Sarmiento en campaña presidencial : El Chacho, último caudillo de la montonera de los llanos. Episodio de 1863 (la escritura del crimen argumentado)

• Main Author: Lucila Pagliai
• Format: Article
• Language: Spanish
• Published: Réseau Interuniversitaire d'Ètude des Littératures Contemporaines du Río de la Plata 2013-09-01
• Series: Cuadernos LIRICO
• Subjects: Ángel Vicente Peñaloza; discourses into conflict; Facundo; new versions and rewritings; political violence
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/lirico/1161

Sarmiento started writing El Chacho, último caudillo de la montonera de los llanos. Episodio de 1863 while living in the United States as a representative of the Argentine government, with the purpose of including it in the same volume than the 3rd edition of Facundo, which would appear in New York during the final period of his presidential campaign. In face of the extemporaneous character of this provocative and challenging text, one wonders what brought Sarmiento to publish, in 1868, the story of Vicente Peñaloza, a general in the national army murdered five years prior after being defeated, captured and unarmed, while the colonel Sarmiento – as he named himself repeatedly throughout the text- fought the montonera from the government of San Juan. The hypothesis that supports this work is that the publishing of El Chacho… in the same space as Facundo can be read as another campaign act that the Sarmiento machine produced with several pragmatic objectives, anticipating nodal questions in order to strengthen a certain social order: the relationship between politics, violence, and Justice; constitutional warranties in turbulent times; the laws of war when facing non-conventional enemies; the fragile limits between legality and legitimacy according to the place of enunciation and to the power of he who defines the character of events.