“MONSTROUS AND ILLEGAL PROCEEDINGS”: LAW ...

ivers, deserts and a few vagrant and naked men wandering after wild beasts and bulls.” 8 To
address this, Azara proposed the Spanish crown develop a chain of agricultural settlements
along the border. In Azara’s vision, these outposts of small, settler farmers not only would
civilize the region and prevent contraband, but also serve as a first line of defense against the
Portuguese. To police the borderlands, Azara and his successors turned to the same Spanish
contrabandists and indigenous groups that operated beyond their authority. Among them
was José Gervasio Artigas, a former smuggler who entered the Spanish services under Azara
as a mounted cavalry commander along the Portuguese frontier. The mounted blandengues
skirmished with Portuguese and indigenous raiders along the border. They also labored to
protect settlers in the turbulent borderlands and discourage contraband trade. As Artigas
campaigned, he built his personal reputation as a source of order in the countryside. He
deftly used threats of violence but also carefully orchestrated accommodations with
peripheral inhabitants to maintain Spanish authority. 9
The simmering conflicts throughout the first decade of the 19 th century in the Río de
la Plata borderlands intensified with the 1806 British invasion. With continental markets
closed off by Napoleon, British merchants turned their sights to Spain’s American colonies.
Without authorization from London, British forces under Sir Home Popham set sail to
assault what was believed to be the poorly defended Río de la Plata viceroyalty. Arriving in
June of 1806, some 1,400 British troops quickly occupied Buenos Aires. Like the Iberian
powers before them, they aimed to control the mouth of the Río de la Plata’s vast drainage
area and with it access to the large silver deposits at Potosí. The British equally hoped to pry
8
Felix de Azara, Memoria Sobre el Estado Rural del Río de la Plata y Otros Informes (Buenos
Aires: Ed. Bajel, 1943), 4-5.
9
James Street, Artigas and the Emancipation of Uruguay (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1959).
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