“MONSTROUS AND ILLEGAL PROCEEDINGS”: LAW ...

Serra throughout the 1880s. The campanha remained the bedrock of Liberal opposition.
These two poles of riograndense society eventually clashed in the 1893 Federalist Revolution.
The Republican victory in 1895 marked their triumph in the province’s political life. It also
heralded the final turning away from the borderlands politics that had characterized much of
the province’s history of the course of the 19 th century. The revolution itself was not about
cross-border commercial linkages and tariffs, but about the relationship between elites in the
campanha and Porto Alegre. 76
Conclusion
An 1877 article appeared in Salto’s El Progresso newspaper declaring: “[t]he frontier
of yesterday is not the frontier of today.” 77 The article focused on the increasing economic
prominence of Uruguaiana and the need for Salto to improve its own infrastructure to
compete against its rivertine rival. Cross-border trade and movement were not new.
However, what was new was that these relationships now operated within a system that
recognized the legitimacy of the region’s nation-states. States had shown their growing
power to compel peripheral elites to accept their authority. Grasping this reality,
borderlands power brokers like Urquiza had taken steps to engage with national authorities
in order to fashion the terms of new state structures. A system emerged that blended
elements of national law together with local legal norms.
These types of negotiated relationships, facilitated by peripheral courts and enforced
by the growing economic and coercive power of national entities, formed the bedrock of the
new order emerging in the 1880s. Leaders like Julio Roca in Argentina proved adept at
consolidating their own authority by using their control over the military and the treasury to
76 Love, Brazilian Regionalism.
77 El Progresso, Año III, n. 86 (April 26, 1877).
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