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In-Depth Information
Buenos Aires policies. He used the wealth and military forces of his
home province to intervene in the internal politics of neighboring ones.
For much of the 1840s, Rosas lent his forces to one Uruguayan faction
that laid siege to a rival party in Montevideo. The governor of Buenos
Aires also prevented direct foreign trade on the Paraná and Uruguay
Rivers. In this, he alienated the local elites of the riparian provinces and
the French and British governments, provoking the latter to send fleets
to blockade the port of Buenos Aires in 1838 and 1848 in a vain attempt
to open trade in the Paraná River basin. Rosas also kept Paraguay iso-
lated and punished foreign merchants who wanted to open trade to
Asunción. Ultimately, these narrow policies led to his downfall.
Justo José de Urquiza of Entre Ríos succeeded in uniting provincial
opponents to topple Rosas. General Urquiza was, in fact, a caudillo very
much in the mold of Rosas. He owned extensive cattle-grazing
estancias
in Entre Ríos, established meat-salting plants
(saladeros)
to process
cattle products for export, commanded a powerful army of gaucho
ranch hands, and made himself governor of his province. In January
1852, Governor Urquiza led a powerful gaucho army into Buenos Aires
province and defeated Rosas's provincial forces at the battle of Caseros.
Rosas, who had often wrapped himself in the cloak of nationalism and
defiance of foreign powers, thereupon boarded a British ship and fled
to exile in England.
While
porteño
opposition soon drove Urquiza, the new director of
the United Provinces of Argentina, from Buenos Aires, he succeeded
in laying the foundation for the modern Argentine nation. Urquiza
convened a congress in 1853 to ratify a new constitution. In the lib-
eral tradition, this constitution outlawed slavery once and for all, and
it became legal to engage in direct foreign trade on the Paraná and
Uruguay Rivers.
While its commercial provisions benefited provincial interests, the
constitution rejected the loose federalism of the recent past in favor
of a strong executive power. The constitution contained a provision
for its own suspension in a so-called state of siege. It also gave the
president power of
intervención,
the right of the federal executive to
intervene in provincial governmental affairs in times of local political
turmoil. In the future, these constitutional provisions enabled national
leaders to reduce the autonomy of the governors. The federal construct
of the United Provinces of Argentina gave way to the new Republic of
Argentina.
Constitutional architect Juan Bautista Alberdi devised a new policy
to remedy the problem of labor scarcity. He incorporated constitutional
