Dominance of Buenos Aires

By then, military leaders had assumed power in almost every province. Each provincial political regime soon acquired its own character, according to the relative power held by military strongmen (caudillos) and by local political interests. This differentiation was not, however, cause for friction between the provinces; rather, economic and geographic factors separated them. Buenos Aires made significant advances toward national leadership by taking advantage of the interprovincial rivalries.

Within the province of Buenos Aires itself, the regime of the so-called Party of Order instituted popular reforms, including dismantling the military apparatus that had persisted from the war. The remaining armed forces were sent to defend the frontier areas and Pampas against attacks by Indians. This prudence on the part of the government won the support of the rural landowners as well as the urban businessmen, whose backing ensured victory at the polls.

The political order that seemed to be taking hold was achieved by setting aside, rather than resolving, certain fundamental difficulties. In particular, the institutional organization of the country was not carried out, and nothing was done about the Banda Oriental (the east bank of the Uruguay River), which was occupied first by Portuguese and then by Brazilian troops. By 1824 both problems were becoming urgent. Britain was willing to recognize Argentine independence, but only if Argentina established a government that could act for the whole country. And in the Banda Oriental a group of eastern patriots had taken over large sectors of the countryside and agitated for their reincorporation into the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata, forcing the Buenos Aires government to face the possibility of war with the Brazilian empire.

Presidency of Rivadavia

In the meantime, an attempt was made to establish a national government through a constituent assembly that met in December 1824. Overstepping its legal authority, the constituent assembly in February 1826 created the office of president of the republic and installed the porteño (native of Buenos Aires) Bernardino Rivadavia as its first occupant. Civil war flared up in the interior provinces, soon dominated by Juan Facundo Quiroga—a caudillo from La Rioja who opposed centralization. When the assembly finally drafted a national constitution, the major portion of the country rejected it.

Meanwhile, war against Brazil had begun in 1825. The Argentine forces were able to defeat the Brazilians on the plains of Uruguay, but the Brazilian navy blockaded the Río de la Plata and succeeded in crippling Argentine commerce. Rivadavia, unable to end the war on favourable terms, resigned in July 1827, and the national government dissolved. Leadership of the province of Buenos Aires was given to a federalist, Colonel Manuel Dorrego. Dorrego was backed by local interest groups whose political spokesman was the great landowner Juan Manuel de Rosas, who had been named commander of the rural militia. Dorrego made peace with Brazil, and in 1828 the disputed eastern province was constituted as the independent state of Uruguay. The Uruguayan lands, which Rivadavia had considered indispensable to the “national integrity” of Argentina, were never to be recovered. In December 1828 troops returning from the war overthrew Dorrego and installed General Juan Lavalle in his place; Dorrego was executed.

Although there was little resistance to the new governor in the city of Buenos Aires, uprisings began promptly in the outlying areas of the province. A convention of provincial representatives met in Santa Fe; dominated by the federalists under Rosas, they called on the governor of Santa Fe to take steps against the Lavalle regime. Lavalle finally came to terms with Rosas, and they agreed to hold elections in Buenos Aires for a new provincial legislature. Under the compromise agreement Rosas and Lavalle appointed a moderate federalist governor of Buenos Aires, but political tensions were too great for this attempt at reconciliation. Rosas reconvened the old legislature, which Lavalle had disbanded when he came to power—a triumph for the most intransigent forces of federalism. The legislature unanimously elected Rosas governor on December 5, 1829.

Domestic politics

The new governor saw clearly the ambiguities and dangers of such widespread support, and, although he was identified as a federalist, he ruled as a centralist, with Buenos Aires his main power base. Rosas manipulated factions of labourers, gauchos, and elites from the estancias and set himself up as the arbiter of a delicate and constantly threatened balance between the masses and the elites.

By 1832 the opposition to federalism had disappeared throughout the country, and Rosas turned over the reins of the government of Buenos Aires to his legal successor, General Juan Ramón Balcarce. However, Balcarce’s assumption of the office fanned sparks of dissidence among those who had pledged to uphold the principles of federalism. Balcarce was overthrown, and his successor took office with a cabinet composed of Rosas’s friends. They adopted policies that were designed to lead to political and economic stability, but it was stability that Rosas feared, since it would have entailed the demobilization of his mass political following. The legislature in Buenos Aires was induced to designate Rosas governor of the province under conditions that Rosas successfully imposed: he was granted extraordinary resources, absolute public authority, and an extension of the governor’s term of office from three to five years. Armed with these powers, he soon established a formidable dictatorship, hunting down his real and supposed enemies with the aid of the Mazorca, a ruthless secret police force whose members behaved like thugs and vigilantes. To show their loyalty, citizens were required to wear red favours, and priests had to display Rosas’s portrait on the altars of their churches.

Foreign policies

Rosas’s foreign policies left no room for anything other than total success or total failure, and international difficulties arose as extensions of domestic turmoil. In January 1833 Britain reasserted an earlier claim to the Falkland Islands (Islas Malvinas), and a British warship took possession of the islands. More troublesome was the growing independence of neighbouring Bolivia, Paraguay, and Uruguay, which continued to pursue their destinies as independent states rather than as parts of a Buenos Aires-controlled federation. General Andrés de Santa Cruz, who had established a confederation of Peru and Bolivia, supported opponents of Rosas in Argentina. Rosas in turn aided the influential governor of the northern province of Tucumán when that governor decided to go to war against Santa Cruz’s confederation. The northern Argentine forces, in alliance with Chile and Peruvian nationalist rebels, were victorious in 1839.

Rosas’s involvement in a trade dispute with Uruguay, however, proved to be costly and ended in failure. It contributed to the first open friction with France, which sent warships to blockade Buenos Aires in 1838. This caused dissension in the coastal region, which depended heavily on export trade. Argentine political exiles in Montevideo, Uruguay, received French backing in their efforts to overthrow Rosas, and in the north a league of dissident provinces was formed.

This formidable coalition of adversaries soon fell apart. France, faced with other problems, abandoned its adventure in the Río de la Plata area and left its local allies to fend for themselves against Rosas. At the same time, an army organized in Buenos Aires and commanded by Manuel Oribe (the deposed second president of Uruguay) gained control of most of the Argentine interior. For the first time since 1820, troops from Buenos Aires had advanced as far as the Bolivian and Chilean frontiers. The hegemony of Buenos Aires under Rosas’s system of federalism was not to be challenged again. Oribe went on to conquer most of Uruguay, and his predominantly Argentine army began a nine-year siege of Montevideo in February 1843. The city was supplied through the intervention of British warships, and in 1845 an Anglo-French fleet blockaded Buenos Aires while a British fleet sailed up the Paraná River. Eventually the British and French withdrew their aid to Montevideo and ceased hostilities with Rosas.

The fact that Rosas was able to conduct a vigorous foreign policy for so many years was partly because of the weakness of Argentina’s natural rival in the Río de la Plata area, Brazil, which had been involved in a civil war (1835–45) in Rio Grande do Sul. Once the rebellion was put down, it was only a question of time until Brazil again influenced the Río de la Plata region. This influence opposed Rosas, and it worked in support of a rebellion by General Justo José de Urquiza, governor of the province of Entre Ríos. In 1851 Urquiza formed an alliance with Brazil and Uruguay. The allies first forced Rosas’s troops to abandon the siege of Montevideo and then defeated his main army in the Battle of Caseros (February 3, 1852), just outside Buenos Aires. Rosas, abandoned by most of his troops as well as his political supporters, escaped to England, where he died in 1877.

Economic development, 1820–50

Argentina’s society and economy underwent considerable changes in the 30 years after 1820. Buenos Aires was the province best adapted to the new era of free trade, exporting cattle products in return for consumer goods from overseas. The interior provinces adjusted slowly, replacing their traditional markets in Upper Peru with new ones in Chile, where a great expansion of the mining industry was taking place. The coastal provinces fared better, although their livestock industry suffered from the effects of the civil war. For Santa Fe, moderate prosperity returned in the 1830s, and a similar trend began in Entre Ríos and Corrientes provinces in the 1840s.