“MONSTROUS AND ILLEGAL PROCEEDINGS”: LAW ...

addressed the problem of order and facilitated commerce, it is necessary to look at the
concrete experiences of the traders and landowners who developed and utilized them
throughout the Río de la Plata’s periphery.
This section does this through the stories of two prominent merchants, Agustín
Guarch from Uruguay and Francisco de Lemos Pinto from Rio Grande do Sul. It uses their
personal histories in order to delve beneath the military conflicts and into their commercial
operations and strategies. This allows us to understand how traders and landowners in the
borderlands forged a workable peripheral order on the ground in the absence of more
formal, state-centered relationships. Their respective stories also reveal how these cross-
border ties fed back into factional allegiances and heightened the stakes in the political and
military conflicts sweeping the region.
Agustín Guarch began his career in Montevideo in the 1820s by supplying Brazilian
troops occupying the empire’s newly formed Cisplatine Province. 20 The 1825 war between
the Argentine Confederation and the Brazilian empire over the borderlands created renewed
instability but also new commercial opportunities for Guarch and his allies. Guarch
developed political and commercial linkages with Uruguayan General Fructuoso Rivera.
During the conflict, Rivera had crossed into the yerba-rich Missiones region along the
northern Uruguay River. He plundered Brazilian lands in order to supply his army
throughout his campaign against imperial forces. With the end of the war in 1828, Rivera
carried thousands of cattle and indigenous laborers with him as he withdrew to the newly
created Uruguay Republic. Rivera then used his wartime spoils to secure ties with prominent
20 El Sor. Sindicado de la Ciudad c. D. Juan Maria de Vargas, AGN-SJ. Montevideo. Civil: 1º
Turno, S-7 (1828), 1bis.
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