“MONSTROUS AND ILLEGAL PROCEEDINGS”: LAW ...

Ríos. From there, he continued to harass the Portuguese invaders while seething about what
he saw as Buenos Aires’ betrayal.
Tensions between Artigas and the government in Buenos Aires temporarily subsided
when the Portuguese, succumbing to British diplomatic pressure, finally agreed to withdraw
from the Banda at the end of 1812. As imperial forces slowly retreated, the interior and
coastal revolutionaries again combined forces to confront the royalists in Montevideo. The
new army marched across the Banda and once again laid siege to Elío’s forces inside of the
port city’s walls. From the very beginning of the campaign, however, conflicts erupted
between Artigas and the porteño commanders. Artigas openly defied his purported superior
Manuel de Sarratea. He commanded his own Uruguayan division essentially as a separate
army. Sarratea in turn accused the oriental commander of treason. Only the need to form a
common front against Elío’s forces prevented the revolutionaries from turning on each
other. Officials in Buenos Aires grew so alarmed that they went as far as to replace Sarratea
in an attempt to limit the internal squabbles and ensure the success of the siege.
The conflicts between Artigas and the government in Buenos Aires finally boiled
over in April of 1813. In January, the porteño government had requested that provinces
throughout the old viceroyalty send representatives to the capital to draft a constitution. In
response, Artigas convened his own congress to pen instructions for the Banda’s deputies to
the national convention. The instructions created by the Uruguayan convention offered one
of the first explicit statements of the federalist ideology percolating throughout the
borderlands. The document called for a creation of a confederation of equal provinces with
limited powers delegated to a central government. It further asserted the Banda’s right to
of a rural population of some 15,000. See Comision Nacional Archivo Artigas. Archivo
Artigas, T. VI (Montevideo: A Monteverde y Cia, 1996) (“AA”), No. 82, Patrón de las familias
que acompañaron Artigas (Dec. 16, 1811), at 98-154.
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