An Empire Cut Into Pieces
During the summer of 1776, the Spanish crown carved a new government out of its South American empire. The viceroyalty of La Plata, authorized by Charles III, took in territory that had belonged to the viceroyalty of Peru: the lands that today make up Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay, plus the southeastern portion of Bolivia, with the capital placed at Buenos Aires, which sits on the Rio de la Plata.
The reorganization had two stated purposes, according to the EBSCO research reference on the period. One was administrative: Charles III wanted no single viceroy controlling so vast a stretch of the empire. The other was military, shifting resources toward the territory south of Brazil, which Portuguese and British colonial activity threatened.
A Deputy King, Very Far Away
The king appointed Pedro de Cevallos as the first viceroy, though he died after two years in office and was followed by Juan Vertiz, who served until 1784. The office itself was extraordinary. A viceroy was, in effect, a deputy king, holding the power to levy taxes, conscript troops and grant land inside his domain. The catch was distance. South America sat weeks of communication away from Spain, so the Crown could barely supervise its deputy, and could just as rarely send money or soldiers in time. A viceroy’s colonial subjects, close at hand, could matter more to his survival than his sovereign across the ocean.
Historians note the consequence: royal authority over La Plata began to thin almost as soon as the viceroyalty existed. Viceroys steered a middle course between Madrid’s wishes and local opinion, favoring regional leaders whose cooperation the government needed to function at all.
Revolution and Its Long Aftermath
The breaking point came fast. In 1806, with the viceroyalty just twenty years old, Britain invaded Buenos Aires in a bid to claim the region. The Spaniards drove the British out, but the repair came too late: the city’s bourgeoisie was already restless, some of the population was in open revolt, and in 1810 a revolution swept out the last viceroy, Baltasar de Cisneros. Formal sovereignty followed on July 9, 1816, when delegates proclaimed independence and organized the region as the United Provinces of South America.
Independence settled one question and opened several more. Buenos Aires urbanites leaned toward a constitutional monarchy on the British model; rural provinces and smaller cities wanted a federal system closer to that of the United States. The deadlock curdled into civil war by 1819, and out of the vacuum came provincial dictatorships, most famously Juan Manuel de Rosas, the Buenos Aires governor whose rule enforced loyalty down to a public dress code, until Justo Jose de Urquiza overthrew him in 1852 and took office as the Argentine Republic’s first president.
The borders were still unsettled. Paraguay invaded in 1865 amid turmoil in Uruguay, and the resulting War of the Triple Alliance ran until 1870, ending with victory for Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay. Later in the decade came the War of the Desert, led in part by Julio Argentino Roca, which wrested vast agricultural lands from the indigenous peoples and confirmed the republic’s dominance.
The final ledger is pointed. Spain created La Plata in part to shield the south Atlantic flank, yet Britain still seized the Falkland Islands in 1833, and within a little more than one hundred years the viceroyalty’s provinces had become separate sovereign republics.
