When Montevideo Belonged to Buenos Aires
Almost 200 years ago, the city surrendered to the military forces of Argentina, occupation which lasted 8 months and witnessed endless abuses. Moreover, it left with a sacking
In these days of patriotic exaltation (in some of the cases real, in some others invented) and of skin-deep national sensitivity at the beginning of the World Cup, who remembers that two centuries ago, in June 1814, the surrender of the Spanish governor in Montevideo, Gaspar de Vigodet, took place giving place to the eight months of domination by the army of Buenos Aires? The date coincides with the recent decision of Buenos Aires to re-assess its relation with Montevideo after the Uruguayan government authorized an increase in the production of cellulose in UPM plant. According to statistics, a large number of Uruguayans have a spirit of rejection towards the inhabitants of Buenos Aires, but not to the rest of the Argentineans. Those feelings, which are mostly evidenced in football, derive from remote ages.
Due to the harsh conditions of life in besieged Montevideo, by mid-1814, realistas (Royalists) tried to leave by ship from the port towards the Uruguay River, the same place where the cellulose plant of discord is located.
One of their aims was to create an isolation hospital in the island Martín García, because Montevideo was infested with leprosy. But Guillermo Brown beat them in Juncal and then in Buceo. After that, the city remained besieged by sea and land, and on June 23rd, Vigodet surrendered before Carlos María de Alvear, Colonel and nephew of Gervasio Posadas, supreme director of Provincias Unidas, and the flag of yellow and red stripes went down and did not flutter back in Montevideo.
At 4 pm on June 23rd, the troops from Buenos Aires entered though San Pedro´s door, according to Reyes Abadie, “amid the cold and hostile silence of the population”. Alvear ignored the terms of the surrender, made the Spanish officers prisoners, incorporated soldiers from Montevideo to his troops and blacks to the “battalion of pardos y morenos,” commanded by Miguel Estanislao Soler, future governor of Montevideo.
José Batlle y Carreó (father of Lorenzo Batlle, grandfather of José Batlle y Ordóñez and great great grandfather of Jorge Batlle), a Catalonian tradesman who was living in Montevideo since early XIX wrote in his Memoires that they seized from him a “box with silk goods worth on thousand pesos”. “In those days we had to obey and shut up, due to the terror inspired by a revolution against the Spanish European,” wrote Batlle y Carreó.
While porteños dominated in the city, the rest of the country was under the domain of artiguista forces. To impose their domain, porteños left Montevideo to put down the Oriental troops. On October 4th, Manuel Dorrega defeated Otorgués in Marmarajá battle. In other words, Argentina was beating it 1-0 and as visitor.
But on January 10th, 1815, Rufino Bauzá and Fructuoso Rivera beat Dorrego in Guayabos battle, close to Arerunguá in Salto.
But for Orientals, that “tie” meant much more, because Alvear decided to evacuate Montevideo, on February 25th, 1815, after nine months of occupation.
They took hundreds of cannons, firearms, gunpowder and ammunitions. They took the furniture, iron fittings, windows and even coffee sacks from the town hall. They also stole small fishing boats and they auctioned them in Buenos Aires. They took all the bronze they found, as well as the iron “and whatever they could find useful”. Before they left, they made ammunitions in the Vaults explode (which can still be seen on the port seafront) and 100 people remained under the ruins of the explosion.
The experience of the occupation was so traumatic for Montevideo inhabitants that those loyal to Spain even went out to receive the 160 men from Otorgués, but soon they had reasons to “mistrust those bandits,” as Batlle y Carreó states.
As the new governor Fernando Otorgués, cousin of Artigas, dominated the city, he published a proclamation where he established as first measure that all Spanish people who got involved in political issues would be executed. In this sense, artiguistas were no better than Porteños, but…the national hero is the national hero.
Lea la versión en español .
