Imagining Spain: Historical Myth and National Identity (review)
his political and interpersonal failures were mighty. His quarrels with Lord Cochrane, commander of the Chilean Navy, and with Bernardino Rivadavia, politician and president of Argentina, were legendary. He got along beautifully with Bernardo O’Higgins, supreme director of Chile, and with a large number of British officers who joined his army. His final lapse of political judgment, as Lynch calls it, was his support for the Argentine dictator, Juan Manuel de Rosas, who rose to power in 1829. But by then San Martín was out of touch with affairs in Buenos Aires, isolated and lacking a political home. He willed and accepted his withdrawal from the scene.