Carlos Pellegrini

Senator (1895–1904)

After his presidential term ended, he served as senator for the period 1895 to 1904. He played a prominent role in securing passage in 1896 of a law that guaranteed payment of Argentina's foreign debt. He received many offers to run for president in the 1898 presidential election, but rejected them.

In 1904 he traveled to the United States, where he witnessed the accession to power of president Theodore Roosevelt. Pellegrini recounted the experiences of that trip in six letters that later appeared in the newspaper La Nación, in which, among other things, he spoke of strengthening relations with the North American country.

The anti-Roca movement

The political alliance between Carlos Pellegrini and Julio Argentino Roca weakened in July 1901, although it did not disappear entirely, because of differences over a financial project. The break occurred when Roca, during his second government, asked Pellegrini to draft a legislative initiative for the consolidation of the public debt of 392 million gold pesos into a single loan of 453 million gold pesos. Pellegrini drafted a bill to unify the external public debt through a single loan at 4% annual interest and 0.5% amortization, over the long term, with obligations guaranteed by customs revenues. The proposal obtained half-sanction in the Senate. But the project met with strong rejection in public opinion; an address by José Terry at the Faculty of Law triggered street disturbances at the beginning of 1901, and the government ended up declaring a state of siege. For several days there were disturbances in the city center and demonstrations dispersed by police; a protest also gathered in front of Pellegrini's own house, which was stoned. Roca ultimately withdrew the bill without Pellegrini's consent, an action that angered the senator to the point of severing personal relations with the president, though he still remained within the National Autonomist Party.

Beginning in July 1902, a division arose in the Argentine Republic's PAN over the succession to president Julio A. Roca. The "convention of notables", established from 1903 as the informal body for selecting the presidential candidate of the ruling party, fractured over the failure to fulfill the commitment to nominate former president Carlos Pellegrini and Roca's decision to promote the lawyer Manuel Quintana in the 1904 election. From then until his death, Pellegrini demanded a law guaranteeing deep electoral reform in order to end fraud and promote civic freedoms.

Thus two political expressions emerged within conservative ideology: the "national autonomists" or Roquistas, with their uncompromising policy of maintaining electoral fraud, and the "autonomists" or Pellegrinistas, sectors split off from the PAN influenced by the radical revolutions, anarchist attacks, and workers' strikes. One of the main concerns of the Pellegrinistas was to transfer protests from the streets to parliament by giving political space to the new social actors. To do so it was necessary to create representational space for the main opposition party, the Radical Civic Union, but also for the moderate Socialist Party. In that way, the two major emerging social forces of the period — workerism and anarchism — would be weakened.

When the split in the PAN occurred and the candidacy of Manuel Quintana was confirmed on 12 October 1903, Sáenz Peña organized a banquet in Pellegrini's honor two days later at the Café de París. There, the former president announced the reasons for the new anti-Roca political movement: "The political party to which we belonged has disappeared, replaced by a single head that thinks, a will that decides, a voice that orders, an elector that chooses".

In that context, the autonomists took part in the national senatorial elections for the City of Buenos Aires on 6 March 1904. Sáenz Peña withdrew his candidacy and Carlos Pellegrini stood in his place against the government deputy Benito Villanueva, president of the Capital Committee of the National Autonomist Party, and Emilio Mitre, candidate of the Republican Party. The government victory was overwhelming: Villanueva won with 11,516 votes and 28 electors, followed by Pellegrini with 9,075 votes and 6 electors, and Mitre with 7,547 votes and 10 electors. Quintana, meanwhile, obtained a majority of electors on 10 April, and in the supplementary elections for vacant deputy seats Pellegrini won comfortably on 16 June 1905, returning to the Chamber of Deputies after twenty-eight years.

During his final years, Pellegrini attempted to adapt the PAN to the political changes taking place in the country. To achieve this, he became convinced that it was necessary to carry out a reform of electoral practices. But his early death, in Buenos Aires, on 17 July 1906 at the age of 59, though not surprising to his friends and colleagues because of the deterioration of his health, had a profound national impact due to the expectations generated around the need for electoral reform, and created a political vacuum that would later be filled by Roque Sáenz Peña, considered his political heir, who put forward the secret-ballot electoral reform that would bring Hipólito Yrigoyen to the presidency in 1916. Sáenz Peña, however, died in 1914.

Deputy again (1906)

Amid the institutional fluctuations of the presidential politics of Manuel Quintana and the radical revolution of 1905, the enemies of Julio A. Roca outnumbered his friends and allies. Thus, in 1906, he was elected National Representative in the lower house in the election of 11 March 1906, again under the complete-list system: the Popular Concentration coalition defeated the government slate amid scandals and protests over vote-buying. It was a political front of autonomists, Mitristas, the conservative Benito Villanueva and Bernardista radicals that placed Pellegrini, Emilio Mitre, Roque Sáenz Peña and Ernesto Tornquist in the leading positions.

He took the seat as legislator that he had won. In the session of 9 May 1906, he delivered a fiery speech while challenging the credentials of the deputies elected by the Buenos Aires government party:

I arrive with fewer illusions, with less enthusiasm, with more experience. I bring a weary machine because the journey has been long and the road often rough and thorny. But I come with the same blind faith in the future of my country and the same determination to serve it as far as my strength allows.