Gonzalo Sánchez
06/20/2020 - 7:01
- Clarín.com
- Society
Manuel Belgrano answers the phone at his home in Olavarría. He is 69 years old and a few minutes to go to the bone. Live days of isolation and some calm. His work as an agricultural consultant has decreased due to the pandemic, but his tasks as a popularizer have grown. Manuel Belgrano says that for two months, as always happens at this time, he has spoken to people who call him to ask him questions. He has to answer the supposed solemnity of a hero, but he is a common man like anyone worth his salt.
Manuel Belgrano became convinced over the years that his mission in life, in addition to working on the productive plain, was to classify all the existing documentation that carried the signature of Manuel Belgrano, the creator of the Flag, his distant grandfather. But very far away. Manuel Belgrano occupies in the family tree of the patriot, whose death anniversary is commemorated this Saturday, that of chozno grandson in the first degree.
Manuel Belgrano, fifth generation of Belgranos, is the owner of the Instituto Belgraniano, an office on Avenida Belgrano at 400, full of written treasures, which reports to the Ministry of Culture.
Manuel Belgrano does not want to play anachronisms. He does not accept the question that journalists often ask him, including the one who writes. What would be the political gaze of that man today who considered it necessary first a cockade and then a light blue and white flag to go to the melee differentiating his troops from the realistic troops? "No", says Manuel Belgrano , the hut grandson: "I could not tell you where you would be located ideologically. I have learned not to take the protagonists of the story out of context because it is precisely in that context that they were great and transcendent."
Manuel Belgrano and the creation of the flag.
"My father was a great-grandson of Belgrano and I am a descendant of Manuel Belgrano and the daughter he had with Dolores Helguero, who was from Tucumán," explains Manuel Belgrano, Olavarría's. Widowed for 14 years, father of two children, grandfather of six grandchildren. The childhood of that Manuel Belgrano is like the childhood of all of us. Lay education in public schools. But with a certain peculiarity. Manuel Belgrano saw that something happened every time the month of May arrived, the events of June and July. The teacher and her classmates asked for her opinion. Because here we have Manuel Belgrano, said one teacher and the other and the next. A luxury: having Belgrano in the classroom.
He understood that he must know more about his prose. Go to the past. To shed light on the truth of the story. Do not leave to analysis of any political fanaticism the analysis and disclosure of events that were in a way, according to documents.
Manuel Belgrano was born on June 3, 1770 and died exactly 200 years ago: on June 20, 1820. He was the architect of the Nation, a brilliant student, a man of word and thought and finally a military man of sword and action. After the May Revolution, he was one of the fiercest defenders of the incipient Homeland during the wars for independence.
The hero began writing at a very young age, at 18, during his days as a student of law and economics in Valladolid and Salamanca. In 50 years of life, he has left an infinity of texts and correspondences scattered by public and private archives and museums in Argentina and abroad. Manuel Belgrano, his hut grandson, is dedicated to compiling all of this.
Manuel Belgrano by cartoonist Vior
The work is of a brilliant caliber. There are two investigators and there is Belgrano. They detect a document, for example, in the Historical Archive of the Nation. They analyze it. They microfilm it. They digitize it. Preserving can also be sacralizing. They make it unalterable. They collect it. They bind it. They make it a book. "And we are going," says Belgrano, "creating a bibliography of documents that bear the signature of Manuel Belgrano, written over the years, between Spain and Argentina. Assembling a book takes between three and four years. We are going to 1816. In other words, we need to reconstruct in documentation the last four years of his life ”.
Manuel Belgrano always liked the story. Slowly, that vocation prevailed over his work in the field. They offered to join the Belgraniano Institute. He is now its director.
The Documents for the History of General Manuel Belgrano (as the volumes are called) that he makes each have 400 pages. In them lives the original version of those stories that the oral transfer, through media disseminators and writers of the moment, is deforming or reformulating. They are the books where scientific research is done to understand the nature of the hero. Or to meet man. "An historian," Belgrano says, "can be sure that if he goes to one of our books, he will have 90% of the documents secure ."
Manuel Belgrano's great production of political text takes flight when he returns from studying in Salamanca. "At 24 years old, he begins to write," says Belgrano. But there is also a lot of prior correspondence, written letters to the family. Letters from him as a student ”.
The Battle of Salta. oil, 1908. The author is the Italian artist Aristene Papi.
Belgrano was an outstanding student. “At 18, he is named President of the Academy of Forensic Economics and Practice. In Salamanca. He was an Indian and to get such a position with that condition of inferiority for the time you had to be brilliant.
While in Salamanca, Belgrano lives a moment of historical illumination: the French Revolution . The ideas of Republic, Liberty, Brotherhood, Private Property nest in it. You have the opportunity to read Adam Smith, father of liberalism, and Italians who forged mercantilism in the original language.
Belgrano chozno grandson is asked, what then would be the ideological matrix of the hero? “He develops a fairly broad concept of economics. He was a liberal physiocrat (branch of the economy that advocates non-state intervention), an eclectic as an economy. He spoke of promoting agriculture and industry, but also of protecting trade. The liberalism of that time is not very different from today, ”he replies.
Where to find the essence of Belgrano? Memories of the Buenos Aires Consulate. There, says Belgrano. "You have to read that. There are things that really surprise. He talks about education, surveying the territory, topographic plans, a perspective of what needs to be done. To promote different crops, even hemp and flax; He talks about textile crops, how the wool of animals that produced wool had to be improved. Talk about looking for new steps to Chile…. to trade with China! It really was a great advance. "
Belgrano reviews that Belgrano's friends have been Juan José Castelli, "who was the cousin", but also the important men of his time: Mariano Moreno, Rodríguez Peña, Vieytes, "with whom they talk from the English invasions and begin to discuss the idea of a sovereign republic or as Belgrano wanted, of a parliamentary monarchy with an Inca king ”.
Data from the life of Belgrano, the hero: the May Revolution seizes him on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. "They send for him to call," says Belgrano. "And he is going to ask that the open Cabildo of the 25th be summoned. And from May, the man of action emerges. He was a member for a few months and he was named to take over the army to go to Paraguay, on those expeditionary trips that carried the voice of what was the May Revolution. ”
Manuel Belgrano usually gives talks about the legacy of the hero by different municipalities in the interior of the country. A guardian and disseminator of the legacy.
Later, 1816, independence: Belgrano exhibited in Tucumán. That form of government, an Inca king, takes it from the British model because he understands that the republics are not sufficiently consolidated in Europe. Belgrano does not deny the indigenous. Draws up the Political Regulation for the Peoples of the Missions, which indicates the right to land. Experts consider it an antecedent to the National Constitution.
But before that, between the May Revolution and the Declaration of Independence, he created the Flag.
Belgrano Chozno tells from Olavarría, while talking with Clarín, on this June morning, of diaphanous sky, of coming storms, that his grandfather is sent to Villa del Rosario to assemble two batteries. It is a time of internal wars. You must defend the coast of Paraná from realistic ships anchored in the deep waters of Montevideo. From there, the troops of the crown make warlike incursions.
Belgrano continues: “They had to fight and they had the same flag. He needed to differentiate his own. First create a rosette, white and light blue, and then, yes, create the flag, ”says Manuel Belgrano. What everyone knows or should know happened: "On February 27, 1812, as he said, 'having to fly a flag, and not having it, I sent it to be made white and light blue', he hoists the flag of the homeland for the first time." Unforgettable. And told by Manuel Belgrano.
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