“MONSTROUS AND ILLEGAL PROCEEDINGS”: LAW ...

combined Spanish and French navies sailed from Cádiz to face the British fleet at Cape
Trafalgar. Lord Nelson decimated the continental armada, ensuring British dominance over
the Atlantic. Spain had lost access to her overseas possessions. The peninsular economy lay
in ruins. 7
The rapidly shifting events in Europe equally resonated in the Río de la Plata’s
borderlands. Coaxed by Napoleon into war with Portugal, Spain saw her valuable
possessions in the eastern Río de la Plata under assault from advancing Brazilian forces. To
solidify their position against the Spanish, the Portuguese now exploited tensions between
borderlands settlers and absentee landowners throughout the Banda. The Portuguese allied
themselves with aggrieved indigenous groups and landholders. These groups in turn used
the Portuguese presence to protect their contraband trade and their possessory land claims.
In classic borderlands fashion, Charruan Indians in particular entered into a number of pacts
with the Portuguese to oppose Spanish authorities in order to secure lands for themselves.
They also used borderlands alliances to blunt the incursions of absentee landowners from
Spanish commercial centers on the coasts. Contraband exploded and the revenues flowing
into viceregal coffers in Buenos Aires sharply declined.
Alarmed by rural “lawlessness” and desperate to contain the illegal cross-border
trade with the Portuguese, Spanish officials sought to bolster both settlement and law
enforcement on its peripheries. Traveling into the borderlands in order to investigate the
1801 conflict, Spanish officer and reformer Felix de Azara filed a scathing report on
conditions in the interior. Azara’s Memoria sobre el estado rural del Río de la Plata en 1801
described a lawless world in which its inhabitants “saw no order in anything, only lakes,
7 Jaime E. Rodríguez O., The Independence of Spanish America (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998).
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