“MONSTROUS AND ILLEGAL PROCEEDINGS”: LAW ...

operations surrounding them also rapidly expanded. In particular, the disputed borderlands
became important for the export of salted beef and other products to slave centers in
Spanish Cuba and Portuguese Brazil. With feral cattle now representing an important
economic asset in its own right, localized conflicts between settlers in the borderlands
became endemic. Displaced indigenous groups from the Paraguayan missions combined
with Portuguese contraband traders to raid Spanish estancias throughout the region, seizing
cattle “as never before and in alarming proportions.” 6 The commercial revolution in the
borderlands also aggravated social tensions. The large landholdings springing up particularly
in the Banda as the beef and hide export trade expanded tended to displace smaller Spanish
settlers lacking title to their lands. Small landholders fumed against distant Spanish officials
and their elite commercial allies in Buenos Aires and Montevideo.
Despite these rumblings, imperial structures remained sufficiently robust to contain
the political and social conflicts between coastal capitals and their interior hinterlands. As
the 19 th century dawned, however, external shocks to the pillars of imperial authority in the
Iberian Peninsula would transform colonial frictions in the Río de la Plata into full-scale
revolutions. Although they did not know it, the inhabitants of the Río de la Plata in 1800
stood on the edge of a precipice. The ensuing wars would both ravage the viceroyalty and
open up new sovereign possibilities that were previously unthinkable. At the same time, the
social and political struggles that had characterized the Río de la Plata borderlands for
centuries would continue to make the goal of imposing a new order on the region
frustratingly elusive.
6 Ibid., 208. See also Bell, Campanha Gaúcha, 32.
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