Cisplatine War
Brazil and the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata went to war in 1825 over the territory that became Uruguay, and neither got it. The Banda Oriental had been fought over since the seventeenth century, when Portugal planted Colónia do Sacramento directly across the estuary from Spanish Buenos Aires. Portugal invaded again in 1816 and annexed it in 1821 as the Cisplatine Province, and it passed to Brazil at independence. On 19 April 1825, thirty-three exiles under Juan Antonio Lavalleja landed from Buenos Aires — the Thirty-Three Orientals — and raised the province. A provincial congress declared for union with the United Provinces in August, and Buenos Aires accepted, which Brazil treated as a declaration of war. Brazil had the fleet and blockaded the Plate; the Argentines had the better land army and won at Ituzaingó in February 1827, without being able to exploit it. Neither side could finish. Brazil's war was expensive and unpopular and contributed to Pedro I's abdication in 1831; the Argentine government collapsed over the peace terms and the country fell into the civil wars that produced Rosas. Britain, whose trade the blockade was strangling, mediated. The Treaty of Montevideo in August 1828 created an independent Uruguay as a buffer state — an outcome neither belligerent had wanted and the British minister Lord Ponsonby had proposed from the start. Uruguay's own civil war began in 1839 with both neighbours intervening, and ran for thirteen years. The buffer worked in the end, which is more than can be said for the war that produced it.
- Year: 1825 CE
- Category: Military
