“MONSTROUS AND ILLEGAL PROCEEDINGS”: LAW ...

porteño cavalry at Cepeda and Pavón. Flores now marched into Corrientes to protect the
rebel government and ensure that Urquiza and his remaining allies in Entre Ríos could not
intervene from the south. By moving into Corrientes, Flores could also link up with his
colorado and Brazilian supporters. As we will see in greater detail in the next section, these
various groups began activity coordinating an invasion across the Uruguay to overthrow
their factional rivals.
By the end of 1862, Mitre’s triumph over the Confederation was complete. Building
upon the 1853 constitutional framework, Mitre established the ligaments of a new, unified
republic. Buenos Aires was at its head. Mitre became president of the Argentine Republic
on 12 October 1862. But Mitre’s rise also pointed to the durability of borderlands legalities
even within his emerging national model. As Pablo Buchbinder explained, it was Mitre’s
ability “to negotiate and arbitrate the conflicts between different groups of local power” that
proved critical to the installation of his national regime in the early 1860s. 194 Yet, the
localized clashes that Mitre had successfully utilized to propel himself to power also
threatened to embroil his new government almost immediately into borderlands conflicts.
Political allies like Flores ensured that simmering disputes over sovereignty in the Argentine
Littoral converged with the vigorous cross-border conflicts over private law rights in
northern Uruguay. Flores’ presence just across the Uruguay River in Corrientes particularly
elevated the factional tensions between blancos and colorados throughout the Uruguayan
borderlands. Conditions were ripe for another dramatic escalation of borderlands violence
that would nearly topple the sovereign structures Mitre had labored so hard to construct.
194 Buchbinder, Caudillos de Pluma, 123.
239