José Artigas
José Artigas is the father of Uruguay, fought for a federal Río de la Plata that never came, and spent the last thirty years of his life farming in Paraguay without seeing the country founded in his name. He was born in Montevideo in 1764 into a founding family of the town, spent his youth on the cattle frontier as a gaucho and a smuggler, and joined the Blandengues, the frontier corps, in 1797 to police the men he had ridden with. When Buenos Aires revolted in 1810 the Banda Oriental, the Spanish shore east of the river, stayed royalist under Montevideo, and Artigas went over to the revolution in 1811, beat the Spanish at Las Piedras in May, and besieged the city. Buenos Aires made peace behind his back that October, and he led the population of the countryside - some sixteen thousand people, with their carts and cattle - across the Uruguay river rather than submit, an exodus Uruguayans call the Redota and treat as the birth of the nation. His quarrel with Buenos Aires was constitutional: he wanted a confederation of equal provinces on the North American model, with Montevideo as a free port, and his instructions to the deputies of 1813 are the first federalist programme in South America. Buenos Aires wanted a capital. The provinces of the interior - Entre Ríos, Corrientes, Santa Fe, Córdoba - took his side and named him Protector of the Free Peoples in 1815, and for five years his Federal League was the alternative Argentina. Then Portugal invaded from Brazil in 1816 with an army of veterans, Buenos Aires let it, and by 1820 he had lost Montevideo, the war and finally his own lieutenants, who went over to Buenos Aires at his back. He crossed into Paraguay in September 1820 and Francia gave him a farm and a pension and never let him leave. Uruguay became independent in 1828, as a buffer state, by a treaty he took no part in. He died in Paraguay in 1850 at eighty-six, and his bones were brought home in 1855.
- Lived: 1764 CE – 1850 CE
- Nationality: Uruguayan
- Roles: military, revolutionary, head_of_state
