Río de la Plata

Its history is not a story of state-building so much as a story of argument — between Buenos Aires and the interior, between unitarians and federalists, between a port that wanted free trade and provinces that wanted protection — conducted with armies, treaties and constitutions that rarely lasted a year.

At a glance

How did the May Revolution happen?

Through a constitutional argument inside a collapsing empire. When Napoleon's forces occupied Seville in early 1810 and the Junta Central dissolved itself, the question for Spanish America was who held sovereignty in the absence of the king. In Buenos Aires, the viceroy Cisneros convened an open cabildo on 22 May, and on 25 May 1810 a junta of creoles took power in his place, in the name of Ferdinand VII.

That fiction — governing in the king's name — lasted two years. The junta sent armies to Córdoba, to Upper Peru and to Paraguay, all of which failed or stalled; it opened the port to British trade, which the interior resented; and it convoked a congress that never met. By 1816, when a congress at Tucumán finally declared independence, the fiction had been abandoned and so had any pretence that the viceroyalty's territory would stay together.

Who were the unitarians and the federalists?

The two parties of the revolution, defined less by ideology than by geography and interest. The unitarians wanted a strong central government in Buenos Aires, a single constitution and a national administration; they drew their support from the capital's merchants and lawyers and from the provinces of the interior that depended on its trade. The federalists wanted autonomy for each province, its own militia and its own revenues, and they drew their support from the Litoral — Santa Fe, Entre Ríos, Corrientes — where cattle and hides competed with Buenos Aires's.

The argument was not abstract. A central government meant customs revenue in Buenos Aires and a national army; provincial autonomy meant each province keeping its own customs and its own soldiers. When the unitarians wrote a constitution, the federalists fought it; when the federalists won, they refused to write one. The constitution of 1819 and the constitution of 1826 both failed for the same reason, and the country was governed instead by treaties between provinces — the Treaty of Pilar (1820), the Quadrilateral (1822), the Federal Pact (1831).

What was the war of independence like?

Long, poor and fought mostly on the periphery. The United Provinces never had a large regular army; they had militias, and they fought on four fronts at once: in Upper Peru, where the armies of the north tried and failed to hold Potosí; in the Banda Oriental, where the siege of Montevideo lasted from 1811 to 1814; in Paraguay, which was lost in 1811; and in Chile, from where San Martín's Andes campaign was launched in 1817.

San Martín's strategy was the one that worked. Rather than fight the Spanish in the altiplano, he crossed the Andes with an army raised and supplied in Cuyo, liberated Chile, and moved on Peru by sea; the United Provinces paid for the army, and the campaign ended Spanish power in Lima. It did not end the war in the south, and the provinces' troops were still fighting in Upper Peru and in the Banda Oriental when the 1820s began.

What happened at Cepeda and after?

The collapse of the first attempt at a national state. In February 1820 the federalist caudillos of Santa Fe and Entre Ríos defeated the supreme director's army at Cepeda, and the directorate, the congress and the constitution of 1819 all disappeared within days. Buenos Aires was left as one province among equals, and for the next six years the country was held together — barely — by treaties between provincial governors.

The Treaty of Pilar (February 1820), the Treaty of Benegas and the Quadrilateral of 1822 created a loose confederation with no head. The provinces ran their own customs, raised their own troops, and negotiated with foreign powers; Buenos Aires kept the port and, with it, the income that made it the first among them. That arrangement, not a constitution, is what the United Provinces actually were.

What was the war with Brazil?

The war that created Uruguay. In 1821 the Banda Oriental had been annexed by Brazil as the Provincia Cisplatina, the territory that became Uruguay; in April 1825 a group of exiles, the Thirty-Three Orientals, landed at La Agraciada and raised a revolt, and in August the congress of Florida declared the province's reunion with the United Provinces. Brazil declared war in December 1825, and the Argentine and Uruguayan forces fought it to a standstill at Ituzaingó (February 1827) and in the naval war on the Plate.

The war bankrupted the United Provinces and ended with a British-brokered compromise: the Preliminary Peace Convention of August 1828 created Uruguay as an independent buffer state, and both Argentina and Brazil guaranteed it. For Buenos Aires the war was a military success and a political disaster, because it was fought by provincial militias under a government that could not pay them.

Why did the 1826 constitution fail?

Because it tried to make Buenos Aires the nation. Bernardino Rivadavia, president from February 1826, pushed through a constitution that created a unitary state with a powerful executive, a national bank, a standing army and a capital under federal control. The provinces saw it for what it was: the formalisation of the port's dominance, and the end of their own revenues.

The war with Brazil gave Rivadavia the emergency powers and the debt that made his government unpopular; the peace convention of 1828, which gave up the Banda Oriental, destroyed his prestige. He resigned in June 1827, the constitution was discarded, and the provinces returned to the treaty system. The failure established a pattern that would last until 1853: no constitution could pass that did not first settle the question of Buenos Aires's customs revenue.

What was Dorrego's government and the coup of 1828?

A federalist interlude ended by the unitarians. Manuel Dorrego, governor of Buenos Aires from 1827, accepted the peace with Brazil and tried to govern as a federalist, with the support of the Litoral caudillos and the popular classes of the city. In December 1828 the unitarian general Juan Lavalle seized the city and had Dorrego executed at Navarro, an act that turned a political dispute into a civil war.

The countryside rose behind Rosas, the great cattle rancher and commander of the rural militia, and Lavalle was defeated within months. The episode fixed the alignments of Argentine politics for a generation: federalism became associated with the provinces, the cattle economy and popular urban politics; unitarianism with the city's merchant elite, the army and the constitution. It also made Rosas, who had refused the governorship in 1829 but controlled it from outside, the arbiter of the province.

What was the Liga del Interior?

The last serious attempt to build a national state before 1853. In 1829–31 General José María Paz, a unitarian, conquered Córdoba and organised a league of the interior provinces — Córdoba, Tucumán, Salta, Catamarca, La Rioja, San Juan, Mendoza, Santiago del Estero — with a congress, a constitution and an army. It was a genuine federal project, but a unitarian one at its head, and it depended on Paz's military genius.

It collapsed in 1831. Paz was captured in May at El Tío by a federalist party, his army dissolved, and the interior provinces fell to the caudillos who would dominate them for the next twenty years: Quiroga in La Rioja, López in Santa Fe, Ferré in Corrientes. The Liga's defeat and the Federal Pact of January 1831 ended the United Provinces as a project and opened the era of the Argentine Confederation.

What was the economy of the United Provinces?

Hides, tallow and silver, with British goods flowing in. The pampas produced cattle, and the cattle produced hides for European leather, tallow for candles, and salted meat for the plantations of Brazil and Cuba; the trade ran through Buenos Aires, which took the customs revenue. The interior produced wine, textiles, mules, and the silver of Potosí until Upper Peru was lost in 1825.

Independence changed the economy in two ways. It opened the port to British manufactures, which destroyed the artisan textile industry of the interior — the Córdoba and Tucumán workshops that had supplied the whole viceroyalty — and it redirected trade from Lima to the Atlantic. The result was a country whose wealth lay in the pampas and whose politics was a fight over who would tax it.

What was the role of the caudillos?

They were the state in the provinces. Estanislao López in Santa Fe, Francisco Ramírez in Entre Ríos, Juan Facundo Quiroga in La Rioja, Martín Güemes in Salta and Juan Manuel de Rosas in Buenos Aires were not simply warlords: they were provincial governors who raised militias from their own estates and clients, distributed land and offices, and negotiated with each other as sovereigns. Their power rested on the ranch, the militia and the personal following.

Sarmiento's Facundo (1845), written in exile, made the caudillo a symbol of barbarism against civilisation, and the image stuck. The reality was more complicated: the caudillos built the provincial states that the unitarians wanted to abolish, and the federal system that Argentina eventually adopted owes as much to them as to the constitution-makers of 1853.

What did the Assembly of 1813 change?

More than the revolution had. The Assembly of the Year XIII, which met in Buenos Aires from January 1813, abolished the titles of nobility, ended the encomienda and the forced labour of indigenous people, declared the freedom of slaves' children born after that date — the libertad de vientres — abolished the Inquisition, established the freedom of the press, created a national mint and a national anthem, and adopted a set of civic symbols to replace the Spanish ones.

It did not declare independence, because it was still governing in the king's name, and it did not abolish slavery, because the coastal economy depended on it. But the assembly's measures defined the liberalism of the Río de la Plata: secular, commercial, and egalitarian in law while preserving the social hierarchy in fact. Its libertad de vientres was the first such law in Latin America, and it was followed, slowly, by the abolition of slavery itself in 1853.

What was the place of slavery and of Afro-Argentines?

Larger than the national myth admits. Buenos Aires was a slave port in the eighteenth century, and enslaved Africans and their descendants worked in the households, the workshops and the cattle economy of the city and the coast; in 1810 they were perhaps a quarter of the population of Buenos Aires. The revolution recruited them into the army with promises of freedom, and the assembly of 1813 legislated for their children's liberty.

Abolition came in stages: the 1813 law, the 1831 and 1840 treaties with Britain, and finally the 1853 constitution, which abolished slavery outright. The Afro-Argentine population then disappeared from the record — through war casualties, through epidemic disease, through intermarriage and through a national narrative that preferred to describe Argentina as a European country. That erasure is only now being studied.

How did the interior fare?

Badly, and it knew it. The interior's economy had been built on supplying the mining towns of Upper Peru and the markets of the viceroyalty: mules from Salta and Tucumán, textiles from Córdoba and Catamarca, wine from Mendoza, and the silver route through Potosí. Independence broke the route at both ends — Upper Peru was lost to the royalists and then to Bolivia, and the Atlantic port replaced Lima as the outlet.

The result was deindustrialisation and depopulation in the north-west, and a long argument about protection. The interior provinces wanted tariffs on imported cloth to protect their workshops; Buenos Aires wanted free trade, because its revenue came from customs and its consumers wanted cheap goods. That argument, more than any constitutional doctrine, is what the federalist wars were about.

What was the British influence?

Commercial and decisive. Britain was the United Provinces' main trading partner and its main creditor: British merchants dominated the export trade in hides and the import trade in manufactures, British capital financed the loans of the 1820s, and British diplomacy brokered the 1828 peace with Brazil. The 1825 treaty with Britain gave British subjects religious liberty and exemption from military service, and the British community in Buenos Aires became a small but influential presence in commerce, banking and eventually football.

Britain did not colonise the Plate, but it shaped the terms on which the new state entered the world economy: as an exporter of primary produce and an importer of manufactures, with a port open to foreign shipping. That arrangement lasted until the 1930s, and the debate about it — dependency or development — became one of the central questions of Argentine historiography.

What did the United Provinces leave behind?

A country, an argument and a set of institutions that had to be rebuilt. They left the pampas economy, the port, the customs house, the British connection and the militia system; they left the federalist tradition that would shape the 1853 constitution; and they left a habit of provincial autonomy that survives in Argentine politics to this day.

What they did not leave was a state. Between 1820 and 1853 there was no national constitution, no national bank, no national army that obeyed a national government, and no capital that belonged to the nation rather than to a province. That is why the period matters: it is the laboratory in which the questions that Argentina still argues about — the power of the port, the rights of the provinces, the place of the interior — were first posed.

What did the congress of Tucumán do?

It declared independence and failed to write a constitution that anyone would accept. The congress met at Tucumán in March 1816, in a provincial city far from the port's politics, and on 9 July 1816 it declared the provinces independent of Ferdinand VII and of any other foreign domination. It also adopted a flag, a national seal and the name United Provinces of the Río de la Plata, and it elected Juan Martín de Pueyrredón as supreme director.

What it did not do was settle the constitutional question. Its committee produced a draft in 1819 that was centralist, and the provinces rejected it. The congress then moved to Buenos Aires, where it became the instrument of the directorate, and it was dissolved after Cepeda in 1820. The declaration of independence, in other words, outlived the body that made it, and the constitution it produced did not.

How was the war paid for?

With loans, customs revenue, forced contributions and paper. The United Provinces borrowed in Buenos Aires from merchants and, after 1822, from British bondholders: the Baring loan of 1824 raised a million pounds, of which the government received rather less after commissions and which was largely spent on the war with Brazil and on Rivadavia's reforms. The customs house provided the bulk of ordinary revenue, which is why control of the port was the central political question.

Paper money began in 1822 with the Banco de Buenos Aires, and inflation became a permanent feature of Argentine public finance from that moment. The provinces issued their own currencies, taxed imports at their own ports, and paid their militias in paper; the result was a monetary patchwork that survived until the 1880s, and a fiscal system in which the province that held the port held the country.

What was the place of the church?

Catholic, protected and subordinate. The revolution inherited the church's property, its parishes, its universities and its control of education, and it kept them: the 1813 assembly abolished the Inquisition but confirmed Catholicism as the state religion, and the 1816 declaration was sworn before the church. The church's wealth was not confiscated, but its tithes were secularised and its clergy were drawn into the patriot cause as chaplains and as legitimisers of the new order.

Rivadavia's reforms of 1822–27 went further, and provoked the conflict that outlasted him: he abolished the ecclesiastical courts, secularised the cemeteries, suppressed the monasteries and put the University of Buenos Aires under state control. The church never forgave him, and the federalist cause inherited its support. The struggle between a secular state and a Catholic society, begun then, continued through the 1880s and into the twentieth century.

What was the indigenous frontier?

The edge of the state, and a source of labour and land. South of the Salado river and west of the Andes foothills, the Pampas and the Chaco were controlled by indigenous peoples — the Ranqueles, the Tehuelches, the Mapuche who had crossed the Andes, and the Guaycurú peoples of the Chaco — who traded with the provinces, raided their cattle and negotiated with their governments as independent powers.

The United Provinces did not conquer them. Rosas's campaign of 1833 pushed the frontier south and took captives for the army and the households of Buenos Aires, but the pampas were not cleared for European settlement until the 1879 campaign, and the Chaco not until the 1880s. The frontier was, in the meantime, the place where the provinces got their cattle, their soldiers and their cheapest land — and the place where the national state would later build the myth of the desert.

Why did the provinces not become a nation?

Because the interests that divided them were stronger than the ideas that united them. A nation needs a capital that the other members accept as theirs, a revenue that is collected centrally, and an army that obeys the centre; the United Provinces had none of the three. Buenos Aires had the port and would not share the customs; the provinces had the militias and would not accept a capital they did not control; and the war had left every province with its own commander and its own debts.

The failure was not inevitable. The Liga del Interior of 1829–31 came close to a federal state, and the constitution of 1826 came close to a unitary one. What ended both was the same thing: the refusal of the province that held the port to surrender it, and the refusal of the provinces to be governed from it. Argentina's eventual solution — a federal capital created in 1880, after decades of conflict — took another fifty years to arrive.

What was political life like in the 1820s?

Loud, cheap and factional. Buenos Aires had newspapers — La Gazeta, El Grito del Sud, La Abeja Argentina — clubs, cafés, a theatre and a generation of young men who had been educated at the new university and who argued about constitutions as if the country's future depended on the wording, which it did. Politics was conducted in the press, in the legislature and in the street, and the militia officers who commanded the street were also the men who wrote the editorials.

The 1820s also produced the first national intellectuals: Rivadavia's circle, the group around the University of Buenos Aires, and the exiled unitarians who would write the country's foundational books. Their project was enlightenment — schools, science, European immigration, a constitution — and their weakness was that it depended on a state which did not exist. The gap between the project and the country became the theme of Argentine thought, from Sarmiento's Facundo to Alberdi's Bases, and it was posed for the first time in these years.

What happened to Upper Peru?

It became Bolivia. The provinces of Upper Peru had been part of the viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata since 1776, and the armies of the north spent a decade trying to hold them for the revolution; they failed, and the territory was fought over by royalists, by local guerrillas and finally by Sucre's Colombian troops, who won the battle of Ayacucho in December 1824 and then liberated Upper Peru in 1825.

The assembly at Chuquisaca declared the territory independent on 6 August 1825 and named it after Bolívar, against the wishes of Buenos Aires, which had never accepted the loss. The dispute over Upper Peru poisoned relations between the two states for decades and helped to produce the war of 1825–28 with Brazil, since the United Provinces were simultaneously trying to hold the Banda Oriental and to recover the altiplano.

What did the United Provinces leave to their successors?

Two states and a disputed inheritance. To Argentina they left the pampas economy, the port, the federalist tradition and the constitutional argument that ended only in 1853; to Uruguay they left the idea of independence as a buffer, guaranteed by Britain and Brazil, which shaped that country's politics for a century. To Bolivia they left a grievance about Upper Peru, and to the region they left the memory of a viceroyalty that had briefly been a single economic space.

The United Provinces are therefore less a state than a moment: the point at which the Spanish empire in the south broke into pieces, and the pieces discovered that they could not be put back together. Their history explains why the Río de la Plata region has three states where the viceroyalty had one, and why the borders between them were drawn by war, by British diplomacy and by the refusal of any of them to be governed by another.

What was the military balance?

Militias, rivers and a little navy. The United Provinces never had a standing army of the European kind; they had provincial militias raised by landowners and caudillos, paid irregularly and loyal to their commanders, plus a small regular force and, after 1814, a flotilla on the Plate built by Irish and Italian officers. The war of independence was fought by these forces at great cost, and the war with Brazil was fought largely at sea, where the Argentine squadron under Guillermo Brown held its own against a much larger Brazilian navy.

The military weakness had political consequences. Because the army was provincial, the government that wanted to use it had to negotiate with the provinces; because the navy depended on the port, the province that held the port controlled the war. When Lavalle marched on Buenos Aires in 1828 he did so with units raised for the Brazilian war, and when Rosas rose against him he did so with the rural militia of the province. The army was never the state's instrument; it was one of the state's competitors.

What does the Río de la Plata mean for the region today?

It is the name of the estuary and of the common market. The river Plate, the estuary between Argentina and Uruguay, is still the axis of the region's trade: the Paraná–Paraguay waterway carries soy and ore to the Atlantic, the ports of Buenos Aires, Montevideo and Rosario handle most of the exports of three countries, and the Bi-Oceanic corridor proposals aim to connect them to Chile's Pacific ports.

The name also survives in Mercosur, whose members are Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay — an attempt, two centuries later, to do economically what the United Provinces failed to do politically. Whether it succeeds depends on the same question that broke the viceroyalty: whether the port and the interior can agree on who pays for what.

Common myths about the United Provinces

Timeline of the United Provinces

What the map shows next

At 1822 on the map the United Provinces are a treaty system without a head, and Chile is being liberated by an army paid from Buenos Aires.

At 1831 on the map the Federal Pact has replaced them, and the Argentine Confederation begins.