“MONSTROUS AND ILLEGAL PROCEEDINGS”: LAW ...

Removing the old colonial order, however, was far easier than securing loyalty for a
new American system based in Buenos Aires. Almost immediately, the May revolution
unleashed powerful centrifugal forces throughout the old viceroyalty as local elites from
Upper Peru to Paraguay questioned the legitimacy of porteño-led government. 2 A rapid
transfer of power gave way to a long civil war over questions of who possessed the right to
rule the old viceroyalty and on what terms. What began as a struggle for self-rule ended by
producing a profound vacuum of political authority.
The contested grounds between the Spanish and Portuguese empires in the eastern
Río de la Plata were at the center of these revolutionary conflicts. Here, social tensions
combined with sovereign frictions to produce the revolution’s most radical projects and its
most violent confrontations. José Artigas, the mounted commander of the Spanish
blandengues cavalry in the borderlands, led a growing uprising that fused demands for local
autonomy with populist outrage against merchant elites in the coastal capitals of Buenos
Aires and Montevideo. Artigas attempted to remake the borderlands into a multiethnic
polity of small landowning farmers. This radical vision was too much for the elites in the
region. They began negotiations with the Portuguese empire to crush the oriental general’s
movement in the eastern borderlands. 3 Eventually, the Portuguese invaded and attempted to
seize the borderlands for themselves. As they did so, however, they witnessed their own
dominions crumble under the strains of more than a decade of war – first against Artigas
and then against the Argentine provinces.
2 Porteños are residents of Buenos Aires.
3 An “oriental” is a common nickname for residents of the Uruguayan Republic. The
term, literally meaning “easterner,” refers back to the province’s old colonial moniker as the
Banda Oriental or “east bank” of the Río de la Plata estuary.
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