Bartolome Mitre

Bartolomé Mitre won the war that unified Argentina, served a term as president, and then founded the newspaper that outlived all of it. He was born in Buenos Aires in 1821, spent his youth in exile in Uruguay, Bolivia, Peru and Chile under the Rosas dictatorship, and worked in each of them as a soldier and a journalist — a combination he never gave up. Argentina after Rosas fell in 1852 was two countries. Buenos Aires, with the port and the customs revenue, seceded from the confederation of the interior provinces, and the two fought for a decade over whether the capital's income would be shared. Mitre commanded the Buenos Aires forces, lost at Cepeda in 1859 and won at Pavón in 1861, and was elected president of a reunified republic the following year. His presidency built the institutions: a national supreme court, a civil and commercial code, the first railways, the military academy, and a public education system that was extended much further by his successors. It also fought the war of the Triple Alliance against Paraguay from 1865, which he commanded personally and which was catastrophic for everyone. He founded La Nación in 1870 with a statement that it would be a tribune of doctrine, and it is still published. He translated Dante's Comedy into Spanish and wrote biographies of Belgrano and San Martín that established the national historical canon. He declined a second presidency and died in 1906. He is one of very few nineteenth-century Latin American presidents who left office when his term ended, lost a subsequent election and accepted it. The library he assembled is a museum in Buenos Aires and the house is the one he lived in.

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