“MONSTROUS AND ILLEGAL PROCEEDINGS”: LAW ...

Artigas’ defeat did not spell the end of the political conflicts across the Río de la
Plata drainage. Instead, it redirected them back towards the old coastal cores. Having
temporarily asserted control over much of the upper Uruguay, Ramírez turned his attention
back to the porteño government to the south. Estanislao Lopez, the federalist leader of Santa
Fe across the Paraná River from Entre Ríos, joined Ramírez’s forces as they marched into
Buenos Aires province. In February, the littoral commanders smashed a porteño army,
leaving the capital defenseless. Ramírez and Lopez swept into Buenos Aires and sacked the
city. Following a brief occupation, the littoral caudillos returned to their home provinces and
left the old viceregal capital in chaos. Desperate for order, civilian authorities turned the
government over to the provincial military. General Martín Rodríguez and Colonel Manuel
Dorrego emerged on the scene to assume control. In the process, they abolished the
ineffective Buenos Aires cabildo altogether. By the end of 1820, the revolution had devoured
the old institutions of civic rule in the viceregal capital that had launched it a decade earlier. 36
The persistent tensions between the borderlands and the coastal cores had exploded
throughout the 1810s. These conflicts had produced not only powerful expressions of local
autonomy, but also more radical demands for a new multiracial and egalitarian society.
Artigas had sought to forge an alternative order throughout the borderlands rooted in these
identities. His rivals from the old viceregal capitals and imperial Brazil had dismembered his
brief attempt to secure a federalist polity in the interior. In the process, however,
borderlands conflicts had accelerated the destruction of the colonial system. By the end of
1820, the political foundations for the Creole elite in Buenos Aires had been destroyed. The
1820s would be about efforts to forge new institutions to govern not only in the former
imperial centers, but in the contested borderlands as well.
36 Halperín Donghi, Rovolución y Guerra, 316-38.
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