The reader will be unsurprised to find a provincial governor to be an exponent of federalism, and this put him at loggerheads with the ferocious Buenos Aires dictator General Juan Manuel de Rosas.
He logged a more specific head about a year before his death by attempting to negotiate a province-level arrangement with the French fleet blockading Argentina,* for which extravagance of federalism Rosas forced him to vacate his office and conceal himself in internal exile. Eventually Cullen was betrayed, and his arrestors putatively escorting him to the capital for trial rudely informed him once they reached the soil of Buenos Aires province that they were in fact licensed to shoot him out of hand.
Cullen’s son, Patricio, served as Santa Fe governor from 1862 to 1865, and also met a violent death.
* In response to a law that permitted the Argentine armed forces to conscript foreign nationals, including Frenchmen.
Early in the morning on this date in 1977, Argentinian revolutionaries Marta Angélica Taboada de Dillon and Gladys Porcel were shot by the junta.
Essentially all the information available about these Dirty War murders is in Spanish, as are most of the links in this post. The preceding October, Argentina’s new military junta — having just a few months previous seized power by deposing Juan Peron’s widow — raided the Buenos Aires house shared by the pregnant Marta Taboada with Gladys Porcel and the latter’s boyfriend Juan Carlos Negro Arroyo, all of them adherents of the October 17 Revolutionary Movement.*
They vanished into the shadow ranks of the “disappeared” — the women shot on February 3 in Ciudadela, Negro Arroyo executed separately with some other male activists that same month, all to be dumped into the mass graves that became the usual repose of the junta’s enemies.
Taboada’s children, notably including journalist and activist Marta Dillon, who was 10 at the time, witnessed their mother’s abduction. In 2000, all four children marked the anniversary of that terrible night — a night, Marta Dillon described, after which there was “nothing left of the world that I had known” — by publishing a letter in a newspaper pledging militancy in their mother’s memory.
Mama, in your name and in that of all the compañeros, we uphold the joy of standing and fighting. We do not forget, we do not forgive, we do not reconcile, we judge and punish the genocides and their accomplices.
-Marta, Santiago, Andrés and Juan Dillon.
The remains of Taboada, Porcel, and Negro Arroyo were identified by forensics teams in 2011 and interred with honor.
* The name alludes to the date in 1945 when popular protests forced the army to release Juan Peron from custody.
On this date in 1970, Argentine general and former dictator Pedro Eugenio Aramburu was shot by a band of Peronist student guerrillas.
Aramburu (English Wikipedia entry | Spanish) was one of the major figures behind the 1955 Revolución Libertadora that sent populist president Juan Peron fleeing to Spain. Peron was initially succeeded in the presidency by another general named Eduardo Lonardi, but before 1955 was out Aramburu had overthrown and replaced him, too; Aramburu ran the ruling junta until elections in 1958, maintaining a sharp ban on any vestige of Peronism — including even the mere mention of the exiled ex-president. He also had General Juan Jose Valle shot for plotting a Peronist coup in 1956.
The next two decades saw Argentina’s political institutions grow ever more painfully brittle, as shaky civilian governments were toppled in turn by equally shaky military rulers, every turn of the wheel eroding the country’s norms of orderly governance without attaining a stable political coalition. The charismatic Aramburu remained throughout a pole of anti-Peronism, which mattered as Peron’s long shadow grew and his return to Argentina began to seem likely.*
The faltering legitimacy of the government in turn spawned leftist guerrilla movements like the Peronist Montoneros, who entered Argentina’s political fray in gobsmacking style by abducting Aramburu in an affair the guerrillas called “Operation Pindapoy”.
On May 29, 1970 — Argentina’s Army Day and also the one-year anniversary of a suppressed popular uprising against the military government — two of the Montoneros terrorists disguised themselves as junior officers and presented themselves at Aramburu’s unguarded Buenos Aires apartment, claiming that the army had assigned them as his escort. The ruse worked like a charm.
With their prey in hand, the “officers” and their confederates stuffed him in a Peugeot and followed clattering dirt roads to evade police checkpoints, arriving that evening to a safehouse they had readied in the hamlet of Timote. There, a trio of young radicals constituted themselves a revolutionary tribunal and put Aramburu on “trial” for the murder of Gen. Valle and his fellow Peronist rebels fourteen years before.
Mario Firmenich, one of the dozen young Montoneros kidnappers, would later describe the three days they spent with their celebrated prisoner for a magazine: “His attitude was calm. If he was nervous, he controlled it.” Firmenich, who is still alive, has always insisted as he said then that their action evinced the popular will. “For the first time the people could sit on the bench and judge and condemn. That is what the Montoneros performed in Timote: to show the populace, that, beyond the pitfalls, legal chicanery and repression, there was a path to true justice, which stems from the will of a people.”
True justice was executed in the basement of their hideout. Having announced the inevitable verdict to Gen. Aramburu half an hour before, the leader of the cell shot him in the chest and then the head. The Montoneros then buried him, still bound and gagged, right there in the cellar — slathered with quicklime in an effort to hide the evidence.
It was a shocking blow to a fragile polity, and would help speed the (probably inevitable) fall of Gen. Juan Carlos Ongania, who was ousted from the presidency just a week after Aramburu’s murder.**
To grasp the profound effect of the kidnapping and murder of Aramburu it is necessary only to consult any Argentine periodical issued after May 29, 1970. Shortly after the kidnapping, Ongania announced in a televised speech that the death penalty would be imposed for crimes against public order. This decree was insufficient, however, to alleviate the feeling that order and authority had collapsed for good. (Source)
During Argentina’s subsequent dictatorship (and its escalating “Dirty War” against, amongst other subversives, the Montoneros), the town square of Timote was named for its unwilling guest Aramburu. That name has been changed in recent years.
** Aramburu was probably involved in a plot to get rid of Ongania, whose credibility had gone to pieces in early 1970 quite independent of the Montoneros. Firmenich suspects this might account for the ex-president’s compliance with the purported junior officers who abducted him.
On this date in 1828, Argentine independence hero Manuel Dorrego was shot in Buenos Aires — a casualty of that country’s unfolding civil war.
Dorrego (English Wikipedia entry | the more detailed Spanish), the youngest son of a Portuguese merchant, became a brilliant soldier of his country with an adventuresome career in the Argentine War of Independence, at one point taking refuge in exile in Baltimore, U.S.
If one likes, that sojourn in a functioning republic firmed up Dorrego’s commitment to federalism — the principle that would animate a decades-long internal conflict over division of power in the newly independent state.
Argentina’s federalists approved a distribution of power to its constituent regions; the opposing unitarians wanted a strong central government in Buenos Aires.
And they did not confine their disputes to pamphlets.
Resistance from the provinces to overweening Buenos Aires and Argentina’s unitarian first president Bernardino Rivadavia helped precipitate that gentleman’s fall from power and the dissolution of the national government.
Dorrego became Governor of Buenos Aires in August 1827, and exercised de facto head of state powers — for instance, he formally accepted the treaty ending hostilities in the Argentina-Brazil War.*
But a rough customer of the unitarian camp, Gen. Juan Lavalle, overthrew Dorrego’s government and mounted a terrifying purge of federales.**
Beginning, of course, with Dorrego himself, who was given one hour’s advance notice of his entirely extrajudicial shooting.
Most of the detailed information available online about this martyr is in Spanish — see here, here, here, and here, for instance.
* The fruit of this treaty was the independent state of Uruguay, as each side gave up trying to take that territory from the other by force.
** Until Lavalle was ousted by the next great unitarian leader, Juan Manuel de Rosas.
General Valle was shouldered out for his affiliations with the former regime: throughout the months following the coup, the Peron party was systematically proscribed and its leaders barred from politics.
In exile, Peron urged radical action by these disenfranchised followers, and Valle attempted to mount a revolt in June 1956.*
This operation was well-scouted by the government, and crushed instantly — with a couple dozen of its adherents summarily shot. (Spanish link)
Well, the Peronist party slogan was, “Our Lives for Peron.”
Valle avoided the initial slaughter, but he was captured in an apartment in Buenos Aires on this date and shot at the city’s National Penitentiary in the evening.
“Shot for trying to overthrow the government” doesn’t quite sound off the scale of typical coup outcomes, but in Buenos Aires in 1956, these executions were shockingly disproportionate relative to the handling of many recent unsuccessful coups. Actually, the Aramburu government had just that February repealed the death penalty as a statutory option for plotting a coup.
But it wasn’t using statutes to handle the Valle coup: it declared martial law, and handled subversives at its own discretion. (It rescinded martial law and ceased any further executions on June 13.)
The authorities’ brutal response was something of a turning point in Argentine political relations and culture. Throughout the Peronist decade even the harshest critics of the regime could not accuse it of executions of this sort, even though coups had been attempted against it. Bloodshed on this scale for political reasons was unprecedented in the political and military history of Argentina.
Aramburu himself would catch a bit of the blowback for authoring this “turning point”: in 1970, the former president was kidnapped (Spanish-language site) by the pro-Peron Montoneros guerrillas and himself summarily executed shortly thereafter — allegedly in specific retaliation for having shot Gen. Juan Jose Valle.
And the literary fallout was hardly more complimentary. Argentine writer Felix Luna penned La Fusilacion (The Firing Squad) the next year;** set during Argentina’s 19th century civil wars, it’s plainly informed by that country’s more contemporaneous problems.
* Valle’s top co-conspirator was another general, Raul Tanco. In a strange coda, Tanco managed to escape execution by claiming asylum in the Haitian embassy. Pro-government gunmen kidnapped him from that refuge and turned him over to the army, but in a gesture of diplomatic courtesy, Aramburu returned Tanco to the embassy unharmed, with apologies to the Haitians for the breach of decorum.
Cullen (English Wikipedia entry | Spanish) succumbed to Argentina’s lethal rolling civil conflict between political Unitarians (strong central state) and Federales (distributed federal power).
Essentially all the information available about these 
Aramburu (
Dorrego (
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