Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
This exhausting list of coups, civil hostilities, political unrest, and
feckless leaders held true for every province of Argentina in the 1820s.
Suffice it to say that 19th century caudillo-style politics became iden-
tified with unstable political leadership, assassinations, coups and
countercoups, civil unrest, intimidation of critics, and the flouting
of the constitution. It has endured and is practiced even today. Most
Argentine citizens can recount numerous instances of caudillo-style
politics during the last quarter of the 20th century.
No one escaped the repercussions of revolution and civil war in
the Río de la Plata. The military impressment recruited hundreds
of young men of the popular classes in the cities and countryside.
Deserters turned to banditry, preying on cattle herds and plagu-
ing the commercial routes, or they went to live among the Indians.
Gaucho armies laid siege to Montevideo and invaded Paraguay and
Bolivia. Once the loyalist forces retreated, armed factions turned on
one another as patriot politicians sought advantage. Long subject to
Hispanic incursion, the Pampas Indians took advantage of the confu-
sion and raided rural settlements and cart trains. Merchants had to
pay forced loans and extraordinary taxes, landowners lost cattle, rural
women were kidnapped by Indians, and urban women saw their men
taken into the militias.
In 1825, Buenos Aires began a protracted war in the Banda Oriental
with the empire of Brazil, which had proclaimed its independence from
Portugal in 1822. More military impressment, desertions, and banditry
followed. Only the emergence of Juan Manuel de Rosas as the governor
of Buenos Aires stanched somewhat the political instability of the first
half of the 19th century. However, Rosas controlled only his home prov-
ince and had to perfect rather than depart from caudillo-style politics in
order to remain in power for 20 years.
It is little wonder that the once-bustling colonial economy of the Río
de la Plata lay in ruin. The Bolivians stopped working the rich mines of
Potosí that had been the engine of transport and production in the inte-
rior provinces and of commerce at Buenos Aires. Caudillos with their
personal mounted armies took over provincial governments, taxed
their enemies, and set up customs houses on provincial borders. In
the interior, overland trade came to a halt and the river trades declined
dramatically. In 1840, one Tucumán resident reflected that the previous
three decades had been filled with nothing but “disasters and misfor-
tunes.” “After the anarchy of so many years, after the sacrifices that
these peoples [of the interior provinces] were obliged to make in the
wars,” he wrote, “they have remained submerged in the most dreadful
