, Juan Facundo Quiroga, who dominated the countryside in the 1820s and 1830s. Sarmiento uses the text to critique Facundo, contrast the “civilization” he finds in Buenos Aires with the “barbarism” of the countryside, and make broader comments about the nature and direction of Argentine society. It should be noted that as an old man, Sarmiento became part of the generation that did modernize the nation and triumph over Federalism. Sarmiento was one of the presidents who pushed the hardest to support European immigration, a move that became one of the single most important episodes of modern Argentine history.

To be clear, de la Fuente’s book Children of Facundo is not about Sarmiento’s "Facundo," but of his political descendants who would terrorize the countryside form 1853 to 1870. However, be sure to note that de la Fuente is not condemning the gauchos or caudillos like Sarmiento did, but rather, is trying to understand their world and actions.