“MONSTROUS AND ILLEGAL PROCEEDINGS”: LAW ...

CHAPTER 3
SOVEREIGN CONFLICTS
THE REACTIVATION OF BORDERLANDS LEGALITIES TO RESOLVE THE PERSISTENT
crisis of order in the Río de la Plata’s contested interior had provided one mechanism to
sustain trade. As the 1830s progressed, however, the very success of the relationships
underpinning the region’s commercial chains began to rub against renewed attempts to
impose national legal categories and political boundaries on the interior. In particular, Rosas,
the self-proclaimed “restorer of laws,” utilized the expanding export-economy to promote a
rival state project in which Buenos Aires retained its monopolistic authority over its putative
rivertine hinterlands. European interventions and the continued presence of the old unitarist
faction in Montevideo provided a common enemy that temporarily suppressed the sovereign
divisions between borderlands legalities and porteño-dominated models. With their political
and economic relationships, as well as their personal reputations, rooted in systems premised
on cross-border integration and localism, however, borderlands inhabitants would inevitably
clash with these efforts to police new borders and impose new, abstract legal categories.
These sovereign conflicts between borderlands legalities and more state-centered
forms of government defined the 1830s and 1840s. They produced nearly incessant violence
across the Río de la Plata’s borderlands. The eastern borderlands along the Uruguay River
once again emerged as the center of these sovereign storms. Here, the creation of the
Uruguayan Republic in 1828 produced escalating tensions on both sides of the new national
border, particularly among the Brazilian ranching community. Frictions between riograndense
ranchers and imperial elites attempting to impose revenue measures on cross-border trade
ultimately exploded into a decade-long civil war in 1835. The “Farrapos Revolution,” as the
war became known, threatened the very existence of the Brazilian empire. When the conflict
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