Nicolas Avellaneda
Nicolas Avellaneda paid Argentina's debts by economising on everything including hunger, and doubled its territory by destroying the people who lived on the other half. He was a lawyer and journalist from Tucuman, the son of a provincial leader who had been executed and whose head was displayed in the town square, and he was thirty-seven when he took office in 1874 after an election his opponents insisted was fraudulent and answered with a rebellion. He inherited the world depression that had begun the previous year, an economy built on borrowed money and wool exports, and a treasury that could not service what it owed. His response became famous in a phrase - that the republic would economise on hunger and thirst to honour its obligations abroad - and he meant it: salaries cut, public works stopped, the debt paid. The second half of his programme was the conquest of the south. The frontier with the independent indigenous peoples of the pampas and Patagonia had barely moved since the colonial period, and in 1878 his war minister took an army equipped with the new repeating rifles and the telegraph across it. The campaign killed something over a thousand people in fighting, drove tens of thousands from their land, broke up families into forced labour on sugar estates and in Buenos Aires households, and opened some fifteen thousand square leagues, most of which was distributed to a few hundred families and to the syndicates that had financed the expedition. It ended indigenous political existence in Argentina and created the landholding structure that defined the country afterwards. His term also brought the immigration and colonisation law that opened the country to the European migration that would multiply its population fivefold, and it ended in a civil war over whether Buenos Aires or the nation owned the city. The nation won, the city was federalised in 1880, and the question that had been open since independence was finally settled by artillery.
- Lived: 1837 CE – 1885 CE
- Nationality: Argentine
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
