“MONSTROUS AND ILLEGAL PROCEEDINGS”: LAW ...

abusing his position in order to avenge himself of a writ issued by Your
Mercy in my favor. 177
Sañudo argued that authorities could not tolerate such a violent assault on Fernandez and by
proxy on Jubim’s estate and maintain any semblance of order in the countryside. Piris
agreed. He ordered Fernandez to be released. Piris then ordered Ylla’s arrest. Before
Uruguayan officials could act, however, Ylla crossed the border into Brazil. There, he
immediately sought protection from Canabarro in the commander’s stronghold in Santana
do Livramento. Ylla then claimed that blanco officials had violently dispossessed him of his
rightful lands. He demanded justice from his powerful patron.
Canabarro aggressively intervened in Ylla’s case on both sides of the border. He
petitioned the provincial president in Rio Grande do Sul regarding the illegal “confiscation”
of Ylla’s lands. He further sought allies across the border to aid Ylla. He reached out to
Andrés Rivas, a prominent colorado rancher around Salto, to provide support for Ylla’s
claims. In the process, Canabarro and prominent Brazilians like him further ratcheted-up
tensions over property rights back in the Estado Oriental. By the 1860s, the increasingly
violent conflicts around the property rights of Brazilian ranchers spilled over into the
factional struggle between blancos and colorados. As we saw in detail in the last chapter,
conflicts between factional rivals over questions of personal reputation and political power
were swirling around Salto’s courthouse and theater. Throughout the early 1860s, these local
conflicts began to merge with cross-border political disputes over property and sovereignty.
Officials in Montevideo had grown increasingly alarmed by their inability to control
the sizeable Brazilian population in the northern borderlands. Following his election in
1860, Bernardo Berro, the fusionist Uruguayan president and blanco, began once again to
adopt a series of measures designed to assert control over the country’s porous borders with
177 Ibid., 16.
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