By: Ricardo Jaén. Academic director. Free Chair Mariano Moreno. (UNLP)
The British merchant frigate Fame seeks the exit from the estuary of the Río de La Plata to the sea bound for the port of Rio de Janeiro, an inevitable point on the route to England. He follows her neatly as an escort and to avoid any problem with the royalist squadron of Montevideo, the war schooner Mistletoe under the command of Robert Ramsay, close friend of the important traveler who deserves such treatment: Mariano Moreno, recently resigned Secretary of the Board, now with a mission diplomat in London with the delicate task of obtaining support and protection from the only power that could eventually be able to “stop, appease or negotiate” the inevitable reaction of the Spanish crown. Violent times have begun in the most commercially important port city in the south of Spanish America. An almost fortuitous event in principle such as the English invasions and their confrontation with the local bourgeoisie triggered the formation of a locally powerful army, supported by its own resources. This allowed, a few years later, Colonel Saavedra to inform Viceroy Cisneros, one of the most politically skilled figures of those days, that he was not in a position to guarantee that the troops under his command could “successfully contain” to the crowd. Tulio Halperín Donghi, our main contemporary historian, tells us that precisely that event that occurred on May 22, 1810 and which led to the possibly hasty resignation of Cisneros opened a period of time until the 25th in which Moreno ´´…will deploy a dazzling tactical skill and his performance in those days the arrival point of a trajectory that until shortly before was not clear that it was oriented in that direction. ´´ Now, if Mariano Moreno is a survivor, as Noemí Goldman defines him (From a bureaucratic lawyer to an insurgent. UBA. 2016) to explain how he goes in a very short time from a lawyer attached to the colonial order to the main promoter of the execution of Liniers and others in Cabeza de Tigre, the city also begins to realize that if it wants to survive it will have to finance the revolution with its resources and personal fortunes. He clearly seems like a complete nonsense. Mariano Moreno and the city of Buenos Aires are a great accumulation of contradictions absolutely necessary for the revolution in Latin America, an undertaking clearly unviable without the determined support of a power such as was the case of France with the United States. Right or wrong, Moreno imposes the need to have an orderly public opinion in revolutionary thought and La Gaceta de Buenos Aires and the founding of the Public Library as well as the use, under threat, of the preaching of the clerics of the local church or the translation with its prologue of Rousseau’s The Social Contract, fulfilled their purpose. The city finances the export of the revolution and from whom will the funds come to finance Belgrano in the army of the north or San Martín crossing into Chile. Of the opulence of the port. While fortunes disappeared in the city of sin, others in the provinces consolidated them, they are those who will star in Argentine politics once the war of independence is over. It matters little for the historical future if the Plan of Operations is a plagiarism of the critical novel of the French Revolution: ´´The Magdalena Cemetery´´ by Jean Regnault-Warin (Diego Bauso. ´´A Bicentennial Plagiarism´´. Sud Americana 2015) or if Buenos Aires is going to need to pay for a ´´professional´´ navy to liberate the port with British sympathies. It is the revolution. That she is urban and that she devours her best men. Ruthless, contradictory, bloody and full of betrayals that later become loyalties but that will give birth to a national state that, according to Ricardo Levene, will have Mariano Moreno as its undisputed hero and the opulent city of Buenos Aires as the great protagonist. @r_jaen
