History of Argentina

European discovery and settlement

The main Atlantic outline of Argentina was revealed to European explorers in the early 16th century. The Río de la Plata estuary was discovered years before Ferdinand Magellan traversed the Strait of Magellan in 1520, although historians dispute whether the estuary was first reached by Amerigo Vespucci in 1501–02 or by Juan Díaz de Solís in his ill-fated voyage of 1516. Solís and a small party sailed up the Plata, which he called the Mar Dulce (“Freshwater Sea”), and made landfall. Ambushed by Indigenous peoples, Solís and most of his followers were killed, and several disappeared. The survivors of the expedition returned to Spain.

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The Río de la Plata was not explored again until Magellan arrived in 1520 and Sebastian Cabot in 1526. Cabot discovered the Paraná and Paraguay rivers and established the fort of Sancti Spíritus (the first Spanish settlement in the Plata basin). He also sent home reports of the presence of silver.

In 1528 Cabot met another expedition from Spain under Diego García, commander of a ship from the Solís expedition. Both Cabot and García had planned to sail for the Moluccas but altered their courses, influenced by excited tales about an “enchanted City of the Caesars” (a variant of the Eldorado legend), which later incited many explorations and conquests in Argentina. While Cabot was preparing to search for the fabled city, a surprise attack by Indigenous people in September 1529 wiped out his Sancti Spíritus base.

Inspired by the conquest of Peru and the threat from Portugal’s growing power in Brazil, Spain in 1535 sent an expedition under Pedro de Mendoza (equipped at his own expense) to settle the country. Mendoza was initially successful in founding Santa María del Buen Aire, or Buenos Aires (1536), but lack of food proved fatal. Mendoza, discouraged by attacks by Indigenous people and mortally ill, sailed for Spain in 1537; he died on the way.

In the same year, a party from Buenos Aires under Juan de Ayolas and Domingo Martínez de Irala, lieutenants of Mendoza, pushed a thousand miles up the Plata and Paraguay rivers. Ayolas was lost on an exploring expedition, but Irala founded Asunción (now in Paraguay) among the Guaraní, a largely settled agricultural people. In 1541 the few remaining inhabitants of Buenos Aires abandoned it and moved to Asunción, which was the first permanent settlement in that area. In the next half century Asunción played a major part in the conquest and settlement of northern Argentina. The main population of Argentina was concentrated there until the late 18th century. Buenos Aires, reestablished in 1580 by Juan de Garay with settlers from Asunción, was largely isolated from this northern area. Northern Argentina as well as Buenos Aires was settled mainly by the overflow from the neighboring Spanish colonies of Chile, Peru, and Paraguay (Asunción). There was little direct migration from Spain, probably because the area lacked the attractions of Mexico, Peru, and other Spanish colonies—rich mines, a large supply of Indigenous labor, accessibility, and the privilege of direct trade with Spain. Nevertheless, in the early communities a simple but vigorous society developed on the basis of American Indian labor and the horses, cattle, and sheep imported by the Spaniards, as well as native products such as corn (maize) and potatoes. Some of the Indigenous people worked as virtual serfs, and densely populated missions (reducciones) established by the Roman Catholic Church played a notable role in the colonizing process. European men often took Indigenous wives because there were few Spanish women among the settlers.

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Colonial centers

Politically, Argentina was a divided and subordinate part of the Viceroyalty of Peru until 1776, but three of its cities—San Miguel de Tucumán, Córdoba, and Buenos Aires—successively achieved a kind of leadership in the area and thereby sowed the regional seeds that later grew into an Argentine national identity.

San Miguel de Tucumán’s leadership lasted from the latter part of the 16th through the 17th century. Its political and ecclesiastical jurisdiction extended over most of northern Argentina, including Córdoba. San Miguel de Tucumán also dominated trade, which was the chief economic activity, by supplying the rich silver-mining area of Upper Peru (now Bolivia) with foodstuffs and livestock in return for European manufactures and other goods brought from Spain. Under the same economic system, Córdoba rose to leadership in the 17th and 18th centuries, because the expansion of settlement gave the city a central location, and because the University of Córdoba, founded in 1613, put the city in the intellectual forefront of the region.

Buenos Aires, which rose to leadership in the late 18th century, symbolized the reorientation of Argentina’s economic, intellectual, and political life from the west to the east. On the economic front commerce was oriented away from the declining silver mines of Peru and toward direct transatlantic trade with Europe. Intellectually, the new ideas of the European Enlightenment found fertile soil in cosmopolitan Buenos Aires. Political life was reoriented in 1776, when Spain created the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata (consisting of modern Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and southern Bolivia), with Buenos Aires as its capital. By carving the new viceroyalty from lands formerly part of the Viceroyalty of Peru, Spain intended to put its east-coast dominions in a better defensive position. The chief threat came from Brazil, which was growing rapidly in population, wealth, and military potential. For the first time, the port of Buenos Aires was opened to transatlantic trade with Spain and, through Spain, with other countries. This resulted in a great increase in both legal trade and smuggling.

Independence

In Argentina the independence movement began in 1806–07, when British attacks on Buenos Aires were repelled in the two battles known as the Reconquista and the Defensa. Also important there, as elsewhere in Spanish America, were the ramifications of Napoleon I’s intervention in Spain, beginning in 1808, which plunged that country into a civil war between two rival governments—one set up by Napoleon, who placed his own brother Joseph Bonaparte on the throne, and the other created by patriotic juntas in Spain in the name of the exiled Ferdinand VII and aided by the British. In most of Spanish America there was general sympathy with the regency, but both claims were rejected, mainly on the ground that an interregnum existed and thus, under ancient principles of Spanish law, the king’s dominions in America had the right to govern themselves pending the restoration of a lawful king.

This view was sustained in Argentina by the Creoles (criollos; Argentine-born Europeans) rather than by the immigrant (“peninsular”) Spaniards, and it was put into effect by the Buenos Aires cabildo, or municipal council. This ancient Spanish institution had existed in all the colonies since the 16th century. Its powers were very limited, but it was the only organ that had given the colonists experience in self-government. In emergencies it was converted into an “open” cabildo, a kind of town meeting, which included prominent members of the community. On May 25, 1810 (now celebrated as Venticinco de Mayo, the day of the revolution), such an open cabildo in Buenos Aires established an autonomous government to administer the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata in the name of Ferdinand VII, pending his restoration. When Ferdinand was restored in 1814, however, he was virtually powerless in Spain, which remained under the shadow of France. An assembly representing most of the viceroyalty met at San Miguel de Tucumán, and on July 9, 1816 (Nueve de Julio), declared the country independent under the name of the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata.

Several years of hard fighting followed before the Spanish royalists were defeated in northern Argentina. But they remained a threat from their base in Peru until it was liberated by José de San Martín and Simón Bolívar in 1820–24. The Buenos Aires government tried to maintain the integrity of the old Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, but the outlying portions, never effectively controlled, soon were lost: Paraguay in 1814, Bolivia in 1825, and Uruguay in 1828. The remaining territory—what now constitutes modern Argentina—was frequently disunited until 1860. The root cause of the trouble, the power struggle between Buenos Aires and the rest of the country, was not settled until 1880, and even after that it continued to cause dissatisfaction.

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 Indigenous people. 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 favorable terms, resigned in July 1827, and the national government dissolved. Leadership of the province of Buenos Aires was given to a federalist, Col. 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 Gen. 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 laborers, 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, Gen. 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 favors, 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 neighboring Bolivia, Paraguay, and Uruguay, which continued to pursue their destinies as independent states rather than as parts of a Buenos Aires–controlled federation. Gen. 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 Gen. 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.