It was 15 p.m. on that memorable May 25, 1810. The ceremony was certainly emotional: the nine members of the brand new government entered the Cabildo through the main door while being cheered and applauded by the crowd. Cornelio Judá Tadeo Saavedra, appointed by the Cabildo to preside over our first national government, knelt in front of the platform of the main hall in which the historic deliberations of the Open Cabildo of Buenos Aires had taken place, and placed the palm of his hand on the open gospel. At his sides, Mariano Moreno and Juan José Paso (the secretaries of the Board) placed theirs on Saavedra's shoulder. Behind them, the members (Alberti, Azcuénaga, Belgrano, Castelli, Larrea and Matheu) did the same, resting their hands on the shoulder of the person in front of them. The oath of assumption of our first rulers was about to be taken. At that very moment, from the heart of the city of Buenos Aires, the history of the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata or the Argentine Republic began to be written.
At the beginning of 1810, Argentina did not yet have that name. Our current country was part of a much larger political unit called the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, which had been created in 1776 by King Charles III of Spain. It was home to just over eight million inhabitants, had an area of approximately five million square kilometers and included present-day Argentina, Bolivia, Uruguay and Paraguay.
On May 25 of that year, in the historic and emblematic event that is two hundred and eleven years old today, emancipation from Spain took place, and we became known as the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata, but six more years had to pass before independence was declared, and forty-three to achieve national organization under the protection of a National Constitution.
It was not until 1853, with the sanction of our Magna Carta, that Argentina joined the ranks of the world's States of Law. From then on, it was assumed that there would be a growing and sustained development of our institutions within the framework of liberty, the benefits of which the constituents wanted to ensure for themselves, for posterity and for all the men of the world who wanted to inhabit our soil.
And Argentina was that magnet for a world that saw in these lands a promising place for development. However, between 1930 and 1983, we had to endure six coups d'état and live for twenty-two years in the shadow of de facto regimes that devastated democracy and the republic as systems of government.
In 1983, democracy was restored, and since then it has been developing for almost forty years; but Argentina has not yet managed to consolidate its “republic” because the functioning of our institutions continues to be deficient.
In 1994, the National Constitution was the victim of a reform that weakened its republican vocation, because it gave the President of the Nation the power to exercise powers of Congress through the nefarious decrees of necessity and urgency; because it empowered Congress to delegate its powers to the former, giving legality to the legislative delegation or granting of extraordinary powers (which we call "superpowers"), and because it allowed the entry of the political corporation into the Judicial Branch (through the Council of the Judiciary).
And as if all this were not enough, we arrive at this new anniversary of the birth of our own government, in the context of a pandemic that is ravaging the world, and of a government management that is adrift, in which it is not clear whether power is exercised by the President or the Vice President, and which considers that the health emergency is a sufficient argument to manage outside the constitutional framework, to avoid strict compliance with the legal system, to turn the law "upside down" and to suspend the validity of the republican system of government provided for in the Fundamental Law.
If we leave aside the twenty-two “May 25s” that we have experienced during de facto administrations, the current one is perhaps the saddest institutionally and socially speaking. However, let this sad anniversary of our nationality not prevent us from projecting and foreseeing a better future in what refers to the full functioning of our republican institutions, whose functioning is clearly framed within the terms of the Constitution, whose sanction also occurred in a month of May, but in 1853.
Let today serve to think about it, to propose it to ourselves as a society, and to not leave our children with the idea that the only way out of our sleepless nights is in Ezeiza.
Felix V. Lonigro is Constitutional Lawyer y Professor of Constitutional Law (UBA)
The author is a lawyer and Professor of Constitutional Law (UBA). His latest book is "Keys to the Civic Education of Argentines" published by Planeta.
