“MONSTROUS AND ILLEGAL PROCEEDINGS”: LAW ...

CHAPTER 2
THE (RE)EMERGENCE OF BORDERLANDS LEGALITIES
TWO DECADES OF MILITARY AND POLITICAL CONFLICTS UNLEASHED BY THE
collapse of imperial authority in Spain and Portugal had torn apart the foundations of the old
colonial order throughout the Río de la Plata. Always a zone of conflict, the borderlands
had become the theater for not only clashes over rival sovereign projects, but also over the
social order that would eventually emerge from the revolutionary process. With no
institution or group able to hold sway for any sustained period of time, exhausted rivals had
sought a respite from sovereign struggles through a brokered peace that established an
independent Uruguayan state. The creation of a “buffer state” and the erection of further
artificial national divisions across the borderlands, however, represented only a temporary
truce in the battle to control this contested ground. The absence of an agreement on the
basic elements of a more permanent political order continued to vex would-be state-makers
throughout the basin, producing weak and fragmented provincial governments that rose and
fell along with the military fortunes of their titular leaders.
Throughout the 1830s and 1840s, conflicts over sovereignty only intensified as
competing state models throughout the region clashed behind and across borders. These
conflicts pitted international coalitions of Argentine unitarists, Uruguayan colorados and
riograndense republicans against their local federalist, blanco and loyalist rivals. The existence of
these coalitions fundamentally reflected the region’s deeply interconnected nature. The
porous boundaries along the periphery in particular meant that local conflicts almost always
possessed an international dimension. Blurred boundaries ensured that no one side could
gain a permanent hold on the region, deepening the violence and instability in a vicious
cycle. The path forward in the borderlands seemed treacherous and unmarked.
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