4 ideas
It did this by turning revolutionaries into bloodless marble statues. Stripping heroes of their conflicts, doubts and radical proposals, such as Belgrano's ideas on land distribution and education or Moreno's egalitarianism, makes them safe to venerate and useless to imitate.
The festive image of May 1810, with a united 'pueblo' under umbrellas outside the Cabildo, hides that the open council was restricted to a few hundred invited notable residents. It also hides that the revolution was driven by competing groups with divergent interests: merchants tied to Spanish monopoly, contraband and free-trade interests, military leaders, and radical lawyers. Those groups began fighting each other almost immediately.
Manuel Belgrano, creator of the flag and a general of independence, died in Buenos Aires on 20 June 1820 sick and impoverished. He reportedly paid his doctor with his pocket watch because he had nothing else. That same day the province was in anarchy with three rival governors, and his death went almost unnoticed in the press. The episode exemplifies how the republic neglected its founders while alive and sanctified them only later.
Mariano Moreno, the radical secretary of the First Junta, lost the power struggle with Cornelio Saavedra's more conservative faction. He was sent away on a diplomatic mission to Britain in 1811 and died aboard ship after the captain gave him a large dose of an emetic. Pigna uses the episode, and the suspicion of poisoning around it, to show that the revolution's internal enemies eliminated its most radical figure. Official memory later softened that into a patriotic martyrdom.