Juan Manuel José Domingo Ortiz de Rozas y López de Osornio (30 March 1793 – 14 March 1877), nicknamed "Restorer of the Laws", was an Argentine politician and army officer who ruled Buenos Aires Province and briefly the Argentine Confederation. Born into a wealthy family, Rosas independently amassed a personal fortune, acquiring large tracts of land in the process. Rosas enlisted his workers in a private militia, as was common for rural proprietors, and took part in the disputes that led to numerous civil wars in his country. Victorious in warfare, personally influential, and with vast landholdings and a loyal private army, Rosas became a caudillo, as provincial warlords in the region were known. He eventually reached the rank of brigadier general, the highest in the Argentine Army, and became the undisputed leader of the Federalist Party.
In December 1829, Rosas became governor of the province of Buenos Aires and established a dictatorship backed by state terrorism. In 1831, he signed the Federal Pact, recognising provincial autonomy and creating the Argentine Confederation. When his term of office ended in 1832, Rosas departed to the frontier to wage war on the indigenous peoples. After his supporters launched a coup in Buenos Aires, Rosas was asked to return and once again took office as governor. Rosas reestablished his dictatorship and formed the repressive Mazorca, an armed parapolice that killed thousands of citizens. Elections became a farce, and the legislature and judiciary became docile instruments of his will. Rosas created a cult of personality and his regime became totalitarian in nature, with all aspects of society rigidly controlled.
Rosas faced many threats to his power during the late 1830s and early 1840s. He fought a war against the Peru–Bolivian Confederation, endured a blockade by France, faced a revolt in his own province and battled a major rebellion that lasted for years and spread to five northern Argentine provinces. Rosas persevered and extended his influence in the provinces, exercising effective control over them through direct and indirect means. By 1848, he had extended his power beyond the borders of Buenos Aires and was ruler of all of Argentina. Rosas also attempted to annex the neighbouring nations of Uruguay and Paraguay. France and Great Britain jointly retaliated against Argentine expansionism, blockading Buenos Aires for most of the late 1840s, but were unable to halt Rosas, whose prestige was greatly enhanced by his string of successes.
When the Empire of Brazil began aiding Uruguay in its struggle against Argentina, Rosas declared war in August 1851, starting the Platine War. This short conflict ended with Rosas being defeated and exiled to Britain. His last years were spent in exile as a tenant farmer in Southampton, Hampshire, until his death in 1877. Rosas garnered an enduring public perception among Argentines as a brutal tyrant. Since the 1930s, an authoritarian, antisemitic and racist political movement in Argentina known as Nacionalismo has attempted to improve Rosas' reputation and establish a new dictatorship on the model of his regime. In 1989, his remains were repatriated by the government in an attempt to promote national unity, seeking to rehabilitate Rosas and pardon military personnel convicted of human rights abuses. Rosas remains a controversial figure in Argentina in the 21st century; he was represented on the 20 Argentine peso bill until 2017.
Juan Manuel José Domingo Ortiz de Rozas was born on 30 March 1793 at his family's town house in Buenos Aires, the capital of the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata. He was the first child of León Ortiz de Rozas, a military officer with an undistinguished career, and his wife Agustina López de Osornio, from a wealthy criollo family. His father was the son of Domingo Ortiz de Rozas y Rodillo, a Spanish officer from Seville. The young Juan Manuel de Rosas' character was heavily influenced by his mother Agustina, a strong-willed and domineering woman who derived these character traits from her father Clemente López de Osornio, a landowner who died defending his estate from an Indian attack in 1783.
As was common practice at the time, Rosas was schooled at home until the age of eight, and then enrolled in what was regarded the best private school in Buenos Aires. Though befitting the son of a wealthy landowner, his education was unremarkable. According to historian John Lynch, Rosas' education "was supplemented by his own efforts in the years that followed. Rosas was not entirely unread, though the time, the place, and his own bias limited the choice of authors. He appears to have had a sympathetic, if superficial, acquaintance with minor political thinkers of French absolutism".
In 1806, a British expeditionary force invaded Buenos Aires. A 13-year-old Rosas served in distributing ammunition to troops in a force organised by Viceroy Santiago Liniers to counter the invasion. The British were defeated in August 1806, but returned a year later. Rosas was then assigned to the Caballería de los Migueletes (a militia cavalry), although he was probably barred from active duty during this time due to illness.
After the British invasions had been repelled, Rosas and his family moved from Buenos Aires to their estancia (ranch). His work there further shaped his character and outlook as part of the Platine region's social establishment. In the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, owners of large landholdings (including the Rosas family) provided food, equipment and protection for families living in areas under their control. Their private defence forces consisted primarily of labourers who were drafted as soldiers. Most of these peons, as such workers were called, were gauchos.
The landed aristocracy of Spanish descent considered the illiterate, mixed-race gauchos, who comprised the majority of the population, to be ungovernable and untrustworthy. The gauchos were tolerated because there was no other labour force available, but were treated with contempt by the landowners. Rosas got along well with the gauchos in his service, despite his harsh, authoritarian temperament. He was known to dress like them, joke with them, take part in their horse-play, and pay them well, but he never allowed them to forget that he was their master rather than their equal. Shaped by the colonial society in which he lived, Rosas was conservative, an advocate of hierarchy and authority, like the other great landowners in the region.
Rosas acquired a working knowledge of administering ranch lands and, beginning in 1811, took charge of his family's estancias. In 1813, he married Encarnación Ezcurra, daughter of a wealthy family from Buenos Aires. Soon afterwards, he sought to establish a career for himself, leaving his parents' estate. He produced salted meat and acquired landholdings in the process. As the years passed he became an estanciero (rancher) in his own right, accumulating land while establishing a successful partnership with second cousins from the politically powerful Anchorena clan. His hard work and organisational skills in deploying labour were key to his success, rather than creating new or applying nontraditional approaches to production.
The May Revolution of 1810 marked the early stage of a process which later led to the disintegration of Spain's Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, independence and the eventual formation of Argentina. Rosas, like many landowners in the countryside, was suspicious of a movement advanced primarily by merchants and bureaucrats in the city of Buenos Aires. Rosas was specially outraged by the execution of Viceroy Santiago de Liniers at the hands of the revolutionaries. Rosas felt nostalgic about colonial times, seeing them as stable, orderly and prosperous.
When the Congress of Tucumán severed all remaining ties with Spain in July 1816, Rosas and his peers accepted independence as an accomplished fact. Independence resulted in a breakup of the territories that had formed the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata. The province of Buenos Aires fought a civil war with the other provinces over the degree of autonomy which the provincial governments were supposed to have. The Unitarian Party supported the preeminence of Buenos Aires, while the Federalist Party defended provincial autonomy. A decade of strife over the issue destroyed the ties between capital and provinces, with new republics being declared throughout the country. Efforts by the Buenos Aires government to quash these independent states were met with determined local resistance. In 1820 Rosas and his gauchos, all dressed in red and nicknamed Colorados del Monte ("Reds of the Mount"), enlisted in the army of Buenos Aires as the Fifth Regiment of Militia. They repulsed invading provincial armies, saving Buenos Aires.