In this book, José Luis Busaniche, a fecund Argentine historian of the 1920s and 1930s, offers a collection of his earlier articles and essays concerning Estanislao López. The pieces were assembled frankly to vindicate the santafecino, who, according to the author, has historiographically suffered from the dichotomy posited in Sarmiento’s “civilización y barbarie.”
Busaniche argues that the dichotomy is false, for it equates Civilization with Buenos Aires and Barbarism with the interior. According to the author, López and other provincial caudillos arose in a power vacuum created by the ouster of Spain and the clumsiness of Buenos Aires in trying to replace the metropolis as the dominant political force in the region. Far from being reversions to barbarism, the caudillos were instead responses on the part of the Argentine people to porteño heavyhandedness, which may be best seen in their attempt to reestablish a monarchy in the Plata region. The caudillos, then, were a democratic, American alternative to the oligarchic, European response of Buenos Aires to independence.
López (1786-1838), Governor of Santa Fe from 1818 to 1838, was hardly the garden variety Argentine caudillo. In his years as governor, he was all-conquering general, spokesman for federalism against the pretensions of Buenos Aires, peacemaker, giver of organic law and generally, “paladin of the republican cause.”
Busaniche illustrates his thesis well by delineating the life and struggles of his subject. Expanding on the famous “Instructions” of Artigas for the Congress of 1813, López, no crude montanem, enshrined his federalist, American credo in the first Argentine provincial constitution, promulgated in Santa Fe in 1819. In the ensuing civil wars, he led the provincial forces several times against those of Buenos Aires with success. In so doing, he effectively doomed the monarchist pretensions of the porteño leaders.
Perhaps the major contribution of López to the constitutional and political history of his nation, the culmination of his years of struggle, was the Federal Treaty of January 4,1831, which he engineered. Signed by representatives of the Litoral provinces in Santa Fe, the treaty was to become the precursor and legal base for the Argentine Constitution of 1853.
While one is impressed by López as less a caudillo than a leader of a popular movement, it is legitimate to question how well the provincial caudillo as a type measures up to Busaniche’s self-effacing image.
Generally, the essays are well-chosen and are linked together into a coherent whole. Busaniche’s writing style is clear and easy, but emphatic and prone to the polemical. Despite the documents in the appendix, the work is not generally well-documented. Many crucial citations are vague and incomplete. The best essay is the second, “Aspectos de la historia argentina, 1810-1820,” a short overview of López’ rise to prominence.
