For more than four decades, Argentines have habitually laid their national frustrations at the door of the hated “oligarchy”—that handful of landowning families that has, we are told, worked hand-in-glove with foreign economic interests to sabotage the cause of popular government and economic independence. Yet for all the mileage that the topic has afforded both politicians and social critics, it has inspired few serious studies; the only works that immediately come to this reviewer’s mind are Díaz de Molina’s recently published La oligarquía argentina and José Luis de Imaz’s Los que mandan, which concluded rather perplexingly that Argentina did not possess an elite at all!
Such doubts do not afflict the authors whose books are under review, perhaps because they deal only with the one family whose name has been virtually synonymous with great wealth—and great landed wealth at that—throughout Argentine history. Carretero’s work in particular shows how an obscure merchant family of humble origins rose to preeminence during the early years of the Argentine nation, first through privileged access to Spanish and English exporters, and then through the acquisition of large tracts of land through the Law of Emphyteusis (as interpreted by their relative Juan Manuel de Rosas). Primarily known for his studies in agricultural history, Carretero has limited his book to that period for which ample documentation exists in the Archivo General de la Nación, Buenos Aires; consequently, he is compelled to close his account in 1830. By that time, however, the Anchorenas are firmly launched on a trajectory of wealth and power that moves ever-upwards throughout the remainder of the nineteenth century.
What follows has been told with obvious polemical relish by Juan José Sebreli, whose previous works have established him as a major critical figure of Argentine fife and letters. An avowed Marxist, he begins his book with a methodological introduction and ends it on a stridently revolutionary note; what lies between is a study which, compared to that of Carretero, is much wider-ranging, far more ideological, and decidedly more entertaining. Drawing on both archival and standard sources, as well as on that certifiedly oligarchical magazine, Genealogía, Sebreli concludes that the role of the Anchorena family in Argentine history has been characterized by three outstanding traits. The first has been a predilection for the exercise of power without responsibility—a reluctance to hold public office, and a preference for manipulation of events behind the scenes. The second has been an unfading support for all regimes, and a timely abandonment of each when it enters its hour of peril. (“The Anchorenas,” he writes on p. 206, “were never guided by principles, but simply and purely by considerations of economic interest. Hence they were always capable of accommodating themselves to whatever regime might be in power, changing sides . . . whenever necessary.”) Consequently, Sebreli finds the Anchorenas with the Spanish against the patriots, with the English against the Argentines, siding in turn with Dorrego, Rivadavia, Rosas (“their majordomo”), then Urquiza, Mitre, Roca and so on. (The final chapter ominously reports that the youngest member of the clan was cordially received by General Perón when he visited Madrid in 1970.) Finally, Sebreli concludes that the Anchorenas have unfailingly been on the wrong side of every issue in Argentine history, largely because they represent, quintessentially, the party of property.
It is difficult to argue with Sebreli in his general appreciation of his subject. Obviously, the Anchorenas have not been without influence in Argentine affairs; this much is shown by the ease with which the author is able to intertwine the history of the famfly—or perhaps better stated, of certain members of the family—with his narrative political history of the nation. Doubtless their continued possession of great wealth indicates a unique, and practically congenital, capacity for survival. At all events, it attests to the enduring quality of Argentina’s neo-colonial social structure. Yet this book suffers from all those afflictions that commonly beset elite studies, particularly those written with a strong ideological intent. There is, particularly, the serious problem of defining elite boundaries. Who is an “Anchorena”? In a society where all upper-class families tended (and to some degree, still tend) to intermarry, and where a large circle of in-laws was at one time circumscribed by an even larger outer circle of compadres formed at the baptismal font, where did the Anchorenas begin and end? Might one simply assign the term “landed elite” to some fifty or sixty roughly consanguinai families, and let it go at that? And since politics makes strange (i.e., unpredictable) bedfellows, what are we to make of labels like “a man of the Anchorenas,” “an associate of the Anchorenas,” “a friend of the Anchorenas”? Might not the very same men be “friends” or “associates” of the families Ezcurra, Ortiz Basualdo, Alzaga or others—instruments, in other words, of a few landowning families which in a profoundly backward society might normally be expected to dominate public affairs? If the answer is yes, then the history of the Anchorenas is interesting only as a manifestation of broader estanciero domination of Argentine politics—about which there has certainly never been great dispute—rather than as a hitherto undiscovered and sinister first-cause that explains the entire course of Argentine history, a position Sebreli at times comes perilously close to taking.
