Quiroga, Juan Facundo (1788–1835)

Juan Facundo Quiroga (b. 1788; d. 16 February 1835), Argentine caudillo known as "The Tiger of the Llanos." Born in La Rioja to a family of landowners and regional officials, Quiroga began his own ascent in 1816 as a militia officer, serving the revolutionary government in Buenos Aires by mobilizing men and supplies for the Army of the North. As delegate of the center, he added military and political credentials to his landed power, and from this it was a short step to independent authority. In 1820 La Rioja proclaimed its "provisional independence" of neighboring Córdoba and became in effect a personal fiefdom of Quiroga. From this power base he waged war on Bernardino Rivadavia's centralized constitution, and in spite of defeat at the hands of General Gregorio Aráoz de La Madrid, he went on to extend his control over the provinces of the west and northwest from Catamarca to Mendoza. Recovering from losses to General José María Paz in 1829 and 1830, he furthered his reputation as a federalist by defeating the unitarist forces under Aráoz de La Madrid in 1831. Thus, as Juan Manuel de Rosas was establishing his power in Buenos Aires, Quiroga was consolidating his control in the interior. But Quiroga went further. He moved to Buenos Aires and attempted to secure the calling of a constituent congress to give Argentina a federal republic, a proposal which was anathema to Rosas. He further challenged the idea of Rosas by demanding that the customs revenue of Buenos Aires be nationalized. In 1834 Quiroga was sent by the government of Buenos Aires on a peace mission to the northwest, in the hope that his influence could prevent a threatened civil war between Salta and Tucumán. Returning from successful negotiations, he was ambushed and assassinated at Barranca Yaco on 16 February 1835. The death of Quiroga removed a challenge to Buenos Aires and an irritant to Rosas, and among the possible assassins Rosas himself was suspected. The official judgment, probably correct, convicted the caudillos of Córdoba, all four Reinafé brothers, and their henchmen.

Quiroga, whom Juan Bautista Alberdi regarded as an obscure guerrilla and a common killer, survives in history largely through the exposure he received in Domingo Sarmiento's Facundo (1938), a classic of Argentine literature. There he not only was described as a tyrant and a terrorist but also was elevated to a thesis—the conflict between civilization and barbarism—which was widely invoked to explain the state of Latin America. He was the model of the provincial caudillo, his life a series of outrages, his rule the epitome of personal power.

See alsoArgentina: The Nineteenth Century; Rosas, Juan Manuel de; Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Facundo (1938), and Life in the Argentine Republic in the Days of the Tyrants, or Civilization and Barbarism (1961).

David Peña, Juan Facundo Quiroga, 2d ed. (1971).

Instituto De Historia Argentina y Americana, "Doctor Emilio Ravignani," Archivo del brigadier general Juan Facundo Quiroga, 4 vols. (1957–1988).

John Lynch, Caudillos in Spanish America 1800–1850 (1992).

Additional Bibliography

Cárdenas de Monner Sans, María Inés. Juan Facundo Quiroga: otra civilización. Buenos Aires: Libreria Histórica, 2004.

De la Fuente, Ariel. Children of Facundo: Caudillo and Gaucho Insurgency during the Argentine State-Formation Process (La Rioja, 1853–1870). Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.

                                          John Lynch