Manuel Belgrano

Belgrano trained as a lawyer and economist in Spain, came home full of the physiocrats and Adam Smith, and spent years arguing in Buenos Aires for free trade, public schools, technical education and schooling for girls — proposals that made him a nuisance to the colonial administration. He was not a soldier, but when the revolution came in 1810 he was given an army because there was nobody else, and he learned the trade in the field.

In 1812, on the bank of the Paraná, he raised a flag of white and light blue so his troops would stop fighting under Spanish colours; the government reprimanded him for it, and it is now the national flag. He won at Tucumán and Salta by disobeying an order to retreat, and lost badly twice afterwards. Granted forty thousand pesos for his victories, he gave the whole sum to found four schools. He died of dropsy on the day Buenos Aires had three rival governors and no one noticed, so poor that he paid his physician with a watch. He lies in the churchyard of Santo Domingo, where the flag flies over his tomb.