Argentinian Civil War of 1828-31

Estanislao López, from 1821 the undisputed leader of Argentina' littoral provinces, had on April 7, 1822, signed the Cuadrilateral Treaty with Entre Ríos, Corrientes and Buenos Aires, calling for national unity and convening on the call to a Constitutional Assembly in Santa Fe.

López protects Rosas when he has to flee after the defeat of Manuel Dorrego's army by Lavalle in Navarro.

General Rosas and his gauchos had gone on the offensive against the centralists after the Argentinian federalists toppled the Dorrego government,

Rosas, who in 1820 had defeated the European expeditionary forces with the help of gauchos, had come on to the national scene as a powerful cattle rancher.

He controls the cattle frontier pampas of Argentina, allowing him to rule over the capital, Buenos Aires.

Championing the autonomy of the federation's constituent states, Rosas leads his gaucho militia against the insurgent centralist Unitarians.

López now joins forces with Rosas to defeat Lavalle in Puente de Márquez on April 26, 1829.

After Rosas makes peace with Lavalle without López's consent, however, the relationship between the allies is strained.

General José María Paz takes over its province of Córdoba and his officers campaign through the interior provinces after the Brazilian war, when the officers of the returning army (of centralist tendencies, known as unitarios) depose the federalist governments in an attempt to restore the centralized rule of Buenos Aires,

Paz decides to start his campaign against the caudillos in Córdoba Province with a small force (about a thousand men strong), many of them veterans who have served under him in the Argentina-Brazil War.

He defeats Bustos in the Battle of San Roque on April 22, 1829, and takes the seat of provincial governor.

Bustos flees west to La Rioja, ruled by his friend and ally Juan Facund Quiroga and asks for help, but Quiroga, leading an army towards Córdoba from Buenos Aires, is also defeated by Paz's more disciplined forces at the Battle of La Tablada on June 23; the superior military strategy of Paz neutralizes the caudillo's irregular and improvised methods of warfare.

Juan Facundo Quiroga, the son of a traditional but impoverished Riojan family of cattle breeders, had tried to enter the independentist army at twenty-two after the May Revolution had proclaimed Argentinian self-rule.

With this in mind, he had traveled to San Luis to enter the Granaderos a Caballo Regiment, led by General José de San Martín, which was recruiting there.

He was imprisoned and eventually expelled due to his bad temper.

He had moved back to La Rioja and become a businessman until 1820, when the central government of Buenos Aires fell and the province became autonomous.

Quiroga had entered the provincial army and quickly risen to its command, gaining control of the government through his charisma.

During the time of the Constitutional Congress of 1824, Quiroga had led its forces through the Andean provinces to oppose the centralist tendencies of President Bernardino Rivadavia and the officers of the National Army, which were carrying out a compulsory levy for the impending Argentina-Brazil War (1825–1828).

Thus, under the flag of Religión o Muerte (Religion or Death), he had overthrown the centralist government of San Juan shortly after the central government had signed a treaty with Britain by which religious freedom was established.

After the civil war, Quiroga establishes himself as one of the leaders of federalism in Argentina (along with Rosas and the caudillo of Santa Fe, Estanislao López), although he has declared in his correspondence with Rosas that his ideas are in fact unitarian, but that he had become a champion of federalism because that is what people want.

Juan Lavalle retires to the Banda Oriental (present Uruguay) after agreeing to the Convention of Barracas.

Juan Manuel de Rosas becomes governor of Buenos Aires.

Argentine lawyer Manuel Vicente Maza assumes an important role in Rosas' government.

Although born in Buenos Aires, Maza had finished his university studies in Law at the Universidad de Santiago in Chile.

As the independence movement from Spain grew in South America, Maza had been taken prisoner in Lima, by that time the center of the Viceroyalty of Peru, and had later spent time in jail in Buenos Aires.

Released in 1815, he had begun his political activity as head of the Civil Commission of Justice of Buenos Aires, bringing about the justice administration regulation named after him.

In 1816, he had served as mayor at the Buenos Aires Cabildo and in the following years, he developed a friendship and political relationship with Rosas.

During the 1820s, Maza has become widely involved in political activity.

He had been sent into exile for the first time in 1823 because of his participation in the uprising against Martín Rodríguez, and again in 1829 to Bahía Blanca for rising up against Lavalle.

Juan Facundo Quiroga goes into self-imposed exile in Buenos Aires but then, deciding not to give up, tries a more ambitious attempt against Paz.

Quiroga returns to face Paz, leading a larger, more powerful and disciplined army, only to face defeat a second time at the Battle of Oncativo (called by the Federals as the Battle of Laguna Larga).

By the end of July 1830, nine of Argentina’s fourteen existing provinces are under the control of Paz and the Unitary government that now paradoxically declares as its main enemy the government of Buenos Aires, now declared Federal.

The Pacto Federal—with Juan Manuel de Rosas governing Buenos Aires Province and the littoral provinces threatened by the centralist alliance ruled by José María Paz—is signed on January 4, 1831, between the armies of Buenos Aires and Santa Fe, who join to invade Córdoba.

Paz, in a preemptive attempt against Estanislao López, the caudillo of Santa Fe, falls prisoner to the Federal forces of Córdoba and Santa Fe while on an inspection mission.

Juan Facundo Quiroga now marches through territories still occupied by natives in order to bypass Córdoba, and attack directly Mendoza, where he succeeds.

Juan Facundo Quiroga takes his campaign north along the Andean provinces, until he finally defeats General Gregorio Aráoz de Lamadrid, who leads the last remaining Unitarian forces, in Salta.

British sovereignty is reasserted over the Falkland Islands, in the South Atlantic.

Luis Vernet had approached the British Consulate in Buenos Aires in 1826 and 1828 seeking permission to form a settlement on the Islas Malvinas (Falkland Islands); the Government of the United Provinces, the precursor to the Republic of Argentina, had assigned Vernet the same task.

After receiving consent, Vernet agreed to provide regular reports to the British and expressed the desire for British protection for his settlement should they decide to reestablish their presence in the islands.

In 1829, the United Provinces had proclaimed Vernet as Governor of the islands, ignoring British diplomatic protests at the appointment and declarations of sovereignty were ignored.

The United Provinces also granted Vernet exclusive rights to seal hunting in the islands.

The British and American consulates disputed this but once again, the diplomatic protests were ignored.

In 1831, Vernet began to seize American fishing vessels hunting seals in Falklands waters, confiscating their catch and arresting their crews.

Vernet returned to the mainland with senior officers of the American vessels to stand trial for violating restrictions on seal hunting.

On December 28, 1831, the American corvette USS Lexington destroyed the Puerto Luis settlement in response.

The captain declared the islands free of government.

This latter incident finally convinced the Foreign Office to reassert its sovereignty claim over the islands.

Throughout much of 1832, the United Provinces did not have a Government representative in the islands.

The Buenos Aires government commissioned Major Esteban Mestivier as the new Governor of the Islands, to set up a penal colony, but when he arrived at the settlement on November 15, 1832, his soldiers mutinied and killed him.

Lt. Col. José María Pinedo, commander of the United Provinces schooner Sarandí, put down the mutiny with aid from a French ship in Puerto Luis.

Order was restored just before the British arrived.

The brig-sloop HMS Clio, previously stationed at Rio de Janeiro, had reached Port Egmont on December 20, 1832, under the command of Captain John James Onslow.

It is soon joined by HMS Tyne.

Onslow arrives at Puerto Luis on January 2, 1833.

Pinedo sends an officer to the British ship, where he is presented with a written request to replace the Argentine flag with the British one, and leave the location.

Pinedo entertains plans for resisting, but finally desists because of his obvious numerical inferiority and the want of enough nationals among his crew (approximately eighty percent of his forces are British mercenaries who refuse to fight their countrymen).

The British forces disembark at 9 AM of January 3 and promptly switch the flags, delivering the Argentine one to Pinedo, who leaves on January 5.

The British vessels depart two days later, leaving William Dixon (Vernet's storekeeper) in charge of the settlement.

The dispute will remain unresolved for over one hundred and fifty years.

Argentina claims that the population of the islands was expelled in 1833; however, sources from the time suggest that the colonists were encouraged to remain under Vernet's deputy, Matthew Brisbane.

HMS Beagle arrives on March 15, 1833.

Charles Darwin comments, "After France, Spain, and England had contested the possession of these miserable islands, they were left uninhabited. The government of Buenos Aires then sold them to a private individual, but likewise used them, as old Spain had done before, for a penal settlement. England claimed her right and seized them. The Englishman who was left in charge of the flag was consequently murdered. A British officer was next sent, unsupported by any power: and when we arrived, we found him in charge of a population, of which rather more than half were runaway rebels and murderers." (The Voyage of the Beagle.)

Vernet dispatches his deputy Brisbane to the islands to take charge of his settlement March 1833.

Meeting with Captain Fitzroy of the Beagle, he is encouraged to continue with Vernet's enterprise provided there is no attempt to further the ambitions of the United Provinces.

In August 1833, eight members of the settlement run amok, killing the five senior members.

Argentine poet Esteban Echeverría is forced to go into exile in nearby Uruguay, where he will write La Insurrección del Sur and his powerful short story "El Matadero" ("The Slaughterhouse," written in 1838 but not published until 1871), on which his renown as a writer largely rests.

A landmark in the history of Latin American literature, it is mostly significant because it displays the perceived clash between "civilization and barbarism,” that is, between the European and the "primitive and violent" American ways.

Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, another great Argentine writer and thinker, is to characterize this clash as the core of Latin American culture.

Read in this light, "The Slaughterhouse" is a political allegory.

Its more specific intention is to accuse Juan Manuel de Rosas of protecting the kind of thugs who murder the cultivated young protagonist at the Buenos Aires slaughterhouse.

Rosas and his henchmen stand for barbarism, the slain young man for civilization.

Echeverría, who will remain in Uruguay until his death, had returned to Buenos Aires in 1830 from four years of close contact with the Romantic Movement in Paris.

In 1832, he had written “Elvira”, one of the earliest romantic poems written in the Spanish language, and in 1837 published a book of romantic poetry entitled “La Cautiva”, a long narrative poem about a white woman abducted by Mapuche Indians; it will become one of the better-known works of   nineteenth century Latin American literature.

He is a member of the group of young Argentine intellectuals who in 1838 had organized the Asociación de Mayo ("May Association", after the May Revolution that initiated Argentina's move towards independence).

This institution, which seeks to disseminate romantic ideas by establishing political liberalism and creating a literature based on national concerns, aspires to develop a national literature responsive to the country's social and physical reality.

Echeverría has also devoted himself to the overthrow of Rosas.