“MONSTROUS AND ILLEGAL PROCEEDINGS”: LAW ...

Montevideo with relative ease, they had little success in securing the interior. The campaign
in the borderlands continued for the next three years. Artigas largely engaged in a series of
skirmishes, harassing the Portuguese. Imperial forces responded with a brutal scorched
earth campaign, devastating the countryside.
The prolonged wars reduced the Banda, formally one of the most dynamic regions in
the Spanish empire, to ruins. As the conflict drug on, the financial strains on the imperial
government also began to show. Rumblings in the Brazilian northeast in particular
threatened to reproduce the civil wars already sweeping the Spanish territories. In 1817,
rebels chaffing under imperial taxes and falling sugar prices overthrew the governor in
Recife. Imperial troops quickly crushed the short-lived Republic of Pernambuco, but the
specter of revolution loomed over the shaky Portuguese edifice. The Brazilian court
struggled to hold the empire together as fissures increased between the government in Rio
de Janeiro and its peripheries in the north and south. 35
Eventually, however, the federalist coalition sustaining Artigas’ opposition to both
Buenos Aires and the Portuguese empire began to fray first. Francisco Ramírez, Artigas’
erstwhile ally in Entre Ríos, seized upon his former superior’s weakness to assert his own
authority over the borderlands. Artigas promptly invaded Entre Ríos, only to be quickly and
finally defeated. Ramírez pursued Artigas as he retreated towards his old base of support in
the northern borderlands. Vanquished, Artigas finally crossed into Paraguay and into exile in
1820. Artigas would never return to his native Banda Oriental. His social revolution was
over. His dreams of a virtuous borderlands republic were dashed.
35 Kirsten Schultz, Tropical Versailles: Empire, Monarchy, and the Portuguese Royal Court in
Rio de Janeiro, 1808-1821 (New York: Routledge, 2001), 110-50, Adelman, Sovereignty and
Revolution, 326-32.
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