“MONSTROUS AND ILLEGAL PROCEEDINGS”: LAW ...

French. Now, within months of the end of the European intervention, they were forging a
much more powerful coalition. What linked these diverse groups together was a repudiation
of efforts by Rosas and Oribe to impose national boundaries and controls on the webs of
economic and political relationships stretching across the interior. In effect, the decades-old
sovereign frictions between the former viceregal capital and its hinterlands reemerged in the
late 1840s. Ironically, the unitarists in Montevideo were now seeking to benefit from these
discords.
As the fissures between the Río de la Plata’s interior and coastal capitals reopened,
the Brazilian empire once again seized the opportunity to bolster its own political position.
Officials in Rio de Janeiro now aggressively took up the banner of the former borderlands
rebels in Rio Grande do Sul. They loudly complained of abuses by blanco officials and
demanded protection for Brazilian property. Equally telling, they now called for enhanced
trading rights across the border. In October of 1850, the empire broke off diplomatic
relations with Buenos Aires, ostensibly over the issue of Uruguayan independence.
With the Brazilian empire now openly backing borderlands opposition to Rosas, the
path was clear for Urquiza to move against his former federalist allies in Buenos Aires. In
early 1851, Urquiza took advantage of the reauthorization of Rosas’ authority to conduct
foreign relations for the Argentine provinces to announce his formal opposition to the
porteño leader. In doing so, Urquiza not surprisingly drew upon intensely localized notions of
justice. In writing to local leaders throughout Entre Ríos, Urquiza stressed that provinces
“such as Entre Ríos possess an awareness of the role they represent and the high interests
they administer, such that instead of recognizing a Supreme Leader and obeying what he
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