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full control of customs revenues, but it also abolished all state militias,
including that of Buenos Aires. In these final acts of nation building,
General Roca and his political allies enjoyed the full support of the
federal army. The Republic of Argentina finally had become a nation in
fact as well as name.
While basing its political hegemony on the most technologically
innovative economy in Latin America, the Generation of Eighty also
honored political traditions such as patronage. There would be no
meritocracy in national politics. Roca's PAN functioned not as a party
with a definitive political program but rather as an organization of pub-
lic officials wanting to perpetuate their own power. Informal alliances
continued to win out over electoral legitimacy and the rule of law. The
genius of the PAN lay in the ability of Roca and his collaborators to
forge political alliances supported by electoral manipulation among the
AN INTELLECTUAL'S
DESCRIPTION OF THE
GENERATION OF EIGHTY
T
The governing elements [of the nation] are recruited from a class of
citizens which, if it does not properly constitute a caste, nonethe-
less forms a directing class. . . . This class corresponds approximately to
the highest social stratum, formed by the members of the traditional
families, by the rich, and by the educated (“hombres ilustrados”). The
members of this class maintain among themselves more or less tight
social and economic relations and, as is natural, share common senti-
ments and opinions.
. . .Without this common code there would not exist that inter-
change of services and favors which they reciprocally lend without
distinction of party politics. It is this moral code of the directing class
which the citizens designated for the different government positions
carry into the public administration, whence they manage the interests
of the country.
Source:
José Nicolás Matienzo, representative of the federal government
of the Republic of Argentina, quoted in McGann, Thomas F.
Argentina, the
United States, and the Inter-American System
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1957), p. 33.
