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Two Passages from Juana Belén Gutiérrez de Mendoza

        Before sixteen million inhabitants, the dictatorship has run over guarantees, violated rights and outraged citizens. With savage cruelty he has torn apart the independent press, the only remaining manifestation of freedom, he has filled the jails with honest citizens, he has started workshops, he has seized property and  has not respected even the inviolable of the home ... You are incapable of developing your citizens, that is why we do it, because you are incapable of defending your freedom, that is why we have come to defend it for our children, for posterity to whom we do not want to leave only the stain of our ignominious cowardice. Because you do not use your rights, we come to use ours, so that at least it is clear that not everything was abjection and servility in our time.

From "Vesped" May 15 1903

        For the rest, we do not dispute the point: if there are such men of divine origin on earth, let them be in good time; their very origin separates them from us who are simply human [...] We do not have a sufficiently precise point of comparison to distinguish the human from the divine, but they themselves attribute the highest immaterial perfection to their Divinity, and although we know to what extent The immaterial can exist, we find it contradictory that this supreme divine perfection produces works so imperfect that they destroy any idea of ​​the difference between divine perfection and human imperfection; works so subordinate to matter that the divine, if admitted as they present it, would have all the painful abjections of irredeemable slavery. Frankly, even out of vanity we would not want that divine origin, and even less make it believable, because the man who seeks some value outside himself must be very insignificant and to consider himself superior to the other species he invents a problematic origin that no one can satisfy.

From "Por la Tierra y La Libertad" 1924

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