Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"Sarmiento embraced the international culture available through writing and education. His favorite book, which he studied as fervently as any Philadelphian or Bostonian, was the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. . . . When Mitre became president, Sarmiento returned to the United States as his diplomatic representative. In 1868, he succeeded Mitre as president—elected, in fact, while in the United States—and stepped off the ship in Buenos Aires with ten Bostonian women whom he put in charge of teacher training in each of Argentina’s ten provinces. . . . Immigrants were arriving from Europe by the hundreds of thousands. European culture and European people would transform Buenos Aires into a city more reminiscent of Milan or Paris than of Caracas or Lima. . . . Disappointingly, Sarmiento, the great educator, also embodies the darker side of Latin American liberalism in his thinking on race. . . . In truth, Sarmiento had little faith in the mass of the Argentine people. His government maintained rigged elections as a standard feature of politics in liberal Argentina."