Juan José Castelli (19 July 1764 – 12 October 1812) was an Argentine lawyer who was one of the leaders of the May Revolution, which led to the Argentine War of Independence. He led an ill-fated military campaign in Upper Peru. He was in terms of free trade influenced by his cousin Manuel Belgrano.
Juan José Castelli was born in Buenos Aires, and went to school at the Real Colegio de San Carlos in Buenos Aires and Monserrat College in the city of Córdoba, Argentina. He graduated as a lawyer from the University of Charcas, in Upper Peru. His cousin, Manuel Belgrano, introduced him to the public administration of the Viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata. Along with Belgrano, Nicolás Rodríguez Peña, and Hipólito Vieytes, Castelli planned a revolution to replace the absolute monarchy with the new ideas of the Age of Enlightenment. He led the Buenos Aires patriots during the May Revolution, which ended with the removal of viceroy Baltasar Hidalgo de Cisneros from power. He is known as the "Speaker of the Revolution" for his speech during the open cabildo held in Buenos Aires on 22 May 1810.
Castelli was appointed a Committee member of the Primera Junta and was sent to Córdoba to end Santiago de Liniers's counter-revolution. He succeeded, and ordered the execution of Liniers and his supporters. He then commanded the establishment of a revolutionary government in Upper Peru (today's Bolivia) with the aim of freeing the indigenous peoples and African slaves. In 1811 Castelli signed a truce with the Spanish in Upper Peru, but they betrayed him and caught the Northern Army unprepared. As a result, the Argentines suffered a major loss in the Battle of Huaqui on 20 June 1811. When Castelli returned to Buenos Aires, the First Triumvirate imprisoned him for losing the battle, and Castelli died shortly afterwards from tongue cancer.
Castelli was born in Buenos Aires in 1764. He was the first of eight children born to a Venetian doctor, Ángel Castelli Salomón, and Josefa Villarino, who was a relative of Manuel Belgrano. He was trained by the Jesuits shortly before their expulsion, and attended the Real Colegio de San Carlos in Buenos Aires. As was customary, one of the children of the Castelli family was ordained into the priesthood, and Juan José was chosen for this. He was sent to study at the Colegio Monserrat, part of the University of Córdoba. He was influenced by the works of Voltaire and Diderot, and especially by Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Social Contract. He was a fellow student of men who would later have influence in the public life of South America, including Saturnino Rodríguez Peña, Juan José Paso, Manuel Alberti, Pedro Medrano, and Juan Martínez de Rozas, among others. He focused on studying philosophy and theology, but when his father died in 1785, he abandoned his career in the priesthood, for which he felt no strong vocation.
Rejecting his mother's proposal of sending him to study in Spain at the University of Salamanca and Alcalá de Henares, alongside his cousin Manuel Belgrano, he enrolled in jurisprudence studies in the University of Chuquisaca, in the Upper Peru (modern Bolivia). There, he learned about the ongoing French Revolution, and the new ideas of the Age of Enlightenment. He also learned about the 1782 Rebellion of Túpac Amaru II and the oppression of the indigenous peoples, which influenced his actions in his future Upper Peru campaign. Before returning to Buenos Aires, he visited Potosí and witnessed the use of slave labor in the mines.
Castelli returned to Buenos Aires and established a legal firm in his family home. He represented the University of Córdoba in various causes, as well as his uncle, Domingo Belgrano Peri. Through his associations with Saturnino Rodríguez Peña, he also met and befriended his brother, Nicolás Rodríguez Peña, and his associate, Hipólito Vieytes. Castelli married María Rosa Lynch in 1794, and they had seven children: Angela, Pedro, Luciano, Alejandro, Francisco José, and Juana.
Like many other nineteenth century Argentines prominent in public life, he was a freemason.
His professional development allowed him to buy, in August and take possession on 7 December 1798, the 335-hectare farm that belonged to Bishop Azamor y Ramírez on the outskirts of the viceregal capital, in the current neighborhood of Núñez. At the beginning of 1808 he moved his house to the farm. Here he was in the neighborhood of Cornelio Saavedra, Juan Larrea, Miguel de Azcuénaga and José Darregueira. In this farm he had crops and a brick factory.
Fifteen years before the creation of the consulate, the merchants of Buenos Aires managed to constitute a Board that was formalized as a representative body or corporation on 18 May 1779.
They constituted a heterogeneous group that differed:
a) By the place of permanent residence (Spain, "golondrinas" and Buenos Aires) and,
b) By the most important activity to which they were engaged.
The intellectuals of the viceroyalty received and secretly distributed a copy of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, promulgated by the French Revolution in 1789. Meanwhile, Belgrano returned from his studies in Europe, and was appointed as Perpetual Secretary of the new Consulate of Commerce of Buenos Aires. Belgrano and Castelli shared similar ideas about the Spanish trade monopoly and the rights of the natives. Belgrano attempted to appoint Castelli as interim Secretary of the Consulate as his assistant, but faced strong opposition from the peninsular merchants, who delayed the appointment until 1796. Belgrano became ill during his stay in Europe, which forced him to take extended leaves from work, and wanted Castelli to be his successor if he resigned.
There was a similar opposition during the 1799 election of delegates to the Buenos Aires Cabildo: Castelli was elected as third Regidor, but was rejected by merchants associated with the port of Cádiz. The conflict lasted a year, until the prominent local merchant Cornelio Saavedra wrote a memorandum recommending Castelli. Viceroy Avilés finally confirmed him in office by royal decree, in May 1800. Castelli, however, rejected the post because of his high workload in the consulate. This was seen as an insult by peninsular merchants such as Martín de Álzaga, who was influential in the Cabildo.
Castelli and Belgrano backed a pair of projects from Francisco Cabello y Mesa, who had just arrived from Spain. Cabello proposed the creation of a "Patriotic, Literary and Economic Society" lodge and the publication of a newspaper. This newspaper, the first one published in Buenos Aires, was named Telégrafo Mercantil. However, both projects were short-lived: the lodge was never established and its activities were banned by royal decree, and the consulate was instructed to withdraw support for the newspaper, which was then closed. Published by Castelli, Cabello, and Belgrano (secretary of the publication), as well as José Manuel Lavardén, Miguel de Azcuénaga and Fray Cayetano Rodríguez, the Telegraph was the first journal to advance the concept of fatherland, and the first to speak of the inhabitants as "Argentines".
Nevertheless, Hipólito Vieytes released a new newspaper shortly afterwards, the Agriculture, Trade and Industry Weekly, with Castelli in the staff. The editorial staff had meetings at the house of Saturnino Rodríguez Peña, discussing ideas for technical improvements in agriculture, removal of trade restrictions, development, manufacturing, and other topics. The newspaper also published the biographies of some Founding Fathers of the United States, such as Benjamin Franklin.
One example is the "Telegrafo Mercantil" which contains a poem in honor of the recently appointed viceroy Joaquín del Pino. The ideas of the enlightenment, especially practical and utilitarian knowledge to improve the quality of life, penetrated late in Spain due to isolation, traditionalist ideas and the peninsular Inquisition. It was this need to get Spain out of its growing backwardness, in the face of the development of the other European powers, that made the ministers and royal advisers transform these ideas into "state policy". The "enlightened" economic, social, administrative and political changes had to come from the top down: "All for the people but without the people." In this context, the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata was created in 1776; as well as the Hearing in 1785 and the Consulate of Buenos Aires in 1794. The demographic, economic and bureaucratic growth of Buenos Aires gave rise to the birth of a heterodox elite both within the Church and in the secular sectors abandoning many lawyers and other counsels. Several Spanish Americans traveled to Spain to study, such as Manuel José de Lavardén (1770–1778), Dean Gregorio Funes (1775–1779) and Manuel Belgrano (1786–1793). In 1783 the Royal College of San Carlos was inaugurated at the initiative of Viceroy Vértiz and the leadership of the reformist canon Juan Baltazar Maciel, possessor of a wide and eclectic library that members of the elite could consult. All these changes not only aimed to increase the fiscal resources of the Crown, they also improved the living conditions of the inhabitants: health through the institution of the Protomedicato in 1780, the lighting of the streets and the reuse of the printing press of the Jesuits abandoned in Córdoba which, at the beginning of 1780, was transferred by the order of Viceroy Vértiz to Buenos Aires and given property to the Casa de los Niños Foundling for the printing of government documents or cathons and primers used by the Catholic Enlightenment.