Argentine Confederation

The Argentine Confederation was the loose union of Argentine provinces between 1831 and 1861, the last predecessor of modern Argentina. Born from the Federal Pact that the littoral provinces signed in 1831, it had no president and no capital: each province kept its own caudillo, while the governor of Buenos Aires handled war and diplomacy for all. That governor was Juan Manuel de Rosas, who ruled the confederation in fact for two decades, defying French and British blockades, fighting Brazil, Bolivia and Uruguay, and crushing rival caudillos in the civil wars. His fall came in 1852 at the Battle of Caseros, where Justo José de Urquiza of Entre Ríos overthrew him and called the assembly that wrote the Constitution of 1853. Buenos Aires refused to join, seceded as its own state, and only returned after losing the contest of arms at Pavón in 1861. The reunited country kept the old name among its official titles, but power had moved for good from the confederation of caudillos to a national republic. Bartolomé Mitre, the victor of Pavón, became the first president of the reunited republic, and Domingo Sarmiento's schools taught a nation of immigrants to read: Italians and Spaniards poured in to grow wheat and chill beef for Europe. General Roca's Conquest of the Desert seized Patagonia, and by 1900 Argentina stood among the world's richest countries. The Sáenz Peña Law of 1912 brought clean male suffrage and Radical president Hipólito Yrigoyen, but the 1930 coup opened decades of soldiers and strongmen. Juan Perón, elected in 1946 with Eva Duarte at his side, built Justicialismo of unions, welfare and Argentine pride, fell in 1955 and returned in 1973 only to die. The 1976 junta's Dirty War killed thousands before losing the Malvinas war in 1982; Raúl Alfonsín tried the generals, Carlos Menem pegged the peso to the dollar, and the 2001 corralito collapse burned savings and presidencies alike.