José Ignacio García Hamilton

Writer, historian and lawyer. He was born on November 1st, 1943 in San Miguel de Tucumán. He is married and has six children. He graduated from the National University of Tucumán in 1969. A PhD in Legal and Social Sciences from the University of Buenos Aires (UBA). A History and Law Professor at the UBA.

Columnist and Secretary General of La Gaceta newspaper in Tucumán. Founder in 1972 of El Pueblo newspaper. Director of the Association of Provincial Newspapers S.A. In 1991 he ran as a candidate to vice-governor of the province of Tucumán. Vice-president of the interfaith NGO Casa Argentina en Jerusalem. He is columnist of newspapers and magazines of Argentina, Uruguay and the United States.

He is the author of numerous books, among them, ”Hispano-American authoritarianism and unproductiveness”, (1990), as well as the acclaimed biographies of Juan Bautista Alberdi, ”Life of an absentee”, (1993); Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, ”Rowdy Cuyano”, (1997), and José de San Martín, ”Don José”, (2000), a work that sold more than 60,000 copies in Argentina alone.

For his book ”Life of an absentee” the Konex Foundation awarded him the Merit Diploma as one of the five literary figures of the 1984-1994 decade in the category of Biographies and Memories. He has given numerous conferences about life and work of Alberdi at the universities of Georgia and Loyola in the United States.

Nowadays he runs, with writer Pacho O’Donnel and the historian Felipe Pigna, two programs dedicated to Argentine history; one on Channel 7 TV and another on Radio Mitre in Buenos Aires.