Alejo Julio Argentino Roca Paz was an army general and statesman who served as President of Argentina from 1880 to 1886 and from 1898 to 1904. Roca is the most important representative of the Generation of '80 and is known for directing the Conquest of the Desert, a series of military campaigns against the indigenous peoples of Patagonia sometimes considered a genocide.
Julio Argentino Roca
Roca in his youth
Military occupation in Rio Negro territory, painting by Juan Manuel Blanes, 1889
Roca with the presidential band in his first term (1880–86)
The Generation of '80 was the governing elite in Argentina from 1880 to 1916. Members of the oligarchy of the provinces and the country's capital, they first joined the League of Governors, and then the National Autonomist Party, a fusion formed from the two dominating parties of the prior period, the Autonomist Party of Adolfo Alsina and the National Party of Nicolás Avellaneda. These two parties, along with Bartolomé Mitre's Nationalist Party, were the three branches into which the Unitarian Party had divided. In 1880, General Julio Argentino Roca, leader of the Conquest of the Desert and framer of the Generation and its model of government, launched his candidacy for president.
El General Roca ante el Congreso Nacional (c. 1886–1887) by Juan Manuel Blanes
Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, author of Civilización y barbarie and key figure in the Generation of '37, later President of Argentina
Field in the Pampas region, which produced a vast quantity of Argentine exports under the policies of the Generation of '80
Image: Ernesto de la Cárcova Sin pan y sin trabajo, 1894
