Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
tage. They successfully demanded higher pay, moved from job to job,
and flouted the vagrancy and impressment laws. Landowners were
not able to profit at the expense of the workers, only from the strong
demand for pastoral products. The structure of the
estancia,
after all,
proved flexible enough. It served as the chief mode of frontier expan-
sion despite the scarcity of labor and lack of significant technological
improvements in pastoral production.
Reorientation of Trade in the Interior
The economic florescence of the province of Buenos Aires did not reach
the interior provinces in equal measure. No sooner was independence
from Spanish colonial rule achieved than provincial military chieftains
quarrelled among themselves, and the conflicts often halted commerce
and scattered cattle herds and rural residents alike. From 1810 to 1820,
the colonial cart trades between Buenos Aires and Salta nearly ceased,
and river commerce in the Paraná River Basin as far as Paraguay was
interrupted. Meanwhile, Potosí's mines had declined rapidly after two
and one-half centuries of yielding the richest silver ores in the world.
No longer could the towns and provinces of the interior depend on the
prosperous carrying trades between Potosí and Buenos Aires.
As the former center of the colonial mule fairs, Salta had difficulty
adjusting to its new position at the end of the Buenos Aires commercial
lifeline rather than at the center of trade between the Río de la Plata and
Bolivia. The impact of Potosí's decline reached Tucumán and Córdoba.
There,
estancieros
who once prospered on the mule trade found that the
value of their land in the 1820s had dropped by 85 percent.
Initially, the new international trade that underwrote the economic
expansion of Buenos Aires tended to undermine the internal trade of
the Río de la Plata. Cheap imports drove Córdoba's textiles, Tucumán's
timber and sugar, and Mendoza's wines off the Buenos Aires market.
Overland freight hauling via mule and oxcart from the interior, in the
absence of Potosí's silver, simply could not compete with the more cost-
efficient shipping of consumer goods from Europe. The economic life
of the interior in 1820 seemed depressed beyond remedy.
The political unrest among the caudillos of the interior did not help
matters. “The country people, by the duration of a system of robbery and
pillage, have become demoralized,” observed one traveler in the 1820s.
“In one place was Ramirez, with the troops of Entre Rios, or, as they are
termed in abhorrence, the Mounteneros [sic]; in another was Carrera,
with the troops of no place at all, but with all the vagabonds who preferred
