Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Some were not troubled by the disappearance of the gaucho. It was
good for the country, lectured the prominent intellectual Leopoldo
Lugones in 1913, because the gaucho possessed “part-Indian blood, an
inferior component” (Méndez 1980, 85). Nonetheless, the general mar-
ginalization of the criollo did not prevent the glorification of the mythical
gaucho as the repository of traditional Argentine national character.
Yet the Generation of Eighty like Rosas, saw the advantages of pan-
dering to the dispossessed. To counter the demands of the immigrants,
the government recruited members of the Creole working class for the
military and the police. Gringos were exempt from conscription; there-
fore, native-born men of the countryside filled the ranks of the army,
criollos who made the army a career were noncommissioned officers.
According to an army publication, “most of our soldiers are recruited
from the social stratum of field workers, men without much money,
poorly dressed and fed even worse, without house or home, who since
infancy have acquired unfortunate habits and predilections, no doubt
to counteract their organic poverty or as an unavoidable consequence
of their idle or errant life, until pressing need makes them enlist for
a pittance, or impulse leads them to commit a crime and (a judge)
settles the account by assigning them to an army unit as punishment”
(Ramírez 1987, 123). These men were led by an officer corps drawn
overwhelmingly from the provincial and rural gentry. The officers suf-
fered two glaring deficiencies: their excess numbers and poor training.
In 1891, there were 1,360 officers for nearly 6,000 soldiers.
The Generation of Eighty believed it could count on the police and
the army against immigrant workers and farmers. In 1893, immigrant
grain producers of Santa Fe rebelled against a new production tax
intended to support the provincial government controlled by the PAN.
To crush this gringo resistance, the politicians marshaled Creole cattle
workers, who were only too willing to attack foreigners. Throat cutting
temporarily reappeared as an expression of political preferences. The
politicians counterbalanced the two working classes elsewhere, too.
Indians and mestizos from the northern provinces formed the elite cav-
alry units of the Buenos Aires police forces. They particularly relished
breaking up immigrant labor disturbances and union rallies.
Army officers, however, proved to be less loyal to the oligarchy in
the long run. They were recruited principally from the class of mar-
ginal elites of the poorest provinces. Sons of the landholding oligarchs
eschewed the dull life of a bourgeois officer rising up through the ranks;
therefore, the army officers as a group tended to support their own mid-
dle-class interests. They resented the elite for its ability to travel abroad
