06/19/2020 - 20:02
- Clarín.com
- Opinion
Manuel Belgrano is alone in the ravine on the promontory of the improvised viewpoint, a weak watchtower. The night silently invades him. The air is on. The sky is phosphorescent in Humahuaca, and the gorges and summits light up when the wind turns.
The general, who was actually civil, studious and pacifist , graduated in law in the harsh classrooms of the University of Salamanca, rises to the abyss. He throws himself into war, but instead of falling, he climbs on the scaffolds of the peaks of courage. The royalists were already making their way between the giant cardons and the stony ground. And then the Exodus decided. A terrible side spread: "The time has come when you manifest your heroism and that you come to join the Army under my command if, as you assure, you want to be free ... Squatters, hurry to get your cattle, horses, mules and sheep that be in your rooms ... Labradors: secure your crops by extracting them ... Merchants: do not waste a moment in baling your effects ... " Around the pale torches, someone was already singing an elegy: Goodbye Jujuicito, goodbye Goodbye I am crying Farewell is so sad The return who knows when.
Argentina sprouted, giving birth from exodus and sacrifice.
Months before, Belgrano had raised the flag for the first time on the banks of the Paraná. By the way, I imagined another future, that this our present.
Belgrano is not a myth. It was real. And today it is shameful to compare those spirits with so many wretches and scoundrels who run over everyone from the vain power that they use and denigrate. They give money back to thieves, they take what is foreign, they operate only for themselves.
They seek and achieve impunity and impudence. Thus they scatter a filth that poisons and numbs. They have amnestied dishonesty. Ignorant despotism reigns.
Today is Flag Day. History does not forgive those who abuse her with unspeakable negligence. The past teaches but memory has been blurred.
The general, who was a lawyer, was also a journalist and an economist . He wrote in the Mercantile Telegraph, when the United Provinces were not yet free, and in February 1810 he published the first copy of his Commercial Mail. It was his communication project. From there he proclaimed against Spain that he still had not ceased with his colonial tourniquet and Belgrano lashed out against those who were stealing for the Crown .
He already exalted in his early writings the productive power of the field: “Agriculture is the true destiny of man. It is without contradiction the first art, the most useful, the most extensive and the most essential of all the arts ... The wealth of all men has its origin in that of rural men, and if the general increase in the wealth of the land it makes everyone richer, it is in the interest of the one who wants to provide the happiness of the country, that the mysteries that facilitate it are revealed to all the people engaged in the cultivation of land and that the defect of ignorance so easy to correct, not prevent the advancement of wealth… ”“ [agriculture] is the only absolute and independent source of wealth ” .
It was Belgrano who, strictly speaking, inaugurated autonomous journalism , another flag that is trampled on today by government disrespect, and it was he who - visionary - knew how to see in the countryside (when Argentina was not yet Argentina) the first engine of a society that he was beginning to seek his destiny.
His last act is known and reiterated. He had no way to pay his personal doctor and gave him his gold and enamel watch.
The general who was not a general had donated salaries and any form of subsidy towards his deed. I had nothing. He gave up all his own.
In a cruel allegory of the fate of this country, someone stole Belgrano's watch from the National Museum, where it was exposed.
The exemplarity of the original and foundational time had been removed.
It is not known if Belgrano said what the school textbooks say that he said at the moment of death. It is a common place to reiterate it on the occasion of a day like today. It can be an illustrative construction of those who sacralized the heroes.
But that is probably what he felt deep down in his heart that stopped.
"Oh, my homeland . "