Before 1900

views updated

Before 1900

INDIANS AND SPANIARDS

Before its discovery by Spain in 1516, Uruguay was populated by a few thousand indigenous people. To these peoples the European conqueror gave a variety of names: Charrúas, Minuanes, Bohanes, Guenoas, Yaros, Chanáes, and Guaranis. Their territories spread beyond Uruguay into what later became neighboring Argentina and Brazil. The dominant and numerically most important race, the Charrúas, were advanced hunters, while the Chanáes in addition practiced a primitive agriculture, which had also been developed more fully by the enclaves of Guarani settlement. But all were societies fundamentally based on hunting, canoeing, and fishing. A limited quantity of archaeological remains bears witness to the practice of decorating pottery and working stone.

The arrival of the Europeans, and of the cattle and horses they left behind in Uruguay at the beginning of the seventeenth century, changed the demography, customs, and natural environment of the indigenous peoples. Having become skilled horsemen hunting wild cattle, they ended up decimated by smallpox and by persecution by the white men as their culture was inimical to the forms of labor introduced by the Spaniards. Traditionally, 1831 is identified as the year in which the Charrúas disappeared as a population of any importance, wiped out by the soldiers of the first republican government of independent Uruguay. This annihilation did not diminish the importance of indigenous blood as an element in the composition of the rural population, especially the Guaranís, from territories occupied by the Jesuit Missions.

Nonetheless, the so-called extermination of the Indians at Salsipuedes in 1831 established the myth of a European, white Uruguay, which the dominant classes in the country encouraged, all the more as immigration from outside the continent became the basis for Uruguay's population growth.

The Banda Oriental (literally "Eastern Bank") was the name given by the Spaniards to the territory that became Uruguay. It was a region of late colonization, mainly during the period of Bourbon Spain in the eighteenth century. It was populated for three principal reasons: the quality of its natural grassland and the multiplying numbers of livestock derived from those left by the Spanish discoverers, the advantages of Montevideo as the only natural port on the Río De La Plata, and the fact that it was a frontier territory in permanent dispute between the Spanish and Portuguese crowns. This struggle was often the explanation for the foundation of its cities and towns, as was the case, for example, of the first important European settlement, Colonia del Sacramento, founded by Portugal in 1680, and of Montevideo, established by Spain between 1724 and 1730. The lack of a fixed frontier had its effect on the economy, promoting a contraband trade which made a mockery of Spain's commercial monopoly, as well as on society, encouraging horsemanship and the practice of arms.

Natural grassland, and ownerless cattle and horses running free, gave rise to the estancia (ranch), dedicated to cattle production, and to the dominant figure in rural areas, the estanciero (ranchowner). Appearing around 1780–1800 were the first Saladeros (meat-salting plants), which converted part of the beef production into tasajo, hard and lean salt beef, consumed at first only by the slaves of Cuba and Brazil. The saladeros were part estancia and part industry in Montevideo. Although steam power was adopted in 1832 to render the fat, the production of tasajo itself required only the dexterity of the gaucho (horseman) to lasso the semiwild cattle, and the skill of the laborers—until 1830 almost all black slaves—who cut the meat in thin strips. The meat was then salted and placed in piles for two or three days, and then laid out in the sun to dry—a process that was, in effect, a manufacture.

Through the port of Montevideo there was a legal trade with Spain and (after 1779) with Buenos Aires as well as an unlawful trade with Portuguese Brazil and with European ships that made "emergency" entries into the harbor. This activity generated sufficient income to maintain the Spanish bureaucracy that governed the Banda Oriental as well as the wealthy traders who formed the municipal body known as the cabildo, the imperfect but only school of self-government to which criollos had access. The Banda Oriental formed part of the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata following its belated creation in 1776, but Montevideo and a large adjacent area were included in it as a governorship.

The population of the Banda Oriental—about 30,000 in 1800, of whom one-third lived in Montevideo—was divided more clearly perhaps on regional and racial bases than in terms of social classes. Montevideo, as the seat of Spanish authority, was stratified by race and class. Merchants, financiers, absentee estancieros, and holders of high office formed an upper class that still kept the flavor of its humble origins in Catalonia, the Canaries, or the Basque country. Traders, storekeepers, the military, less exalted officials, and craftsmen, constituted a middle class in embryo. Below all the rest was the black slave population, one-third of the total.

The interior was a rural world in which social distinctions, though real, tended to be blurred or combined with other cultural and economic aspects in such a way as to become very distinctive. The estancieros (known as latifundistas) who owned large tracts of land had ejected earlier and less wealthy livestock producers who had lacked the same influence with the Spanish authorities. The majority of these great landowners did not have good title to the lands they held. Many had done no more than begin the process of legal acquisition in Buenos Aires before abandoning it, weary of the slowness of Bourbon bureaucracy as well as its cost, which invariably exceeded the price of the land itself. Others had purchased defined tracts of land from the Spanish crown, but such estancias proved to be much greater in size than what had been paid for. As a result the estancieros were collectively dependent on the policy of the state, both Spanish at first and independent republican subsequently.

The population of the interior was nomadic and frequently of mixed race. Life was easy, with food consumption consisting almost entirely of meat, which was freely available. Meat production was hugely in excess of a demand limited to the tiny internal market and restricted external markets in Cuba and Brazil. The Banda Oriental, with perhaps 6 million cattle and half a million horses, had the greatest number of both per head of population of any country in the world. The lowest rural laborer—the gaucho—was a horseman (even the beggars in Montevideo were mounted), and had an assured supply of food. When one of the leaders of the 1811 revolution was questioned about how he lived, he replied, "When I needed a shirt I worked; when I needed nothing I did not work." For rural laborers, work was optional, not obligatory. The latifundistas regarded with disgust an independent labor force that was only compelled to work when the state from time to time took measures against "vagrants."

The situation was not free of tensions. The Spanish authorities did not allow the estancieros to sell cattle hides freely to British and Portuguese merchants, and frequently threatened to make them pay for the lands that they occupied unlawfully. They carried out the threat, for example, in August 1810, just months before the outbreak of the revolution for independence in February 1811. Traders and livestock producers were inconvenienced by subjection to the political, judicial, and commercial authorities (Viceroy, Real Audiencia, and Tribunal del Consulado) located in the neighboring, competing, and envied city of Buenos Aires. The gauchos and Amerindians hated all those measures emanating from the governor of Montevideo, or the cabildo, which attempted to limit the volume of contraband trade, or persecute vagrants, or expel small landholders from the territories of the great estancias. This last issue had generated enormous resentment. The pioneer settlers had rounded up cattle previously running wild and unclaimed, built ranch houses and cattle pens, and driven off the Portuguese and Amerindians who had invaded their land. And now that the region had been made habitable, they were turned off the land by those owed favors by governors or viceroys, or by wealthy merchants from Buenos Aires or Montevideo who had bought the land and secured expulsion orders against those settled on it. The whole of Uruguay had been settled in four or five successive waves of pioneer settlers, who then found themselves declared "trespassers" by the colonial authority.

CATTLEMEN AND CAUDILLOS, 1810–1850

All of these resentments, both toward local authorities and toward Spain and Buenos Aires, came to a head in 1811, as a result of the earlier French invasion of the Iberian peninsula and the weakening of the constraints of colonial rule. That year the interior rebelled against Spanish authority emanating from Montevideo. The revolution was led by a criollo commander of the loyalist (Spanish) army itself: José Gervasio Artigas. The revolution at first respected the authority of the Junta de Mayo in Buenos Aires, but political, social, and economic differences soon separated orientales from porteños. In 1813 the April Congress proclaimed the political principles of the revolution: independence from Spain; organization of a single state comprising all the regions of the former Viceroyalty of La Plata, at first as a confederation and subsequently on a federal basis; democracy; and republicanism. Buenos Aires was not to be the capital.

In September 1815 Artigas issued a regulation that distributed the vast wealth of those opposed to the revolution, "bad Europeans and worse Americans," to the least favored in society, especially Amerindians, freed slaves, and poor criollos. Each was to receive a modest (by the standards of the time) estancia, with the obligation to build a ranch house and two cattle pens, and to round up the cattle. The enforcement of the regulation was in part delayed by the Portuguese invasion in 1816, but the confiscation of the great estancias prior to their redistribution contributed to the hatred that the old upper class of the colonial period began to feel toward Artigas and his followers.

Between 1811 and 1814 the orientales fought against Spain and eventually succeeded with help from Buenos Aires in occupying Montevideo. Before then, however, in January 1814, Artigas reached the decision that the objective of the revolution could not be to substitute one despotism for another, Buenos Aires in place of Spain, and left the army of Buenos Aires to continue the siege of Montevideo alone. The city fell to the porteños in June, after which Artigas made war on Buenos Aires, aided by the littoral provinces of the Uruguay and Paraná rivers, Entre Ríos, Corrientes, and Santa Fe, all of which were attracted by the idea of federalism. The struggle then became one between federalists, who were also republicans, and the forces of Buenos Aires, who were royalist as well as centralist. In 1815, with the victory at Guayabos, Artigas succeeded in displacing the porteños and restoring Montevideo to the orientales, and established his authority throughout the country.

From 1816 until 1820 Artigas confronted the invasion forces of the Portuguese monarchy now established in Rio de Janeiro. In addition to their traditional desire to occupy the old Banda Oriental, long disputed with Spain, the Portuguese now invaded out of fear that the south of Brazil might otherwise be contaminated with republican and federalist principles. The invasion had the blessing of Buenos Aires, and ended in defeat for Artigas in 1820.

With its trade and livestock industry in ruins following nine years of continuous revolutionary war, the country was in the hands first of Portugal (1820–1822) and then of Brazil (1822–1825). An important element of the upper class collaborated with the invading forces, who, under the command of an able Portuguese general, Carlos F. Lecor, promised to impose order and to restore the property confiscated by Artigas to its former owners. In 1821 a congress of collaborating orientales voted for the incorporation of what was now called the Cisplatine Province into the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil, and the Algarve.

Eventually, however, the upper class became disillusioned with the Brazilian authorities, and other social sectors found similar frustrations. Anti-Portuguese sentiments, strong in a population of Spanish origin that had been resisting Portuguese encroachments since the seventeenth century, were quickly rekindled. It became evident that the Portuguese were giving preference to their own in the distribution of lands and in commercial concessions. The cost of maintaining the army of occupation was heavy. Lecor's authoritarian rule did not permit even a semblance of self-government, not even following the introduction of the Brazilian Constitution of 1824.

The second stage of the revolution began in April 1825, when thirty-three orientales—the number and nationality of whom was in truth somewhat mythical—invaded the country and within a few months had raised a revolt throughout the interior against the Brazilians, who were thus confined to Montevideo. Following the victories at Rincón and Sarandí, the government of Buenos Aires gave its formal backing to the orientales, and at the end of 1825 also entered the war against Brazil. The leader of the orientales was now Juan Antonio Lavalleja, a rural caudillo, who was soon joined by another, Fructuoso Rivera. Their objectives were more modest than those of Artigas. Whereas the latter sought federalism and social egalitarianism as well as independence from external control, his two former lieutenants were content to free the Banda Oriental from Brazilian rule, while leaving undecided (perhaps deliberately) the nature of future relations with Buenos Aires as well as any solution to the question of landownership. On 25 August 1825 the House of Representatives of the Provincia Oriental declared first the absolute independence of the country, and then its union with the other provinces.

The war with Brazil came to an end with an indecisive victory at Ituzaingó in February 1827. For some months Britain had been attempting to mediate the conflict through its envoy, Lord Ponsonby. The war had seriously disrupted British trade with Argentina because of the Brazilian blockade of the port of Buenos Aires. In addition, though a secondary consideration, Britain had some interest in encouraging the independence of a small state on the Río de la Plata to prevent Argentine control of both sides. The Río de la Plata gave access to the largest system of navigable rivers in South America, and by "internationalizing" it, Britain could ensure that her trade would not be impeded by a strong Argentina. On 4 October 1828 the Brazilian Empire and the Argentine Confederation ratified a preliminary peace agreement declaring the Cisplatine Province separate from Brazil and an independent state. Thus the birth of independent Uruguay was the combined result, in proportions that national historiography has discussed with great fervor, of British self-interest and the Uruguayan desire for autonomy and opposition to the porteños.

An elected assembly approved the constitution of the new country, officially designated the Estado Oriental del Uruguay, in 1830. A judicial system based on European and North American models appeared to safeguard internal order. The new state was to be a republic, and individual rights were to be guaranteed through the classic separation of powers. The right to vote was denied to the illiterate, laborers, servants, and vagrants, who collectively constituted the majority of the population. In principle, a minority would elect deputies and senators for three and six years, respectively. They in turn, every four years, would name the president of the republic, who could not serve a second term immediately after the first. This was the constitution that ruled the destiny of Uruguay until 1919.

The reality of the country, however, prevailed over this Europeanized legal framework. Until at least 1876, Uruguayan affairs were dominated by civil wars out of which emerged the two parties, Colorados and Blancos, that eventually modernized and survived into the twentieth century. The first constitutional president, Fructuoso Rivera (1830–1834; 1838–1842), faced three uprisings led by the other main rural caudillo, Lavalleja. His successor, Manuel Oribe (1835–1838), in turn faced two challenges from Rivera. At the battle of Carpintería in 1836, the warring factions for the first time used the devices that would become their traditional forms of identification: white (blanco) for the forces of the government, who styled themselves "Defenders of the Law," and at first pale blue (the other main color on the Uruguayan flag) but subsequently red (colorado) for Rivera's followers. In his second challenge in 1838, Rivera was successful. This time he was assisted by a squadron of the French, who were anxious to displace Oribe, who had allied himself with Juan Manuel de Rosas, governor of Buenos Aires. Rivera occupied Montevideo and had himself elected president for a second term in 1839. That same year Rivera declared war on Rosas, who continued to regard Oribe as the legitimate president of Uruguay, and thus began the Guerra Grande. Both the Uruguayan factions now had international support: Rivera was backed by unitarian refugees from Argentina, as well as by the French and British squadrons in the Río de la Plata. The Europeans were fearful that Rosas might annex Uruguay and were also keen to break up his monopoly of shipping on the Paraná River. But with Rosas's support, Oribe now began the siege of Montevideo, which endured for nine years (1843–1851). The conflict was not resolved until the two European nations withdrew their forces and the Brazilian Empire intervened on behalf of a Colorado Montevideo. Oribe (and Rosas) was defeated, but the peace agreement that was signed on 8 October 1851 declared that there were neither victors nor vanquished.

The atmosphere immediately following this conflict was one of reconciliation between the two factions. The destruction of livestock, commerce, and private wealth during the long conflict encouraged unity. But by now factionalism was engrained in the collective memory, and civil conflict soon broke out again. The Blanco president Juan F. Giró (March-October 1852) was overthrown by a mutiny of the mainly Colorado army. The new Colorado leader, the rural caudillo Venancio Flores, governed as president until 1855. In 1856 the spirit of unity and the desire to forget the resentments of the past brought Gabriel A. Pereyra to power (1856–1860). During his presidency a group within the Colorado Party, called the Conservative Party, raised a rebellion, but its leaders were defeated and executed at Quinteros by government troops. During 1860–1864 President Bernardo P. Berro attempted to continue the policy of unity, but the parties reemerged. In April 1863 Flores invaded the country with the support of the Argentine president, Bartolomé Mitre, and with the eventual collaboration of Brazil. Berro looked for assistance to Paraguay to reestablish, as he described it, an equilibrium in the Río de la Plata region. But following Flores's capture of Paysandú in January 1865, one of his generals ordered the principal Blanco leaders to be shot. Thus did each faction acquire its martyrs, and an emotional force that would ensure permanence for both. During Venancio Flores's dictatorship (1865–1868) Uruguay joined Brazil and Argentina in the War of the Triple Alliance against Paraguay. In February 1868 Flores, whose regime had awakened old passions, was assassinated; the same day the former Blanco president, Bernardo Berro, also fell victim to an assassin. New martyrs fed the traditions of the parties.

Flores was the first in the long continuous series of Colorado governments that did not end until 1959. He was succeeded by a constitutional president, Lorenzo Batlle (1868–1872), who faced an uprising under the rural Blanco caudillo Timoteo Aparicio. This was known as the Revolution of the Lances, a sufficient comment on the primitive military technology of the period. Measured in terms of its duration (1870–1872) and destructive effect on livestock, it was second only among Uruguay's civil wars to the Guerra Grande. The factions were reconciled at the so-called Peace of April 1872, as a result of which for the first time the Blancos shared in the government of the country with the Colorados through the practice of Coparticipación (coparticipation). Nonetheless disorder persisted until 1876, when Colonel Lorenzo Latorre seized power.

It was essentially through the series of struggles, and the various events accompanying them, that Blancos and Colorados acquired some degree of political, social, and even regional significance. The different personalities and social connections of Oribe and Rivera, and the greatest of the wars, the Guerra Grande, gave a new form to the opposition of capital city and interior, which had existed since the colonial period. The Colorados identified with besieged Montevideo, with immigrants, and with unobstructed access for European influence. The Blancos, with their roots in the surrounding countryside, took their identity from the rural environment and the great landowners, and were essentially criollo.

Yet these differences do not adequately explain the extent of internal chaos in Uruguay in this period. A fuller understanding of the country, as well as an interpretation of its political character, must take into account its economic, social, and cultural structures, and the technology available to a preindustrial state. The three pillars of conservatism in Latin America, the Catholic church, the army, and landed property, were all weak in Uruguay. Within the church there was no Uruguayan hierarchy in 1830, and not until 1878 was the country granted its first bishopric. The junior clergy was few, often foreign, theologically not well trained, and of uncertain moral character. Lacking major properties of its own, the church's influence was confined to the representation of the majority religion of the country's inhabitants. The army was small, and did not have a monopoly of coercive power. The rural worker used horses, the lasso, and the knife in normal activity, and at the whim of his leader became an active revolutionary and rival to the professional soldiery. Landed property dominated the agrarian structure, but was not firmly established. Those in possession during the years of the revolutionary wars fought against the landowners of the colonial period, whose titles were also often less than perfect. Government had to mediate in these disputes, which often boiled over into battles between Blancos and Colorados. The former in general corresponded to the class of large landowners; the latter more to those who occupied lands, whether large or small, but who lacked legal papers of ownership for them. Hence, instead of the Uruguayan state straightforwardly representing the landowning class, the status of those holding land depended in fact on the political character of the state itself.

Transport and communication facilities remained those of a cattle-raising society. Provided he could change horses en route, a man could ride from Montevideo to San Fructuoso (240 miles) in two days, whereas the regular stagecoach service (which itself only began in 1850) took at least four or five days, even assuming that the rivers and streams were passable and not flooded. Carts carrying hides and wool needed a month for the journey. Cattle were moved to the saladeros on the hoof, a task requiring the special skills of the troperos (herdsmen). Agriculture, on the other hand, depended entirely on cumbersome and expensive transport by cart, and therefore developed only in the vicinity of the centers of demand. Only the littoral region on the Uruguay River benefited from improved communications, with a three-day steamship service connecting Salto and Montevideo from 1860. Maintaining control of the interior from distant Montevideo with such transport and communication was very difficult. By the time news of a rural uprising reached the capital, the rebellion had taken root. Even the various armies of the government had difficulty in knowing their respective positions and in combining forces, as happened, for example, to the Colorados during the Revolution of the Lances.

THE BIRTH OF MODERN URUGUAY: 1850–1900

The Colorado military governments of Lorenzo Latorre (1876–1880), Francisco Vidal (1880–1882), Máximo Santos (1882–1886) and Máximo Tajes (1886–1890) established centralized power in Uruguay with dominance over the rural caudillos, thus making rural uprisings far more difficult though not yet impossible. There were several reasons why the state and its army could now exercise a monopoly of physical coercion: armaments had become expensive (the Remington repeating rifle and Krupp artillery were now deployed) and required training not available to the gauchos; the introduction of the telegraph and the railway strengthened the power of Montevideo; and developments both in the economy and in society impeded the costly rebellions of the past.

Another factor that contributed to the strengthening of domestic peace was the growth of nationalism, which put an end to the internationalization of the Uruguayan party system based on alliances with Argentine unitarians and federalists and Brazilian factions. The unification of both Argentina and Brazil around Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro, respectively, meant that there were fewer appeals from these countries for Uruguayans to take sides in their internal disputes. In this sense, the Revolution of the Lances was the first wholly Uruguayan civil war.

The period of militarism was succeeded by the presidential and authoritarian but civilian governments of Julio Herrera y Obes (1890–1894) and Juan Idiarte Borda (1894–1897). These exclusively Colorado regimes, bolstered by electoral manipulation, were countered by two Blanco rebellions led by the rural caudillo Aparicio Saravia. His rising in March 1897 led to a Colorado government with Blanco acquiescence, that of Juan Lindolfo Cuestas (1897–1903). However, following the election of José Batlle y Ordóñez in 1903, Saravia led the last great rural rebellion in 1904. These two revolts differed from their predecessors in that their political manifestos went beyond mere adherence to party tradition. On both occasions the Blancos defended the modern causes of respect for the popular will in elections and proportional representation for the parties in the legislature.

Internal peace and strong central government in Montevideo were accompanied by changes in the demography, economy, society, and culture of the nation. Uruguay in 1830 had barely 70,000 inhabitants. By 1875 the population was 450,000, and by 1900 it had reached a million. This spectacular increase, by a factor of fourteen in 70 years, was unparalleled elsewhere in the Americas. The high birth rate before 1890 (between 40 and 50 per thousand inhabitants) was combined with relatively low mortality (between 20 and 30 per thousand), but even more crucial in the demographic transformation was European immigration. French, Italians, and Spaniards before 1850, Italians and Spaniards thereafter, arrived in five waves of migration during the nineteenth century. Mass immigration to Uruguay occurred relatively early in comparison with that to Argentina, and was huge in proportion to the very small population of 1830. During the half-century after 1840 the population of Montevideo was between 50 and 60 percent foreign, nearly all of whom were from Europe. The national census of 1860 found that 35 percent of Uruguayans were foreign, a proportion declining to 17 percent in 1908.

The Europeans (especially) and the Brazilians had values that were different from those of the criollos. They were more enterprising, and more acquisitive. Their interests were protected during internal wars by their consuls, and any losses were invariably compensated by the Uruguayan state, which was vulnerable to external pressure. By the 1870s they had become the principal wealth-owners in both the capital and the interior, with 56 percent of property in Montevideo and 58 percent of interior land. European immigrants were also pioneers in the manufacture of consumer goods, and in 1889 controlled about 80 percent of such establishments.

The economic structure of the country also changed. Sheep farming was added to cattle production on the estancias between 1850 and 1870. According to the census of 1852, the sheep flock was no more than 0.8 million, yielding 14 to 18 ounces of wool per head of a quality fit only for making mattresses. In 1868, however, the flock was estimated at 17 million and now yielded 40 ounces of merino wool per head, as a result of the crossbreeding that had begun with livestock imported from France and Germany. In 1884 wool took the place of hides as Uruguay's most important export commodity, and it retained that position until the great expansion of frozen beef in the second decade of the twentieth century. In addition to the unimproved cattle, whose commercial value largely consisted of the hide, the estanciero now produced wool, which was sold at good prices in the European market. Sheep farming was also the foundation of a rural middle class: it made use of lower-quality pastures, needed only one-fifth of the land per animal compared with cattle, and required at first an increased labor input.

By the end of the nineteenth century Uruguay thus had economic characteristics that differentiated it from the rest of Latin America. It produced a foodstuff, meat, and provided for two other basic human needs, leather for footwear and wool for clothing. Its export markets were diversified rather than dependent on a single importer: Brazil and Cuba for tasajo; France, Germany, and Belgium for wool; and the United Kingdom and United States for hides. Since Europe was importing commodities that it also produced but at higher cost, Uruguay benefited from a high differential rent. Recent estimates of per capita income in the nineteenth century, based on the assumption that per capita exports represented 15 percent of per capita income, suggest that incomes were high in Uruguay during 1870–1900 (US$317 in 1881–1885, for example), comparable to or higher than those in the United States and much higher than those in Brazil. It should also be noted that Britain's policy of free trade—like that of Europe in general—was an essential part of the economic system within which Uruguay sold commodities in Europe that competed with Europe's own agricultural sector. As long as unrestricted trade lasted, until the international economic crisis at the beginning of the 1930s, Uruguay occupied a secure and profitable position within the European imperial systems.

The arrival of the sheep was followed by the enclosure of the estancias. Wire fences were erected between 1870 and 1890, as much to ensure exclusive access for a landowner's livestock to his pasture as to allow crossbreeding of the flocks and herds with European pedigree stock. Fencing destroyed the livelihoods of the laborers who previously guarded the livestock, and gave rise to the previously unknown problem of rural poverty and hunger. It was ironic that this technological unemployment should have been the breeding ground for the last civil wars at the turn of the century, since both sheep and wire fencing implied massive investments, which underlined for the estancieros the need for internal order. The landowners who were at the forefront of these changes established in 1871 the Asociación Rural to represent their interests and to seek domestic peace at all costs.

Concurrent with these rural developments was the transformation of urban Uruguay. Beginning in 1860 the first foreign capital began to arrive, especially from Britain. Pioneer investments between 1863 and 1865 included Liebig's Extract of Meat factory, the London and River Plate Bank, and the first London loan to the Uruguayan government. In 1884 the sum of British investments was estimated at £6.5 million; by 1900 the total had reached £40 million. British investment in Uruguay was small compared to its total export of capital to the rest of the world, but was very large relative to domestic urban capital. Uruguay was the fifth most important Latin American recipient of British capital, after Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, and Chile; but on a per capita basis, only Argentina received more. The British built the railways—the first line was opened in 1869 and in 1905 there were 1,200 miles of track—as well as the urban infrastructure of Montevideo (water supply, gas, telephones, trams), while increasing the volume of lending to the government and securing a near-monopoly in the local insurance market.

In the case of the railway companies, the British investors secured important concessions from the Uruguayan government, which urgently needed rail transport at any price provided it could be used to put down rural rebellions. Most of the lines benefited from a government dividend guarantee of 7 percent on a fixed capital sum of £5,000 per kilometer of track. The result was a system characterized by curves and gradients, unnecessarily extended by between 5 percent and 10 percent of its length. The state could only intervene in the fixing of railway tariff rates if profits exceeded 12 percent, which, needless to say, they never did. But the railway was an essential tool if the government was to control the interior. When the Río Negro was spanned by a railway bridge in 1886, the two halves of Uruguay, which invariably had been divided by winter floods, were then united.

Other British companies in Montevideo as well as the railways provoked public hostility with their high tariffs and deficient service. By 1880–1900 the performance of gas, water, railways, and insurance had raised doubts in the minds of the political elite concerning the benefits Uruguay received from foreign investment unsupervised by the state. These sentiments led to the law of 1888, which instituted strict controls on the accounting of the railway companies, and in 1896 to the founding of the first state bank, the Banco de la Repú blica Oriental del Uruguay (BROU).

After 1875, population growth and protectionist legislation encouraged the birth of Uruguay's modern manufacturing industry. Small and restricted to the production of consumer goods (foodstuffs, beverages, furniture, textiles, leather), such activities nonetheless gave rise both to capitalists anxious for political stability and to a small proletariat that was hostile to the idea of enlisting in the armies of either the Blancos or the Colorados.

The social structure that resulted from these developments, and at the same time promoted them, was very different from that of the first half of the nineteenth century. Social classes were now more clearly differentiated. Landownership was nonetheless complex since alongside the Latifundio smaller farm units based on the exploitation of sheep had developed. The 1908 census suggests that farms of between 250 and 6,250 acres, roughly equivalent to the estancias of the rural middle class, accounted for 52 percent of total land area, whereas just 1,391 latifundios (in excess of 6,250 acres) occupied 43 percent of the land. This distribution was the result of a long historical process that preserved the position of the large landowners, but required them to coexist with an important rural middle class. The wars of independence and subsequent civil conflicts entailed the destruction and theft of livestock and the general disruption of rural production, but they also had another consequence: property rights changed hands rapidly in the nineteenth century. The latifundio still existed in 1900, but the latifundistas were not the same families as in the colonial period or in the early years of independence. Uruguay's rural upper class had the taint of being nouveau riche, thus diminishing its power and social standing.

At the beginning of the twentieth century the estancieros had two monopolies, of land and of cattle, and the value of both was rising with improvements in the saladero industry but above all with the establishment in 1905 of the first Frigorífico (meat-freezing plant) exporting frozen meat to Europe. Rural workers no longer had the choice of vagrancy or employment on the estancia: they had to work to feed themselves. Those who were unable to work found themselves left to rot in what were called the pueblos de ratas (rat towns), eating food of poor quality in place of their previous meat diet. The modern gaucho was reduced to domestic service or prostitution in the case of the women; general labor, sheepshearing, contraband, or cattle-thieving for the men. It was at this point that internal migration to the cities began. In Montevideo, the idea of a "social question" appeared for the first time. Although upward social mobility was possible, life for workers in industry was hard. A working day of 11 to 15 hours provided the background for anarchist ideology and the foundation of the first trade unions around 1875. The old fear of urban employers of a Blanco uprising was gradually replaced by the new threat of class-based revolution.

There were changes also in the intellectual and cultural environment. The Universidad de la República opened its doors to students of law in 1849, medicine in 1876, and mathematics in 1888. In 1877, the Lorenzo Latorre government acted on the ideas of José Pedro Varela to reform primary education, devoting resources to its development while making it obligatory and free. The rate of illiteracy, previously high, began to fall. The need to increase the population's political involvement, and train it more adequately to fit the changing economic structure, lay behind these developments.

At the same time there was a tendency toward social and cultural secularization. In 1861 the Catholic church began to lose its jurisdiction over cemeteries. In 1879 the state took over the registration of marriages (Registros de Estado Civil), though conceding that the religious ceremony should precede the civil. However, in 1885 civil marriage became obligatory and had to take place before the church ceremony. The first divorce law was approved in 1907. In state schools Catholicism continued to be taught, but the hostility of education officials and of many teachers reduced this to rote learning of the catechism with no explanation. Even this vestige of religious education was suppressed in 1909. More significantly, perhaps, university students adopted an eclectic spiritualism in the third quarter of the century, and subsequently moved to positivism and agnosticism, even to atheism. The Catholic church thus found itself under attack and reacted accordingly, but most of the nation's elite and a good part of the population in general remained hostile to it or regarded it with indifference. According to the 1908 census, among native-born men in Montevideo only 44 percent declared themselves to be Catholics, a few more than the 40 percent who were "liberal." One other sign of modernity was the emergence of a new demographic model. Around 1890 the birth rate began to fall, and the average age of marriage for women rose from twenty to twenty-five. People began to practice artificial birth control even in the face of vigorous denunciation by the clergy. Thus did Uruguay, the first of all Latin American countries to become fully Europeanized, enter the twentieth century.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. E. Pivel Devoto and Alcira Ranieri, Historia de la República Oriental del Uruguay (Montevideo, 1981).

José Pedro Barrán and B. Nahum, Historia rural del Uruguay moderno, 7 vols. (Montevideo, 1967–1978).

J. A. Oddone, Economía y sociedad en el Uruguay liberal (Montevideo, 1967).

A. Vázquez Romero and W. Reyes Abadio, Crónica general del Uruguay, 3 vols. (Montevideo, 1980–1981).

M. H. J. Finch, A Political Economy of Uruguay Since 1870 (Hong Kong, 1981).

Gerardo Caetano and J. Rilla, Historia contemporánea del Uruguay (Montevideo, 1994).

Additional Bibliography

Arocena Olivera, Enrique. La rebeldía de los doctores: El Uruguay del fusionismo al militarismo, 1851–1886. Montevideo: Librería Linardi y Risso, 1998.

Barrán, José Pedro. La espiritualización de la riqueza: Catolicismo y economía en Uruguay, 1730–1900. Montevideo: Ediciones de la Banda Oriental, 1998.

Barrios Pintos, Aníbal. Historia de los pueblos orientales: Sus orígenes, procesos fundacionales, sus primeros años. 2nd ed. Montevideo: Academia Nacional de Letras, 2000.

Bentancur, Artur Ariel. El puerto colonial de Montevideo. 2 v. Montevideo: Universidad de la República, Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación, Departamento de Publicaciones, 1997–1999.

Goldman, Noemí, and Ricardo Donato Salvatore, eds. Caudillismos rioplatenses: Nuevas miradas a un viejo problema. Buenos Aires: Eudeba, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universdad de Buenos Aires, 1998.

Kleinpenning, Jan M. G. Peopling the Purple Land: A Historical Geography of Rural Uruguay, 1500–1915. Amsterdam: CEDLA, 1995.

López-Alves, Fernando. State Formation and Democracy in Latin America, 1810–1900. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.

Montaño, Oscar D. Umkhonto: La lanza negra: Historia del aporte negro-africano en la formación del Uruguay. Montevideo: Rosebud Ediciones, 1997.

Rela, Walter. Uruguay: Cronología histórica anotada. 6 v. Montevideo: ALFAR, 1998–.

Verdesio, Gustavo. La invención del Uruguay: La entrada del territorio y sus habitantes a la cultura occidental. Montevideo: Editorial Graffiti: Editorial Trazas, 1996.

JosÉ Pedro BarrÁn

Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture