“MONSTROUS AND ILLEGAL PROCEEDINGS”: LAW ...

merchants, traders and landowners. Rivera leveraged this network of commercial and
political alliances to propel himself to the Uruguayan Presidency in 1830.
Having established ties with Rivera during the war, Guarch now moved to profit
from his increasingly powerful ally’s victory. He joined with other prominent merchants in
Montevideo to advance large loans to Rivera’s cash-starved government in exchange for the
rights to public lands and the revenue stream from the port city’s customhouse. Domingos
Vázquez, a merchant and slave trader, was at the center of this group of creditors. Vázquez
arranged loans for the Uruguayan government on increasingly favorable terms, developing
what Lucía Sala de Touron termed a “usurious cartel” of merchants tied to the weak national
government. 21
While Rivera and his allies were triumphant in Uruguay, the war had been a disaster
for the Brazilian ranchers in the borderlands. Military campaigns like Rivera’s had repeatedly
devastated their ranchlands. After 1828, military defeat and imperial policies exacerbated the
riograndense ranchers’ economic hardships and political grievances. Elites in the borderlands
already laid the blame for their defeat during the Cisplatine conflict at the feet of imperial
military officials from outside the province. On top of this resentment, economic tensions
over the legal significance of the new national border pushed the riograndense ranchers closer
to open rebellion. During the Cisplatine period, Brazilian ranchers had rapidly moved into
the northern Uruguayan pasturelands. The ranchers remained economically tied to their
neighbors, but now politically separated from independent Uruguay. In this context, the free
flow of cattle across the border became essential for the region’s economy. Yet, it was
precisely at this moment that the cash-starved imperial government elected to impose taxes
21 Lucía Sala de Touron, Rosa Alonso Eloy, and Julio C. Rodríguez, El Uruguay
Comercial, Pastoril y Caudillesco, 2 vols. (Montevideo: Ediciones de la Banda Oriental, 1986),
114-35.
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