“MONSTROUS AND ILLEGAL PROCEEDINGS”: LAW ...

The Paraguayan government proposed a confederation with the porteños to the south
premised above all on free rivertine trade along the Paraguay and Paraná Rivers. Buenos
Aires continued to view the Paraguayans as traitors and refused to negotiate or cede their
privileged position at the Río de la Plata’s mouth. Paraguay then declared its independence
entirely, turning away from the political conflicts downriver. Throughout the coming
decade, Francia consolidated his personal hold on the province. He became Paraguay’s sole,
supreme ruler in 1814. Francia governed Paraguay until his death in 1840. 17
Within a year of the May revolution, centrifugal forces had begun to tear the former
Río de la Plata viceroyalty apart. Simply put, while Creole elites in the old viceregal capital
could readily establish a new representative junta to serve their political interests, they could
not as easily secure its recognition as the legitimate government for the entire viceroyalty.
Rather, regions from Upper Peru to Paraguay could rightly claim the authority to speak for
themselves and their interests as Buenos Aires had done. There was no need for
intermediaries with divergent ideologies and economic interests. When Buenos Aires failed
to coerce allegiance through its initial military campaigns, the question of whether the
viceroyalty would survive intact was largely answered. Beyond the breakaway territories in
Upper Peru and Paraguay, however, debates over what institutions and social orders would
emerge out of the revolution were only beginning. The Río de la Plata’s contested
borderlands became the principal arena in which the violent struggles over the nature of the
new societies in the region would play out over the course of the next tumultuous decade.
17 Thomas Whigham, The Politics of River Trade: Tradition and Development in the Upper
Plata, 1780-1870, 1st ed. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991), 20-30,
Richard Alan White, Paraguay's Autonomous Revoluion, 1810-1840 (Albuquerque: University of
New Mexico Press, 1978).
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