The Argentine War of Independence
What is today Argentina was in the early nineteenth century the Viceroyalty of the Rio de Plata, governed by a viceroy from Spain, with most of the positions of authority throughout the province occupied by Spaniards. It included what became Uruguay, Bolivia, and Paraguay, and because of the sheer size of the region and its topography, consisted of isolated areas of population centers. The viceroy’s seat of government was in Buenos Aires, which was connected by water with its rival city Montevideo, and both cities were thriving ports, trading with the Spanish ports of Cadiz and Ferrol.
The region was populated with criollos, who gradually came to the belief that the Spanish were over-represented in the government bureaucracy at their expense, despite the absence of legal barriers to the criollos. During the Napoleonic Wars British troops attacked the cities in the Rio de Plata, and the citizenry of the region was militarized formally, retaking the city of Buenos Aires from the British in 1806. The following year the British captured Montevideo, but another attack on Buenos Aires failed, though the criollos deposed the viceroy during the campaign. Spain appointed a new viceroy following the campaign, through the junta de Seville.
In 1810 the Peninsular War was at its nadir as far as the Spanish were concerned. The Junta de Seville was overturned when Seville was overrun by the French. In Buenos Aires, the authority of the viceroy was questioned since the body which had appointed him no longer existed, and the local military agreed, creating the Primera Junta to govern locally. Buenos Aires then petitioned other cities to send representatives to the new governing body, but found resistance from nearly all of them. The Council of Regency in Spain declared Buenos Aires to be in rebellion and created a new viceroyalty in Montevideo.
Both sides of the conflict remained loyal to King Ferdinand of Spain initially, the dispute was over the authority of the Regency and whether the King was a constitutional monarch or an absolute ruler. Eventually a third faction evolved, and all three battled each other during the war of independence and the ensuing Argentine Civil War. The War of Independence began in May 1810, and would last until 1818. Initially the campaigns were fought in the northeast and by the end the war was being fought in the west, in what is now Chile. As it unfolded the patriots began to develop the republican leanings which led to them opposing even a constitutional monarchy.
In 1815 King Ferdinand was returned to the Spanish throne, after promising to honor the constitutional reforms enacted by the Regency during his absence. Though he failed to honor those promises, the Argentine patriots declared their independence from Spain at the Congress of Tucuman in 1816. Royalist troops failed to suppress the revolution and in 1818 Chile, to which the revolution had spread, declared its independence from Spain as well. Spain did not formally recognize the independence of Argentina until 1857, and the country was plagued by political conflicts and civil war for decades.