“MONSTROUS AND ILLEGAL PROCEEDINGS”: LAW ...

In effect, he hoped to exchange loyalty to the new nation for the recognition of his
continued right to control peripheral economic and political affairs.
As Urquiza positioned himself as a broker between national cores and their
rebellious peripheries, however, renewed violence throughout the region progressively
weakened the entrerriano leader’s personal authority. The Brazilian invasion of Uruguay and
the subsequent outbreak of the Paraguayan War in particular radicalized federalists
throughout the region. Federalist opposition to forced military drafts also produced waves
of rebellions in the Argentine interior throughout the late 1860s. The strains caused by these
internal and external conflicts doomed Urquiza’s initial efforts to forge a grand compromise
between peripheral federalists and the centralizing forces within the Argentine state under
Mitre. Unable to contain “dissident” federalist forces in his own province, Urquiza found
himself increasingly isolated politically. His declining fortunes culminated in his
assassination at the hands of the federalist movement he once led in 1870.
But the forces motivating Urquiza’s willingness to negotiate the terms of emerging
state systems in the borderlands did not dissipate with his death. Rather, the turmoil
throughout Uruguay and the Argentine Littoral only clarified the inability of elites to reject
centralized nation-states. In Argentina, national forces, taking advantage of their increasing
technological superiority, isolated and then finally crushed the dissident federalist uprising in
Entre Ríos under Ricardo López Jordán. The campaign made clear that peripheral leaders
could no longer hope to challenge the power of the nation-state directly. Recognizing this
fact, even López Jordán’s subsequent rebellions sought to mimic Urquiza’s strategy by
exploiting metropolitan tensions to carve out spaces within the dominant national system for
personal and provincial interests.
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