“MONSTROUS AND ILLEGAL PROCEEDINGS”: LAW ...

Uruguayan state formation forward in the borderlands in a concerted effort to improve their
own social standing.
Yet the very interconnected nature between national boundaries and social rights so
evident in the borderlands slave citizenship cases rendered attempts to define each inherently
unstable. As elites and subalterns turned to cross-border networks to assert their rights in
borderlands courts, their conflicts over categories like citizenship and property increasingly
implicated persistent disputes over nebulous national divisions. By the early 1860s, rival
state formation projects in Argentina and Brazil, and the tensions over national boundaries
they engendered, provided factional rivals in the borderlands with the opportunity to
articulate starkly different conceptions of sovereignty and citizenship through their webs of
borderlands connections.
As we saw in the previous chapter, Mitre and his allies in Buenos Aires had
established a new Argentine Republic in 1862. They in turn backed Venancio Flores’
political aspirations in Uruguay. In 1863, Flores had crossed the Uruguay River and
occupied Uruguay’s northern borderlands. Although officially proclaiming their neutrality,
Mitre’s government openly ensured that Flores received a steady supply of munitions in his
struggle with Berro’s constitutional government. In exchange, Mitre received assurances
from Flores that he would assist him in his own campaign to further consolidate his
Argentine state. 74
As Uruguay’s colorado faction increasingly linked its power to that of the emerging
centralized Argentine state under Mitre, their Brazilian allies worked to connect their legal
rights in the borderlands to the imperial efforts to solidify its authority along its southern
and western peripheries. Throughout the 1850s, Brazilian relations with the Paraguayan
74 Barrán, Apogeo y Crisis, 88-96.
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