“MONSTROUS AND ILLEGAL PROCEEDINGS”: LAW ...

funds, the imperial government took steps in both 1830 and 1831 to assert fiscal control
over its southern border with the Uruguayan Republic. The government established tariff
controls at key points such as Alegrete, Bagé and São Borja in order to collect taxes on cattle
bound for the neighboring republic. Even more onerous, they imposed a 15% tax on cattle
imported from Uruguay. This final measure enraged a borderlands ranching community that
increasingly relied on pasturing herds across the border. 14
Efforts to enforce the measures frequently met with armed resistance. Local judicial
officials simply turned a blind eye to incidents between tax collectors and borderlands
ranchers. These low level skirmishes between elites in the campanha and imperial officials laid
bare the sharply divergent conceptions of the borderlands space that each side possessed.
For the ranchers in Rio Grande do Sul, the borderlands were an economically integrated
region. Their reciprocal trading chains stretched across multiple boundaries, linking various
nodes of prominent local vecinos together. For imperial elites in Rio de Janeiro, the
borderlands trade was something else entirely – contraband. Cross-border commerce was
something to be taxed and controlled. These fundamentally distinct sovereign definitions
remained unresolved throughout the 1830s. The borderlands again seethed. 15
Political tensions across the border in Uruguay finally lit this riograndense powder keg.
In particular, as ranchers on both sides of the border forged relationships to facilitate their
cross-border trading operations and advance their political ambitions, conflicts between
them destabilized the borderlands. Much like Tavarez, Bento Gonçalves da Silva maintained
14 Leitman, Raízes, 133-36.
15 Mariana Flores da Cunha Thompson Flores, "Contrabano e Contrabandistas na
Fronteira Oeste do Rio Grande do Sul (1851-1864)" (M.A., Universidade Federal de Rio
Grande do Sul, 2007). Flores frames these disputes over the meaning of contraband in
terms of a “dynamic frontier” that simultaneously captures ideas of borderlands porosity and
interconnectedness, as well as the national boundaries drawn across them.
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