“MONSTROUS AND ILLEGAL PROCEEDINGS”: LAW ...

connections up and down the river took place largely in the absence of reliable state
institutions and national laws governing trading relationships. 62 But as we have already seen,
the absence of state-centered law did not mean lawlessness. Rather, for traders operating
throughout the borderlands, securing legal rights meant drawing upon a number of shared
principles and values rooted in personal solidarities, reputation and reciprocity. These
diverse strands combined into a set of practices or borderlands legalities adapted to the
realities of factional politics and cross-border violence. They provided a means to vindicate
legal rights and establish each man’s social place in a turbulent world. These relationships
proved not only critical to sustaining commercial enterprises, but also the personal and
political power of the men at their center.
But how did borderlands traders enforce these relationships in the absence of formal
state structures? This section argues that they did so by turning to local legal norms and
institutions. Local courtrooms offered an important and familiar institutional site in which
to articulate borderlands legal principles. As we saw in the previous chapter, ideas of local
autonomy and justice played a powerful role in revolutionary discourse. Artigas had drawn
on conceptions of “free pueblos” in his fight to secure local autonomy from porteño control.
While the radical content of Artigas’ social revolution clearly alarmed the merchant and
landowning elites throughout the periphery, embracing the importance of local legal norms
and institutions did not appear so radical. 63 Rather, localized justice, like the reciprocal
trading relationships forged by Guarch and others, fundamentally rested upon a person’s
standing within the community. Linked to personal status and not abstract categories of
national identity, local justice also proved uniquely suited to addressing the blurred identities
62 Chiaramonte, Mercaderes del Litoral, ———, Ciudades, Provincias, Estados: Orígenes de la
Nación Argentina, 1800-1846, Adelman, Republic of Capital.
63 Ana Frega, “La virtud y el poder” in Salvatore, ed. Caudillismos Rioplatenses.
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