Echeverría's romantic liberalism was influenced by both the democratic nationalism of Giuseppe Mazzini and the utopian socialist doctrines of Henri de Saint-Simon.

He was a member of the group of young Argentine intellectuals who in 1840 organized the Asociación de Mayo ("May Association", after the May Revolution that initiated Argentina's move towards independence).

[3] Echeverría's renown as a writer rests largely on his powerful short story El matadero ("The Slaughter Yard", often mistranslated as "The Slaughterhouse"), written in sometime during 1838-1840 but not published until 1871), a landmark in the history of Latin American literature.

Its more specific intention was to accuse Rosas of protecting the kind of thugs who murder the cultivated young protagonist at the Buenos Aires slaughterhouse.

Echeverría's La cautiva ("The Captive"), a long narrative poem about a white woman abducted by Mapuche Indians, is also among the better-known works of 19th-century Latin American literature.