Julio Argentino Roca

Alejo Julio Argentino Roca Paz (San Miguel de Tucumán, July 17th 1843 - Buenos Aires, October 19th 1914) was a politician and military Argentinian, President of the Nation twice, October 12th 1880 with the October 12th 1886 and October 12th 1898 with the October 12th 1904.

Beginnings

Julio Roca began a military career in 1858. Veteran of the fratricidal war between Buenos Aires and the Argentinian Confederation who took place of 1859 with 1861, it also took part in the Guerre of Triple Alliance against the Paraguay of 1865 with 1870, war in which it lost his father and his two brothers.

He drew the strings from the Argentinian policy during more than 30 years by the means of the Partido Autonomista Nacional, weaving complex systems of alliance with various forces, which was worth the name of " to him; the Fox or el Zorro ". Roca was made give the load of the ministry for the war. It made adopt on August 14th, 1878 a plan of offensive war against the natives living the Patagonie, with an aim of increasing the territory under effective sovereignty of Argentina. It was also a question of ramming the pawn in Chile which for a long time lorgnait towards these territories never still subjected.

He was freemason.

The countryside of the " désert"

It developed the very badly named Conquête of the Desert (1879-1884), that the modern specialists qualified act of characterized Génocide and ethnic Purification. The name even of the aforesaid the countryside gives an account of the way in which the people autochtones were perceived at the time: as savages that there was to only exterminate since in spite of their presence on these inhabited grounds one called these grounds a Désert.

Roca, to the head of a powerful modern and well trained army managed to subject Patagonie while coming to end from the tough resistance of the people of the ethnos group Mapuche, causing a terrible number of victims. It is estimated that the war was the direct cause of died of more than 20.000 natives not combatants (women, children, old men). According to Galeano the soldiers received a premium per pair of testicles which they reported of their " drive out in Indiens" . Following its victory, Roca allotted 30.000 hectares of grounds.

Atrocities and genocide

But the simple victory was not enough for him. The survivors were off-set with far in the most sterile areas of Patagonie and besides. Some 3.000 natives (men and women), were made prisoners and deportees in Buenos Aires, where one separated them by sex, in order to prevent which they can procreate of the children: the women were dispersed in the various districts of the city, and were used as maidservants, while the men were sent in the island of Martín García, kind of death camp, where they died as a large majority after a few years of reclusion.

Let us note that at the same time similar horrors proceeded also elsewhere, and in particular in the United States.

Argentina had thus acquired million hectares of new grounds. These enormous fields were sold at low prices, even quite simply offered to politicians and influential big landowners. To justify a as cruel operation one reduced as these territories were about to be conquered by Chile, considering which they were partially the object of a litigation between the two countries, and that to the signature of the Argentina-Chile treaty of 1881.

First presidency of the Nation (1880 - 1886)

In 1880 it was elected president of Argentina, charges that it assumed until in 1886. At the age 35 years, he was the youngest president of all the history of the country. Its government brought a great prosperity to the country, supplied with an massive immigration, the construction of railroads and the development of agricultural exports.

the figure opposite testifies to the intense increase in the population in this last quarter in XIXe century .

It built the bases of the modern Argentinian State. It separated indeed the Church from the State, voted the laws of the civil register and the civil wedding, which brought the rupture of the relations with the the Vatican. It was about the pope Leon XIII. It gave an enormous impulse to education thanks to the law 1420 (initiative of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, then director of the National council of Education ) which established free primary school education, obligatory and layman for all the inhabitants of the country.

However, the financial speculation and corruption reigned as a Master during his government, worsened by the electoral fraud. It solved the problem outstanding situation of the capital of the republic, by transforming the town of Buenos Aires into federal territory, in 1881.

The interregnum

His/her brother-in-law Miguel Juárez Celman succeeded to him, although the principal springs of the Argentinian political life remained mainly between the hands of Roca and its Party Separatist, so much so that Juárez Celman will say, in his speech with the Congress of 1889: " There does not exist other party only the Party National Separatist to which the parliamentary majorities and all the governments of the nation and its states " belong;.

Juárez Celman had to resign in 1890 in the middle of an economic and financial serious attack. Carlos Pellegrini, which finished its mandate and led the way out of crisis very skilfully was profiled like opponent with Roca. It indeed had the same design of progress as Roca (creation of infrastructures, immigration and agricultural exports), but it thought that it was necessary to give up the caudillism and the electoral fraud like means of reaching the capacity. Other politicians of the party shared these ideas like Roque Sáenz Peña. At the same time the Unión Cívica of Leandro NR. Alem was posed in revolutionary alternative and the sectors of the urban middle-classes were identified with him. Unión Cívica had been with the head of insurrectionary risings in 1890, 1892 and 1893, crushed finally by the army ordered by Roca and the general Ignacio Fotheringham.

Once removed from this opposition of Unión Cívica, Roca operated to demolish internal opposition within its own party separatist. Vis-a-vis the threat of presidential candidate of Castling Sáenz Peña, he opposed that of the proper father of this last, Luis Sáenz Peña, which was elected over the period 1892-98. But soon private of the support of Roca, Sáenz Peña resigned in January 1895 and Jose Evaristo Uriburu her vice-president succeeded to him, much more obeying the instruction of the " Renard".

Second mandate of Roca (1898 - 1904)

Having thus eliminated the possibilities from all its adversaries, Roca represented and was again elected president for a second sexennat (1898 - 1904) in full situation of tension with the Chile. Roca obtained peace with its neighbor and the final solution of all the frontier litigations thanks to the signature of the Argentina-Chile Treaty of 1902.

The economic growth continued, and it made undertake important public works.

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