This essay is the contribution of a remarkable scholar to the explanation -and hopefully solution- of a conflict that is deeply rooted in history but whose implications poison the national life, deform the Argentina reality, unbalance it's harmony and darken it's future as a nation.
The pages that follow are the skeleton, the basic and stark architecture of a work that for years I have wanted to write with greater length and depth.
The claims of other subjects and occupations have been postponing a more elaborate elaboration and finally I have chosen to publish it as it is virtually bare of clothing, covered only by the substantial ideas that animate it, without technicalities (which I do not handle) or scholarly devices (which here they seem unnecessary to me).
The reason for throwing him so helplessly into the paths of public discussion is very simple: I can hardly complete it and I don't want to let him sleep indefinitely. The time is approaching when some essential issues must be discussed at all levels of the Argentine community, before the transition from the current military regime to the republican system that is typical of our tradition. I think that the problem of Buenos Aires' relationship with the country is the most dramatic and the one that requires the most urgent decisions, even if the concrete solution is long in coming. I hope, then, that a moment of reflection, of recollection, in the Argentine spirit, can open before the inevitable hubbub that drags every step from a de facto government to one of right, and I want to believe that some of the ideas that Here they are exposed to serve at that moment the best ordering of the Argentina of the future.
For this same reason I have approached the subject from a strictly historiographic point of view. In due course, politicians and technicians from many specialties will have to make their contribution to this proposal - not because it is mine but because the force of things will impose it. They will say theirs. For my part, I clarify that my contribution is that of a historian to the solution of a conflict that has historical roots but whose implications have poisoned the national reality for years, distort our reality, unbalance our harmony and darken our future as a Nation.
I have always doubted that history is the magister vitae that the classics said. But if it did not help us understand some of the great questions that define us and project our destiny, then I would be ashamed of being a historian. For this reason, these pages are the expression of an attitude that is permanent in me: that of considering history, not as a gratuitous act, but as a way of thinking about the country from its past.
