Introduction

Sarmiento published this book in instalments in a newspaper during his exile in Chile. On the surface it is a biography of the Argentine caudillo Juan Facundo Quiroga, the savage warlord nicknamed 'the Tiger of the Plains', killed in an ambush; in reality it uses him to attack Rosas, the dictator then ruling Argentina. Sarmiento sets out a far-reaching thesis: the fundamental conflict of Argentina, and of all Latin America, is the struggle between 'civilisation', embodied in the cities, and 'barbarism', embodied in the pampas. In vivid prose he depicts the boundless plains, the gauchos who live on them, the tracker, the guide, the singer and the outlaw, and the violence and despotism that grow from that land. Combining history, sociology, polemic and fiction, it is acknowledged as one of the most important works of nineteenth-century Latin American prose.