“MONSTROUS AND ILLEGAL PROCEEDINGS”: LAW ...

easoning. 25 They had rejected the authority of Spanish juntas over them. However, porteños
wished to retain their traditional privileges as the former viceregal capital within the new
American polity. Power would continue to radiate outwards from the old imperial core.
Artigas’ followers directly challenged this notion. In their conception, the king’s removal
from the imperial system had dissolved the contract between the cabildos and the rest of the
empire. In their radically federalist vision, each local cabildo or their equivalent in the
borderlands was now sovereign. They were no more subordinate to Buenos Aires than to
the distant juntas in Spain. 26
The federalist vision in the 1813 instructions also emphasized local standing in the
community. Cabildos might represent the will of the people, but only local citizens or vecinos
possessed the right to participate fully in municipal government by virtue of their status.
Consisting solely of the “most landed [haciendados] and respected of vecinos,” cabildos embodied
the close association between personal standing in the local community and municipal
government. 27 These bodies in turn desired to guard their traditional privileges and rights
under the old colonial structures. This included the power to dispense justice over their
jurisdictions. As Ana Frega has shown, the overriding concern in establishing the
foundations for a new state was protecting these local rights from outside interference. 28 In
short, local privileges and relationships were at the heart of Artigas’ constitutional project.
Any larger associations had to be carefully curtailed to “the voluntary association of bodies
25 On the corporatist tradition in constitutional theory in connection with the
formation of the Argentine state, see Chiaramonte, "Acerca del Orígen del Estado el el Río
de la Plata," 27-50.
26 Frega, Pueblos y Soberanía.
27 Maria Medianeira Padoin, Federalismo Gaúcho: Fronteira Platina, Direito e Revolução (São
Paulo: Cia. Editora Nacional, 2001), 53.
28 Frega, Pueblos y Soberanía, 234.
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