Juan Manuel de Rosas

Juan Manuel de Rosas appears in the account of Esteban Echeverría’s El matadero as a dictator whose political power is linked to the lower-class supporters gathered around a Buenos Aires slaughterhouse. Though he is not shown acting directly in the episode, that link makes him central to the story’s picture of tyranny and to its critique of liberal political imagination.

Political Background

Written in the early 1840s and unpublished during Esteban Echeverría’s lifetime, El matadero is described as a polemic against Juan Manuel de Rosas’s dictatorship. The story situates its political conflict in a slaughterhouse in Buenos Aires, where its portrayal of the poor is marked by contempt and disgust. The setting is not merely a backdrop to the opposition between the regime and its critics: it becomes the place where the social base of Rosas’s rule is made visible.

Supporters and the Mazorca

The slaughterhouse workers are presented as a bastion of support for Juan Manuel de Rosas. They form the core membership of the Mazorca, described as a half-secret, lower-class private army deployed to terrorize his enemies. The account establishes this connection between the dictator and the workers without depicting Rosas personally directing the events at the slaughterhouse; its emphasis is on the political alliance and the violence associated with it.

Role in the Story’s Political Argument

The story’s final episode contrasts the slaughterhouse crowd with a proud, well-dressed Unitarian gentleman, an opponent of Juan Manuel de Rosas. The gentleman becomes the victim of the workers’ ritual humiliation and dies. By making this respectable, educated figure rather than the poor the exemplary victim of tyranny, the story exposes a tension in its own liberal perspective: it opposes dictatorship while expressing revulsion toward the lower-class life associated with its popular support. Juan Manuel de Rosas therefore stands at the center of an argument not only about political repression but also about the class antagonism and social fears shaping the story’s vision of resistance.