Manuel Quintana

He participated in politics since his youth and in 1860 he was elected deputy of the legislature of the Province of Buenos Aires, by the party of Bartolomé Mitre. Subsequently, he went to the Autonomist Party of Adolfo Alsina to oppose Miter's project to name the City of Buenos Aires Capital of the Republic.

In 1864, he was elected member of the Argentine Chamber of Deputies for the province of Buenos Aires and presented a bill to name the City of Rosario as the nation's capital, which would be approved but vetoed by the executive power.

In 1870 he was elected National Senator and in 1871 President Sarmiento sent him to Asunción to negotiate the peace treaty that ended the War of the Triple Alliance against Paraguay.

Photo by Manuel Quintana.

In 1873 he became a Freemason, Also in that year he presented himself as a candidate in the presidential elections to succeed Sarmiento from 1874, but he lost to Nicolás Avellaneda.

In 1877 he held the rector of the University of Buenos Aires until 1881 when his term ended.

In 1876 there was an incident between the government of Santa Fe, at that time in charge of Servando Bayo, and the branch of the Bank of London in Rosario, for not having followed the law that ordered the conversion to gold of all emissions of paper money made by the government of the province.

As a result of this situation, the arrest of the branch manager and the intervention of the branch were ordered. Quintana was a National Senator and the bank's legal advisor at the time of the crisis, and he did not hesitate to resign from his bank for "health reasons." However, Quintana traveled to London, where he proposed to the government of Great Britain the bombing of the city of Rosario if the government of Santa Fe did not cancel the intervention of the bank.

At the end of the second presidency of Julio A. Roca, the National Autonomist Party was divided into two factions: the one led by Roca and the one led by former president Carlos Pellegrini; For this reason, Roca sought an alliance with Bartolomé Mitre's party, proposing an alliance formula that would lead a Mitrist, Manuel Quintana, as a candidate for president, accompanied by the roquista José Figueroa Alcorta. In the presidential elections of April 10, 1904, this formula was triumphant, and they were proclaimed President and Vice President of the Nation on June 12 of the same year by the electoral college. Quintana was 68 years old at the time.

Quintana and his cabinet.

Among his government efforts, it is worth highlighting the nationalization of the University of La Plata, the regulation of the exercise of the liberal professions, the sanction of the Sunday rest law, proposed by the socialist deputy Alfredo Palacios, and the "Lainez Law" for the creation of elementary schools in the provinces.

Quintana did not agree with the uninominal system, established by the electoral law of 1901, since the system of patronage and the pressure on voters had not been modified. So he sent a bill to Congress, proposing a single and universal registry –based on military service records– and the mandatory nature of voting. The original project was so modified that the only thing it had in common with the one presented by the president was the elimination of the single-member system; it was a complete return to the previous system, with all its flaws.

Since the defeat of 1893, and even more since the division between "bernardistas" and followers of Hipólito Yrigoyen, no one seriously considered the Unión Cívica Radical as a party with the possibility of accessing power. But, suddenly, the UCR reappeared showing a political and territorial organization far superior to that of the ruling party, and a great revolutionary decision, in the radical revolution of 1905, in which several units of the Army were involved. Exploded on February 4 of that year, it was relatively successful in Buenos Aires, Rosario, Córdoba, Bahía Blanca and Mendoza, but was quickly put down.

Photo by Manuel Quintana.

On August 11, 1905, Quintana and his wife, Susana Rodríguez Viana, suffered an attack against their lives, when Salvador Planas y Virella, a Catalan anarchist, shot at the presidential vehicle, but he could not carry out his task due to a failure in the pistol he used. Planas declared that he acted alone and that his motivation was to avenge the workers killed during the demonstration on May 21 of that year. He was arrested and during the trial in September 1907 the defense alleged mental instability. Planas was sentenced to 10 years in prison for attempted murder. On January 6, 1911, he fled the Buenos Aires National Penitentiary with the anarchist Francisco Solano Regis, who had attacked President José Figueroa Alcorta, Quintana's successor.[1]

bust of Manuel Quintana in the room of the busts of the Casa Rosada.

It was featured on the five hundred thousand austral banknote that circulated during the hyperinflation in Argentina from 1989 to 1991.