Over the years the Argentine popular biographer, Jorge Newton, has hewn his way forward through the major caudillos and/or public figures of the middle and later nineteenth century. El General Roca. Conquistador del desierto falls into place as a recent addition to this small bookshelf of vidas más o menos ejemplares. Like its predecessors the book is characterized by a readable though undistinguished style. It is short on basic research and documentation and long on astute conjecture concerning the motivations of its protagonist. Although obviously writing for non-specialists, the author does not attempt the grand manner. Roca’s career is not set against the burgeoning economic and cultural development of a newly-consolidated Argentina. The reader will not find here the subtle and complex interplay between individual and events. Newton announces the thesis that Roca, a gifted soldier, was an even more gifted politician. This thesis gives play to what is apparently his forte—that of the informed insider, the “inside-dopester.”
Perhaps as a consequence, the portrait that emerges of Roca is curiously unflattering. While the purely military aspects of the general’s career are downgraded, the reader is invited to admire the agility with which Roca, whose service in Paraguay was not outstanding, nevertheless advanced to a lieutenant colonelcy at the age of twenty-five, and then attached himself to the political fortunes of Sarmiento. Subtitle notwithstanding, the Conquest of the Desert itself is summed up in a few pages. As the author says disarmingly, the conquest was not completed until 1882, “porque le faltaría [a Roca] tiempo para ello, al pretender aprovechar sus éxitos recientes con vistas a la elección presidencial que se aproxima” (p. 63). More serious, the author eschews the hard job of disentangling and assessing Roca’s statecraft during two presidential terms in favor of transcribing in extenso his annual presidential messages—documents not noted for their searching objectivity. Still these make clear how Roca won his soubriquet, zorro tucumano. The longest portion of the book is a running exposition of the shifting intrigue and maneuver, alliance and betrayal among roquistas, mitristas, pellegrinistas, quintanistas, and the myriad other cabals and factions of the period. This is based on the published Roca-Juárez Celman correspondence, Pellegrini’s published works, and standard biographies.
The book may hold a certain fascination for the aficionado of the politician’s craft in a traditional non-representative context. However, a reader must look somewhere else if he seeks a more balanced and judicious treatment of this energetic if not particularly visionary president, who presided over profound transitions in Argentina’s national life.