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Juan Manuel de Rosas
Juan Manuel de Rosas , was a conservative Argentine politician who governed the Buenos Aires Province from 1829 to 1832 and again, from 1835 to 1852. Rosas was one of the first famous caudillos in Ibero-America and through his rule united Argentina, provided an efficient government and strengthened the economy. Besides being governor, Rosas was invested with the duty of managing the foreign relations of the Argentine Confederation, which lacked a formal head of state. Rosas was forced to resign after his defeat at the Battle of Caseros against an army gathered by Justo Jose de Urquiza.
Rosas bought a large amount of land and began living the typical rancher's life. Instead of fighting with the gauchos, he became one of them and earned their respect and trust. When civil war broke out in 1820, Rosas organized a regiment of gauchos and soon became a national figure through his efforts to restore peace and order.
During his years out of office (1832-1835), Rosas waged a military campaign against the indigenous population in southern Argentina. As Charles Darwin related in The Voyage of the Beagle, he met Rosas in the early 1830s, who was then engaged in exterminating tribes of wandering horse-mounted Indians, describing him as a man of extraordinary character, a perfect horseman who conformed to the dress and habits of the Gauchos and "obtained an unbounded popularity in the countryside, and in consequence a despotic power". Darwin included a story of how Rosas had himself put in the stocks for inadvertently breaking his own rule of not wearing knives on Sundays. This appealed to his men's sense of egalitarianism and justice. In his Palermo house, which in fact was Argentina's government house, in the evenings balls, he used buffoons to tell foreign Ambassadors harsh things which had to be taken as coming from buffoons; in fact he was sending them.
Related websites
Secretos de la ultima invasion inglesa
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