Juan Manuel de Rosas becomes Caudillo of…
May 1835 CE
Juan Manuel de Rosas becomes Caudillo of Argentina.
General Paz had been delivered to López in the city of Santa Fe, where he had spent four years in prison.
Rosas had asked for Paz's head previously, but López had refused to kill him.
During his time as a prisoner in Santa Fe, Paz had started writing his memoirs.
On March 21, 1835, he marries his niece Margarita Weild, who had served him while in prison and become pregnant, yet upon the assassination of Quiroga, Paz is handed to Rosas, perhaps due to López's poor health condition, to spend yet another three years in Luján (Buenos Aires).
The political crime has created a huge crisis in the Confederation, forcing Maza to resign on March 7.
Former governor Rosas returns to Buenos Aires a national hero in 1835 and on April 13 is elected to a five-year presidency.
Maza returns to the legislature in spite of the growing confrontations with Rosas that had started during Maza's term in the government.
He is also designated as judge in the trial to the Reinafé brothers, accused of Quiroga's assassination.
As the Confederation leader, Rosas leads the criminal investigation that ends with the prosecution of the governor of Córdoba José Vicente Reinafé, and his brother as the intellectual perpetrators of the assassination of Quiroga.
They will eventually b hanged in 1837 along with Santos Pérez in Buenos Aires.
Today, some historians believe that the actual person responsible for Quiroga's death was Rosas himself, who used the crime to return to power.
However, other historians state that there is no proof of that, and that Quiroga's death did not help Rosas at all.
In any case, Rosas begins to consolidate his power, guiding Buenos Aires to even greater dominance of the political and economic affairs of the inland provinces.
Rosas creates the Mazorca, a personal police organization answerable only to him, to deal with opponents of his increasingly powerful dictatorship.
La Mazorca ("the Corncob"), earns the federalists the derogatory nickname of mazorqueros, while they prefer to be known as The Holy Federation.
This feared band is also nicknamed más horca ("more gallows"), which is a homophone of La Mazorca in Spanish.