Advocates and Autocrats: Week 5 Reading

The position of caudillo, as Dawson describes, fills in the role traditionally occupied by the King of Spain as an intermediary between local elites and the marginalized groups of country and city. My impression is that a lot of the vitriol against the Unitarians in Esteban Echeverria's story, El Matadero is traditional Spanish colonial class tensions given an ideological paint job. The revolution transitioned Latin America from a dependent colonial society to an independent republic, but failed to address some of the basic inequities that led to revolution in the first place. One major bone of contention in the struggle between the merchant classes and the working class was when the urban intelligentsia attacked the Catholic Church, which is considered by many peasants to be a vital institution of philanthropy in their remote areas without the tax base or government initiative to provide secular public works. The role of the caudillo was to act as an advocate for the disenfranchised masses of the hinterland against the machinations of the perceived power-mongers that lived in the capitals. Unfortunately, demagoguery tends to create corrupt short-run despotisms that pay mere lip service to democratic ideals and, when a demagogue senses his end, he frequently resorts to violent scapegoating and confiscating the property of newly invented "enemies of the state" to salvage the loyalty of his followers. While the caudillo can be a vital bulwark against the exploitation of the peasantry, historical example demonstrates that it is in practice a role dedicated to repressing the natural tendencies of liberal democracy, and thus caudillo governments consistently have a benevolently autocratic flavour.

Echeverria's story contains a myriad of metaphors and allegories that I find satisfactory to demonstrate the biases of the literate intelligentsia of the United Provinces of La Plata during the reign of Juan Manuel Rosas towards him and his Federalist faction. The author clearly has disdain for the role of the caudillo, drawing a not-so-subtle comparison between caudillos and the cattle yard judge. He describes the judge as "an important personage, the caudillo of the butchers, who wields supreme power over this small republic" and describes of his office as, "such a small and shabby building that no one in the corrals would give it any importance but for the association of its name with that of the feared judge." This is meant to assert that that the influence of the caudillo has no legitimacy except through the use of emotional leverage, whether joyful, fearful or wrathful, over the dissatisfied rural population. Echeverria also speaks with disdain for the "hideous, filthy, malodorous, and deformed" urban proletariat, and as the chapter mentions earlier, he belonged to a class of people that found the idea of racial equality abhorrent. His insistent mockery of the Catholic Church is meant to offer a criticism of their complicity with the regime, using superstition to stoke anti-Unitarian sentiment.  It is a well-written and highly symbolic work that is valuable both as art and artifact of the Latin American past.