“MONSTROUS AND ILLEGAL PROCEEDINGS”: LAW ...

police forces to better protect cattle. Likewise, it reconfirmed the social hierarchy in the
countryside by including provisions like mandatory private surveys of property that were
designed to favor powerful local ranchers with the economic resources to conduct those
types of diligences. 56 The coercive power of the national military stood as the backstop to all
these reforms. Thus, as national governments in the early 1870s repeatedly demonstrated
their ability to defeat opposition forces in open combat, they also offered elites on their
peripheries incentives to recognize their legitimate authority in the borderlands. These
elements of coercion and compromise formed the twin pillars upon which support for
national entities rested.
War in the Brazilian Borderlands
The efforts in Argentina and Uruguay to strike a balance between local legal norms
and broader national structures were equally occurring in Brazil. Like in the rest of the Río
de la Plata, the military conflicts associated with the Paraguayan War played an important
role in the process. The war represented a much more direct and traumatic event for the
Brazilian empire in general and Rio Grade do Sul in particular than for its southern
neighbors. Paraguayan forces had invaded Rio Grande do Sul, capturing Uruguaiana in
1865. Even after allied forces drove the Paraguayans from Brazilian soil, however, Rio
Grande do Sul remained the central staging area for the increasingly Brazilian-dominated
conflict. The province also supplied the bulk of imperial military forces. 57
As it had in Argentina and to a much lesser extent in Uruguay, the Paraguayan War
represented a truly national mobilization for the first time in the empire’s history. As the
56 Barrán and Nahum, Historia Rural del Uruguay Moderno, 499-516.
57 Kittleson, "The Paraguayan War and Political Culture: Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil,
1865-1880," 106, Joseph L. Love, Rio Grande do Sul and Brazilian Regionalism, 1882-1930
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1971), 21-22.
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