“MONSTROUS AND ILLEGAL PROCEEDINGS”: LAW ...

complex laws “that they only understood to their advantage; they exploit their immunity to
them, using the obscurity of the same laws to rob the sweat from our brows.” 85
Chaves dedicated much of the remaining portions of his work to policies designed to
foster commerce. In his fourth discourse, he again argued for the promotion of local legal
institutions in his native Rio Grande do Sul to facilitate trade. He called for local controls
over economic infrastructure. Chaves also argued that provincial legislatures should control
the distribution of uncultivated lands. In this sense, he explicitly linked local justice and
federalism with the promotion of small landowners, agriculture and economic freedom.
Moreover, even if these local institutions failed in their tasks to promote industry and
commerce, accountability lay at the local level. Having selected poor leaders, the povo or
community “could only blame but themselves and lament that among them it did not
possess better citizens.” 86
Writing in the early 1820s before the full collapse of authority throughout the
borderlands, Chaves certainly did not envision the absence of centralized governments to
watch over the entire system of local justice and trade. However, by linking localized justice,
commerce and the law together in his discourses, Chaves did presage the emergence of local
courts as the institutional expression of borderlands legalities in the 1830s and 1840s in
proceedings like Blanes’ and Vidiella’s. In particular, peripheral courts provided a venue
through which traders and landowners could juridically express the personal and factional
relationships underpinning their trading ties. As Chaves suggested, obtaining justice in
borderlands courtrooms meant mobilizing networks of local connections to vindicate legal
rights. In turn, by establishing claims through the public testimony of honorable vecinos –
85 Ibid., 38.
86 Ibid.
107