“MONSTROUS AND ILLEGAL PROCEEDINGS”: LAW ...

simmering struggles. By 1840, local skirmishes throughout the entire Río de la Plata basin
had combined into a regional war that was known simply as the Guerra Grande – literally “the
big war.” To continue to exploit the region’s vast commercial opportunities, traders and
landowners had to navigate conditions of intense violence in nearly every corner of the
basin. The next section of this chapter explores how borderlands residents both expanded
trade and protected their legal rights in this violent world through the stories of two
individuals.
Creating Commercial Chains and Borderlands Legalities
Beginning particularly in the late 1830s, the entire Río de la Plata basin experienced
waves of conflict as rival armies moved across borders from Rio Grande do Sul to Buenos
Aires. The Guerra Grande devastated the region, destroying properties and cattle herds as
military forces scoured the countryside for provisions. 19 Yet, throughout the 1830s and
1840s, trading chains along the Uruguay River and its surrounding territories forged the
connective tissue for a new political order defined by the region’s factional politics, violence
and blurred national boundaries. The sheer pervasiveness of the violence and disorder
throughout the borderlands during the Rosas era tends to mask these practices. This is
particularly so because borderlands legalities emerged largely to address the absence of state-
centered authority and operate in the Río de la Plata’s contested ground. Born through daily
practices and understandings, the creators of borderlands legalities did not produce codes,
treatises or legislation attesting to their existence. To understand how borderlands legalities
19 José Pedro Barrán and Benjamin Nahum offered a particularly vivid description of
the devastation wrought by the Guerra Grande on the Uruguayan countryside throughout the
1840s. They argued in their exhaustive study of rural Uruguay that the various conflicts
reduced herds in the Estado Oriental by more the 50% from the pre-war totals. José Pedro
Barrán and Benjamín Nahum, Historia Rural del Uruguay Moderno, vol. 1 (Montevideo:
Ediciones de la Banda Oriental, 1967), 28-34.
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