Juan Manuel de Rosas

Juan Manuel José Domingo Ortiz de Rosas y López de Osornio (born Juan Manuel Ortiz de Rozas, 1793-1877) was a conservative Argentinian politician who ruled Argentina from 1829 to 1852. Rosas was one of the first famous caudillos in Latin America.

Rosas came on to the national scene as a powerful cattle rancher. He controlled the cattle frontier pampa of Argentina, allowing him rule over the capital, Buenos Aires. Rosas defeated the European expeditionary forces in 1820 with the help of gauchos.

In 1829, Rosas became governor of Buenos Aires. In subsequent years, Rosas went in and out of power over this period but remained a strong leader. During his years out of office (1832-1835) Rosas fought to gain territory from the indigenous population in southern Argentina.

On September 20 1851 he became Supreme Chief of the Argentine Confederation, a new position which made him effective dictator of the nation.

As a conservative leader, Rosas portrayed himself as a man of the people who could relate to the working class of gauchos and Afro-Argentines. Rosas used his man of the people ideal to unify Argentina during his era. Rosas supporters called themselves Rosistas. Rosas rule was filled with violence -- he killed his opponents and anyone who would not support him. To that end he developed a paramilitary force known as La Mazorca ("the Corncob"), which by coincidence or by design was a Spanish homophone for más horca ("more hanging").

The cruelty of his regime and his alignment with the Roman Catholic Church was highlighted with the execution of Camila O'Gorman and the Jesuit priest Ladislao Gutiérrez. O'Gorman and Gutiérrez had fled Buenos Aires in order to continue their affair and remained in hiding near the Brazilian border. Eventually found and arrested, Rosas decreed their sentence. They were executed before a firing squad on 18 August 1848 in Santos Lugares, near Buenos Aires. Camila O'Gorman was twenty years old and was eight-months pregnant. Their story was the subject of Maria Luisa Bemberg's 1984 film Camila.

As Charles Darwin related in The Voyage of the Beagle, he met Rosas who was then engaged in exterminating tribes of wandering horse-mounted Indians, describing him as a man of extraordinary character, a perfect horseman who conformed to the dress and habits of the Gauchos and "obtained an unbounded popularity in the country, and in consequence a despotic power". Darwin included a story of how Rosas had himself put in the stocks for inadvertently breaking his own rule of not wearing knives on Sundays. This appealed to his men's sense of egalitarianism and justice.

Rosas attempted to reincorporate Uruguay and Paraguay as Argentinian provinces and this led to two European blockades of Buenos Aires. During the early part of Rosas' rule Luis Vernet, the Argentinian Governor of the Falkland Islands, seized United States seal hunting ships and in response a U.S. warship removed the Argentinian settlement, leaving escaped convicts and pirates on the islands. Rosas was out of office 1832-1835. In November 1832 a new governor arrived, but was killed in a mutiny, and though a ship's commander took charge, in January 1833 the United Kingdom reasserted its claim and seized control. Rosas wanted to rid Argentina of European influence and cultivate a feeling of nationalism among Argentinians.

Rosas' opponents during his rule were dissidents such as José María Paz, Juan Bautista Alberdi, Bartolomé Mitre, and Domingo Faustino Sarmiento. Rosas political opponents were exiled to other countries such as Uruguay and Chile.

In 1852 Rosas was overthrown by Justo José de Urquiza under the support of Uruguay and Brazil; his army was defeated at Monte Caseros. Rosas spent the rest of his life in exile in United Kingdom as a farmer in Southampton. He never learned to speak English. WHen he died, he was broke and alone.

References

Argentine Caudillo: Juan Manuel de Rosas, by John Lynch (1981, 2001).

Argentine governors | War of the Triple Alliance people | 1793 births | 1877 deaths | History of Argentina

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