Caudillo Democracy and Constitutionalism in Argentina’s National Organization (1850s-1880s)

• In Event: The ‘Democracy’ of the Caudillos in Latin America, 1810-1880 Part II

Abstract

Through an analysis of the writings of some of the foremost nineteenth-century Argentine liberal writers, -Juan Bautista Alberdi, Esteban Echeverría, Bartolomé Mitre, and Domingo Faustino Sarmiento-, I will trace divergent conceptions of democracy, and perceptions of the role played by provincial caudillos in advancing or delaying the cause of democracy in the River Plate. While some saw in the initial social conditions created by Spanish colonization, the seeds of a primitive form of equality that would plant the seeds of a future democratic society, others were appalled by the legacy of the colonial period and of the recent past; a mix of Hispanic traditional authoritarianism and the plebiscitarian model of democracy implemented by the Rosas dictatorship. By the mid nineteenth-century, constitutional debates opened up an exploration of new dilemmas that would persist in decades to come: the balance of power between provincial and national governments, the workings of the different branches of government, in particular tensions between the executive and Congress; the conciliation of the protection of individual liberties and the advancement towards an expanded electoral democracy. In exploring these debates that marked the evolution of democracy in Argentina, I will also discuss the place of the Argentine case within current literature about liberalism, democracy and republicanism in nineteenth-century Latin America.

Author

• Eduardo A Zimmermann, Universidad de San Andrés