Operations Plan - Controversy

Controversy

The first copy of the Plan was found in the Archives of Indias of Sevilla (Spain) by Eduardo Madero, who was studying the history of the port of Buenos Aires. He sent it to Argentina. Bartolomé Mitre received it but lost it, in unknown circumstances. Norberto Piñeiro found a second one, but instead of sending it, he published it. Other historians would later draw relations between the Plan and the government acts of the Junta such as the execution of Santiago de Liniers after the Liniers Counter-revolution or the work of Castelli at the Upper Peru.

Historian Paul Groussac and later Ricardo Levene accused the document of being a forgery, written by an enemy of the revolution in order to discredit it. Levene also insisted in that the copy found was not handwritten by Mariano Moreno but by Andrés Álvarez de Toledo. Supporters of the document accepted it, stating that the document found was not the original but a copy, and that it was not something unexpected that the copy was handwritten by another man. The original document, handwritten by Mariano Moreno, has not been discovered yet.

No other texts of the time written by the members of the Junta, either public or private, make mention to the Operations plan. However, Enrique Ruiz Guiñazú published in 1952 a pair of letters of Carlota Joaquina and Ferdinand VII, where both members of the house of Bourbon make direct reference to the plan written by Moreno. Carlota also cited in it parts of such document, which are coherent with the copy found by Piñeiro.

Later, some authors question the authorship of Moreno, and stated that some expressions or redaction styles may suggest it to be the work of Manuel Belgrano or Hipólito Vieytes. Supporters of the document like Norberto Galasso accept a middle ground option: the document may be the result of a collaborative writing instead that of a single author, even if Moreno wrote most of it.