Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Political Breakdown of the Viceroyalty
Several factors prevented a rapid succession of
porteño
revolutionar-
ies from realizing their plan of gaining political control of the former
Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata in its entirety. First of all, they bick-
ered among themselves, intriguing and breaking up into feuding fac-
tions. Their plans, enunciated in endless proclamations, were quite
impractical. Despite their decrees ending the slave trade in Buenos
Aires and declaring “Freedom of the Womb” in 1813, in which children
born to slave women after that date would be free when they reached
their 21st birthday, the Creoles held their own black and mulatto fol-
lowers in contempt.
These leaders also had a tendency to turn on one another savagely.
Mariano Moreno, for example, lost favor in 1811, and to get rid of
him, his rivals sent him on a diplomatic mission to Europe, en route
to which he died at sea. Others who lost favor were flung into jail.
Vengeance even caught up to Santiago Liniers, hero of the British inva-
sion and former viceroy. From his retirement in Córdoba, he voiced
opposition to the arrogant manner in which the Buenos Aires junta
treated the cities of the interior, for which transgression Liniers was
seized and executed. The future hero of independence, General José de
San Martín, formed an altogether unsympathetic opinion of the Creole
politicians in Buenos Aires and stated, “I fear [utter ruin] not from the
Spaniards but from domestic discord and our lack of education and
judgment” (Lynch 1987, 68).
There was another reason why Buenos Aires could not effectively
exert its leadership far and wide across the region. Creoles in other
areas of the Río de la Plata wished to be governed not by their incom-
petent peers of the faraway port but by home rule, however incompe-
tent it too might prove to be. Across the estuary at Montevideo, on the
other hand, the Creole gentry preferred to support the Spanish gover-
nor rather than follow the dictates of the divided politicos of Buenos
Aires. The
porteños
squandered initial support by sending three suc-
cessive “liberating” military expeditions to bring the Bolivians under
political control. The Creole military leaders twice sacked the mint at
Potosí and once attempted to blow it up. Their excesses encouraged
the black and mulatto troops from Buenos Aires to riot and pillage.
In addition, the social liberalism of the invaders annoyed the Bolivian
Creoles. The
porteños,
who had no experience with a sedentary and
subordinate Indian population, misunderstood the social conserva-
tism of their peers in the Andes. Even though they hesitated to outlaw
