Gregorio de Laferrère

Gregorio de Laferrère (March 8, 1867 — November 30, 1913) was an Argentine politician and playwright.

Gregorio de Laferrère was born in Buenos Aires to Mercedes Pereda, a local heiress, and Alfonso de Laferrère, a prominent French Argentine landowner. One of three brothers, he earned his secondary school education at the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires. He began a career in journalism, and wrote for the satirical El Fígaro briefly under the pseudonym of "Abel Stewart Escalada." Joining his family for a visit to Paris on the occasion of the 1889 World's Fair, he lost his father to a sudden illness while in the French capital; there, however, he became acquainted with the theatre after attending a number of performances of Molière's works by the Comédie-Française.

Returning to Argentina, he joined a friend, writer José María Miró, as an active member of the ruling National Autonomist Party, and in 1891, was elected the first Mayor of Morón, a newly established town west of Buenos Aires; taking office after a heated campaign, he reportedly arrived at City Hall for his inaugural in disguise. He resigned his post in 1892, and approached the new leader of the Radical Civic Union, universal male suffrage activist Hipólito Yrigoyen, in search of alliance that ultimately did not materialize. He was elected on the centrist National Party ticket to the Buenos Aires Province Legislature in 1893, and in 1897, established the splinter Independent National Party; on this latter ticket, Laferrère was elected to the Lower House of Congress in 1898.

Reelected in 1902, the following year he established the "Popular Association," advocating direct democracy. Laferrère relied on his membership in the elite Officers' Association, by virtue of his family ties, to organize a public forum facing the institution's palatial headquarters, where he held forth almost daily, and heard appeals, both personal and of a policy nature, from the city's poor.

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