El Matadero

The Slaughter Yard (Spanish El matadero, title often imprecisely translated as The Slaughterhouse), is a short story by the Argentine poet and essayist Esteban Echeverría (1805-1851). It was the first Argentine work of prose fiction. It is one of the most studied texts in Latin American literature. Written in exile but published posthumously in 1871, it is an attack on the brutality of the Federalist regime of Juan Manuel Rosas and his parapolice thugs the Mazorca.

The text in the first uniform edition of Echeverría's works (ed. Gutiérrez together with Gutiérrez's editorial commentary) may be downloaded from the Internet Archive. A printed English translation by Norman Thomas di Giovanni has been published.

The following is an English-language précis of the original Spanish text.

The action takes place on some unspecified date in the 1830s during the season of Lent. The City of Buenos Aires has been isolated by floods. Pounding their pulpits, the preachers thunder that the Day of Judgement is nigh; that God is angry with the wickedness of man – and, more especially, with the heretical unitarios (adherents of the proscribed Unitario political party).

Eventually the floods abate but not before the city has run out of beef. The government gives orders that 50 bullocks are to be slaughtered, ostensibly to provide beef for children and the sick (for otherwise meat is forbidden to Catholics during Lent). The reader is given to understand that the meat is really intended for privileged persons including Rosas himself and his corrupt clergy.

Echeverría proceeds to paint the slaughter yard scene in lurid colours: in the pens, the cattle stuck in the glutinous mud; the blood-smeared, half-naked butchers – brutal men, staunch Rosas supporters to a man; the hideous black female offal-scavengers; the growling mastiffs; the screaming carrion birds; the riotous youths who amuse themselves by pelting the females and each other with lumps of bloody meat or guts; the cynical, bestial language.

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