Places – Buenos Aires, Argentina (part I)

Buenos Aires is situated in the southeastern region of South America. It lies on the western shore of the Río de la Plata, an estuary formed by the confluence of the Paraná and Uruguay Rivers. The city faces the Atlantic Ocean to the east and serves as a major port, connecting Argentina to international maritime routes.

The city has a humid subtropical climate (Cfa under the Köppen climate classification), with mild winters and hot, humid summers. Its proximity to the ocean and the vast Pampas plains to the west influences its moderate temperature variations and frequent rainfall.

The Rio de la Plata is one of the widest estuaries in the world (up to 220 km across), if not the widest, and it’s width creates the illusion of an ocean horizon from the city’s shore, though it’s entirely composed of river (non saline) water.

Buenos Aires has an average elevation of only 25 meters above sea level, making it one of the flattest cities in the world. This also means that it has an extensive navigable river system. For example, the Paraná, one of the longest rivers in South America, is navigable for more than 2,000 km upstream, well into Brazil. On the other hand the Río de la Plata is prone to sudestadas, a unique weather phenomenon involving strong southeast winds that cause the river to swell, resulting in localised flooding in parts of the city.

Buenos Aires is also one of the largest cities in the Southern Hemisphere, and its dense urban environment amplifies the heat retention during the summer months, creating a localised “urban heat island” effect. This contrasts sharply with the cooler, greener surroundings of the Pampas.

Public plazas, squares, etc. appear to be places that mix public protest with public executions. In Buenos Aires they followed Spanish colonial practices, and public executions served as both punishment and deterrence. The Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata sanctioned capital punishment for severe offences such as murder, heresy, and rebellion, but equally for some important cases of robbery. Executions were often public events intended to reinforce social order and deter criminal behaviour.

From the 1600s it would appear that there were several public executions in Plaza de Mayo (previously just called Plaza Mayor and for a period Plaza de la Victoria). Criminals could be hanged, decapitated, burnt at the stake, garrotted, dismembered, and their bodies displayed as a warning or to deter future dissent.

The first robbery by burglars recorded in Buenos Aires dates back to September 16, 1631. It was at the Casa Rosada, which was the fort of Buenos Aires at that time. One morning they discovered that a cedar chest containing the fort’s funds had been stolen. The search for the culprits did not last long, and soon after, the absence of a certain Pedro Cajal, a 22-year-old Chilean who lived near the Santo Domingo convent, was detected. Days later he was arrested, hidden among bales in a cart with part of the loot. 

He was taken to Buenos Aires where he was sentenced to hanging. Cajal protested and asked to die from a blow to the neck with a club and then be decapitated. He could ask for this since he was the natural son of an official in Chile and his request was accepted. On September 30, 1631, he was taken with his servant in shackles to the area of the fort wall so that the people could see his execution. Cajal was killed by a blow from a club and Juan Puma, his servant, was hanged. Their heads were then cut off and displayed on pikes on one of the walls.

Naturally there were other executions in Buenos Aires, but the evidence that they occurred in public in Plaza de Mayo is often circumstantial.

It is my understanding that the axe and the guillotine were never used, and initially the most frequent method was the gallows.

At the end of 1754 the Buenos Aires City Council acquired the so-called “lathe device”, made by the master blacksmith Juan Bautista Dumison, in the hope of alleviating the unnecessary prolongation of suffering for the hanged. But the reality was that any type of garrote caused tremendous suffering to the condemned. The minutes of the City Council said that the instrument existing at that time was “defective” because it was too “narrow” for necks in general, and could not be “accommodated” without causing “serious discomfort”. I’m not sure how you can avoid serious discomfort when garrotting someone!  

In Spain, from 1832 onwards, the garrote replaced the gallows as the usual form of execution. King Ferdinand VII had decreed the abolition of hanging and the uniform adoption of the garrote procedure for reasons of “humanity” and “decency”. He added at the time that his “munificent decision” coincided with the “happy birthday of my very beloved wife the queen”. A curious way to celebrate a birthday.

As for the word “garrote”, it literally alluded at first to the wooden stick with which low-class convicts were beaten, that is, to “garrotazos”. Over time, the word persisted in the designation of the new lethal instrument, which should rather be called a lathe or screw.

There were three types of punishment by garrote, depending on the seriousness of the crime. First, the ordinary garrote for the common people, then the noble garrote for the nobles, and finally the vile garrote for infamous crimes. In this last type, as a very visible mockery, the condemned man was dragged to the scaffold or arrived mounted on a donkey, but facing its tail.

It’s worth remembering that the last Viceroy of the Río de la Plata (1810–1811), General Francisco Javier de Elío, was later accused of being an absolutist, and was executed by this means in Valencia, in 1822.

In Buenos Aires, executions were carried out according to a precise and very visible ceremony. They were well staged in specific places in the city where crowds could gather. It was a form of performative spectacle, as morbid as the Roman circus and, at the same time, explicitly disciplinary.

The Mutiny of the Braids (El Motín de las Trenzas) was a military uprising that took place in Buenos Aires on December 6-7, 1811, in which the soldiers and non-commissioned officers of the Regimiento de Patricios refused to obey some orders of the government at that time exercised by the First Triumvirate. Among these was the order to cut the troops’ ponytails-braids (cortar las coletas de las tropas), a sign of distinction and autonomy of the members of that regiment.

On 11 December 1811, a few days after the mutiny was over, four sergeants, two corporals and four soldiers of the Regiment of Patricios were sentenced to death as its ringleaders, shot and hanged in public.

On July 6, 1812, Martín de Álzaga, and more than 30 of his co-conspirators, were executed for mutiny, and their bodies were displayed publicly in Plaza de la Victoria for three days as a deterrent to others. They had been accused of, and condemned for, conspiring to overthrow the First Triumvirate (1811-1812).

In the early hours of April 9, 1814, after a process that lasted barely 30 hours, a certain Captain Marcos Ubeda was summarily executed, and his corpse, in accordance with custom, was exhibited in the Plaza de la Victoria.

Carlos María de Alvear had been a leader of the constituent Assembly of the year 1813 and, goaded by political ambition, succeeded in establishing a Unitarian (centralising) form of government. He would become the Supreme Director of the Second Triumvirate (1812-1814). His form of military dictatorship inevitably included censorship, espionage, denunciation, interception of correspondence, elimination of opponents, etc.

The end of Ubeda, although he was not a high-ranking officer or an influential soldier, brought unsuspected political consequences. He was appreciated by the people, and might one day have caused the collapse of the government. So Alvear thought to take advantage of the quietness of Easter Sunday. However the gallows had been erected almost in front of the cathedral, and the devout people of Buenos Aires could not repress their horror at the spectacle. Even the priest Julián Navarro, who served as curate of San Isidro, was arrested during lunch by order of Alvear, for having expressed his rejection of the arbitrary execution. Inevitably Alvear would later resign, and go into exile in Rio de Janeiro until 1818.

On September 20, 1828, the Buenos Aires newspaper British Packet reported in detail the execution of Jaime Marcet and Juan Pablo Arriaga, carried out in the Plazoleta del Fuerte (part of the future Plaza de Mayo) four days earlier. They were accused of murdering Francisco Álvarez. They were allowed to say goodbye to family, then seated and shot. As required by the punitive protocol, the bodies were taken to the gallows that were erected on a scaffold in front of the house where the murder victim lived. They were held up with ropes passed under their armpits, and remained there like pendulums in the sun for an hour.

On March 6, 1830, the British Packet again reported on the execution, three days earlier, in the same square, of a prisoner named Henri Fleury, accused of forging bank notes in complicity with others. Since ancient times, counterfeiters of currency were executed with great rigour. It was said that in the Middle Ages, in some countries, forgers were boiled alive or had molten lead poured down their throats. Dante Alighieri placed them in one of the pits of the eighth infernal circle, condemned to dropsy that monstrously deformed their bodies.

A wooden scaffold was erected early in the morning in front of the Fort to stage the execution and subsequent hanging of the corpse on the gallows. Before the execution a bonfire was lit in front of the scaffold. It was a substantial part of the ritual, because in that fire, one by one, the counterfeit banknotes were burned. When the fire was consumed, he sat on a wooden bench near the pit, and as he was shot a band began to play. He was then hung on the gallows already prepared. 

On October 25, 1837, the death sentence was carried out on two of the four brothers originally called Queenfaith, but renamed in Spanish as Reinafé (a third had already died in prison and the fourth had escaped arrest by crossing to the other side of the Plata). José Vicente Reynafé was an Argentine military man and politician, who served as governor of Córdoba between 1831 and 1835. He was accused and condemned, along with his brothers Francisco, Guillermo and José Antonio Reynafé, for the murder of Facundo Quiroga. A certain Captain Santos Pérez was also accused, and finally the three were shot.

By August 1907, a protest against the rent increase arose in a downtown tenement at 279 Ituzaingó Street. In just over a month, it spread to 500 tenements and reached Barracas and La Boca, where 302 tenements joined. The phenomenon even had repercussions in cities such as Rosario and La Plata.

This was the Tenants’ Strike, also called the Broom Strike (Huelga de las Escobas) because protesting tenants, many of whom were women, symbolically carried brooms and hung them outside their windows. The broom symbolised the “sweeping away” of unfair landlords and high rents.

It was a mass protest against high rents and poor living conditions in the city’s tenement houses (conventillos). At best, the protests were not considered a total failure. And there was one very positive outcome.

In total approximately 120,000 people from Buenos Aires participated actively in the strike committees. All of these committees were led predominantly by female tenants. So finally women took their rightful place in the fight for better working and living conditions in Buenos Aires.