Argentine Independence
The Congress of Tucumán declared the independence of the United Provinces of South America on 9 July 1816, six years after the revolution that removed the Spanish viceroy. The May Revolution of 1810 in Buenos Aires had deposed the viceroy while formally claiming to govern in the name of Ferdinand VII, who was then Napoleon's prisoner. That fiction — the mask of Ferdinand — allowed the movement to be loyal and autonomous at once, and it became untenable when Ferdinand was restored in 1814 and immediately began reconquering the Americas. By 1816 the revolution was in serious trouble. Royalist forces held Peru and Upper Peru and had beaten the Buenos Aires armies repeatedly in the north; Chile had been retaken; Montevideo and Paraguay had gone their own ways; and Spain was shipping an expeditionary army across the Atlantic. The congress met at Tucumán rather than Buenos Aires deliberately, to give the interior provinces a voice, and several littoral provinces under José Gervasio Artigas boycotted it. It debated the form of government at length. Manuel Belgrano proposed an Inca monarchy with a descendant of the Túpac line, which was seriously considered. The declaration itself named Spain and, on a later motion, any other foreign domination. The decisive military answer came from José de San Martín, who had argued that Peru could not be taken overland from the north and who spent two years training an army at Mendoza, crossed the Andes in 1817, and freed Chile and then Peru. Civil war among the provinces followed for decades.
- Year: 1816 CE
- Category: Political
