“MONSTROUS AND ILLEGAL PROCEEDINGS”: LAW ...

Brazilian officials opened secret negotiations with the British and French to incorporate
Uruguay back into the imperial fold. Once again, the small nation’s very existence appeared
to hang in the balance. 8
With Uruguay’s economy in ruins and its independence continually threatened by its
larger neighbors, political leaders throughout the 1850s embarked on an aggressive campaign
to restore order in the countryside, reduce factional conflicts and establish a legal basis for
the fractured republic’s national government. The touchstone of this effort was the outright
elimination of the traditional blanco and colorado factions. In their place, separate political
associations would be “fused” into a new national identity. 9 Bernardo Berro, the blanco
statesman and eventual president of the Uruguayan Republic in 1860, provided much of the
theoretical underpinnings for the fusionist movement. Viewing the vast scale of the
destruction in the countryside, Berro argued that for the small republic to survive and
prosper it had to develop a sense of national identity for the first time. He called upon the
warring factions in the country to accept the peace at the end of the Guerra Grande. He
pointed out that both sides had famously agreed that war had produced “neither victors nor
vanquished.” This philosophy of shared responsibility for the conflict had to now guide the
country’s politics. Berro in particular argued that the old parties were not divided by “ideas”
but by “events.” Now that the “events” of the Guerra Grande were at an end, the country no
longer possessed a need for its traditional factional allegiances. Berro claimed that by fusing
these parties together, the nation could overcome its deep divisions. This did not mean the
end of parties or political clashes. Rather, in Berro’s telling, fusionism was a transitional
8 Barrán, Apogeo y Crisis, 52-53.
9 Ibid., 53-56.
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