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by Domingo F. Sarmiento (Author), Juan Carlos Casas (Foreword by)
One of the best travel books emerged from an Argentine pen is "Travels in Europe, Africa and North America" 1845/1847 "by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento. At the time of leaving for Europe, Algeria and North America, Sarmiento, 34, had already written "Facundo", suffered political exile twice, and had a unique cultural background in the southern republics recently independent from the colonial system. Spanish.
His Chilean friend Manuel Montt "at the time Minister and then President of Chile" had entrusted him, in the words of Sarmiento himself, "to analyze the institutions that retard or promote their progress."
The "Travels ...", written in letters addressed to different recipients, narrate the impressions and experiences of the stages of the journey - Montevideo, Rio, Paris, Spain, Algeria, etc. - as well as the reflections that they provoke in the author. His direct knowledge of the Argentine dictatorship, complemented by that of the civil war and the siege of Montevideo, lead him to wonder the reasons for the roots of what we now call caudillismo and the struggle of factions that tear apart Hispanic America: the proliferation of armed gangs whose bosses could be described as gauderios (this is lazy) "if instead of singing like the cicada they did not stop at spilling blood." Only European trade and the arrival of new immigrants can, in his opinion, inject life into a corrupt system and condemned to repeat itself by people who believe because they do not try to think.
