Importance of the Battle of Caseros (1852)

The most significant confrontation between federals of the 19th century because modern Argentina was born from it. Forces and political proposals were settled by two emblems of the federal ideology: Juan Manuel de Rosas in command of the Argentine Confederation, and Justo José de Urquiza leading the Big Army.

The resources and forces they counted on were almost equal in number, however, the strategy of the allies was more accurate and attentive to the context of the struggle and for this reason they managed to prevail quickly.

It happened in February of the year 1852, in the western area of ​​the province of Buenos Aires (now Morón), and produced various and relevant consequences for the organization. policy of the country: defeat and exile of Rosas, rise to power of Urquiza.

However, these consequences are the most visible or the most obvious and repeated, but there are other issues that advanced thanks to this transcendental Battle: the organization of the state and the sanction of a Constitution national with a republican spirit and that protects federalism.

A 17-year leadership that collapsed on the battlefield

At that time Rosas was the governor of Buenos Aires, he exercised the role of chancellor attending to external issues, and had the sum of public power that allowed him to act at piacere.

On the other hand, since he took office he had opposed the sanction of a constitution and the national organization, basically because this would imply having to share the revenue from customs with the rest of the country and the loss of power of Buenos Aires. Aires.

But Urquiza, a former ally of Rosas and governor on several occasions of the province of Entre Rivers, he decided to put a stop to his overwhelming and tyrannical authority through a pronouncement in which he surprisingly rejected the Rosas's resignation, a strategy that the restorer of the laws used to achieve the renewal of his mandate, but this time he did not it worked…

A struggle moved by commercial freedom and the tyrannical weariness exercised by Rosas

Urquiza received immediate support from the governor of Corrientes, Santa Fé, the Unitarians in exile, Uruguay and Brazil.

A year later, in 1852, they faced Rosas at the Battle of Caseros, and the Allied victory marked the end of 17 years of government rosista, a management marked by lights and shadows, with a federal tendency but also with personalistic and autocratic biases of the highest authority.

In reality several factors agreed on the end of Rosas: the commercial restrictions imposed by the provinces, the weariness of caudillos like Urquiza against the rosista tyranny, and the conformation of the alliance Urquiza-Montevideo-Brazil

Urquiza, as governor of Entre Ríos, demanded from Rosas the free navigability of the rivers to being able to trade directly abroad without the intermediation of Buenos Aires, of course, Rosas gave it to him. The denied.

Fed up with not being respected, he wove external alliances, even with his ideological rivals, the Unitarians, in order to form a common front through the Big Army that ended up defeating Rosas.

Defeated, and absolutely alone because his political allies and the Buenos Aires landowners who supported him so much they ran from his side as soon as he lost the battle, he went into exile in England, in Southampton, where he died at the age of 83 in 1877.