“MONSTROUS AND ILLEGAL PROCEEDINGS”: LAW ...

was finally resolved through an uneasy truce in 1845, battles between borderlands
inhabitants and coastal elites shifted to Uruguay. Blanco leaders similarly attempted to
regulate borderlands relationships in the name of new national interests by ultimately
prohibiting the export of declining cattle herds to Brazil. In response, aggrieved riograndense
ranchers repeatedly swept across the border to seize their cattle and undermine blanco efforts
to erect divisions between themselves and their vast pasturelands in the small republic’s
northern reaches.
By 1850, the prolonged conflicts in Uruguay’s northern borderlands converged with
growing resistance in the Argentine Littoral to porteño efforts to reassert their control over
the Río de la Plata’s rivertine trade. These disputes culminated in the 1852 campaign by
Urquiza, the powerful merchant and general, to defeat Rosas. His triumph over Rosas at the
battle of Caseros reflected the power of peripheral inhabitants to resist would-be state
borders and national laws. The victory by Urquiza’s peripheral coalition ushered in a new
conjecture in the sovereign conflicts between coastal elites and the inhabitants of Río de la
Plata’s contested borderlands. Each side would continue to labor to forge the terms of a
more permanent political order – one that remained frustratingly elusive.
Revolutions in the Brazilian Borderlands
Almost before the ink had dried on the 1828 treaty between Argentina and Brazil
establishing the newly independent Uruguayan Republic, tensions emerged over the erection
of a national boundary dividing the eastern borderlands. The three-year Uruguayan conflict
and the subsequent loss of the Cisplatine Province had devastated many riograndense ranchers
on both sides of the border. Many lost valuable pasturelands outright. Perhaps more
importantly, Brazilians faced the loss of access to remaining Uruguayan herds. The
economic dislocations resulting from Uruguay’s independence produced growing political
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