Colonial Argentina (1580-1789)

In addition to its super-abundance of livestock, Buenos Aires also boasted a natural port on the Atlantic, making it a convenient center of trade. This geographic stroke of luck held great promise for the future of the settlement, but for now success was stifled by the fact that porteños (port-dwellers, as the residents of Buenos Aires are called) were barred by their colonial masters from trading directly with Spain. For political reasons goods had to travel via Peru, Spain's nexus of power in South America. And in an age of mercantilism, trade with any other country was out of the question—legal trade, that is.

So Buenos Aires came to life as a black-market port city (insert comment here about Argentina's seemingly inherent disrespect for the rule of law). There were plenty of hides to sell, and the Portuguese and British wanted them. More important, perhaps, was the silver trade that sprung up, as money could be made smuggling it down from Peru and Bolivia to Buenos Aires. There it was sold to the highest bidder, often in exchange for African slaves. It was all illegal, of course, but who was going to come out to the end of the world to stop them?

The history of northwest Argentina follows the emergence of the so-called silver trail, which was actually a network of trade routes reaching out from Potosí (in present day Bolivia). Potosí was the world's largest silver mine in the 17th and 18th centuries, employing over 100,000 workers. Tens of thousands of mule-loads of food and supplies a year were required to sustain what amounted to the largest city in the Americas at the time. Salta (founded in 1582) and Jujuy (1593) grew to become important trading centers in Potosí's orbit. Connecting Salta and Jujuy to Buenos Aires was Córdoba (1573), the economic and administrative capital of Argentina during the colonial days.

Like elsewhere in Latin America, the backbone of the colonial economy was the encomienda system. A Spanish settler would take charge of a piece of land and man it with native laborers who lived in virtual slavery. Labor was always in short supply in sparsely populated Argentina, and African slaves became another major resource for the colonists to exploit—though many fewer slaves came to Argentina than to Brazil or the Caribbean. Racial mixing was commonplace. African Argentines were seldom allowed to have children with each other, but interestingly a child of a slave father and non-slave mother was born free. Eventually this helped create a class of free laborers of mixed Spanish, African, and Native American descent.

During the colonial era, criollos (American-born Spaniards) came to vastly outnumber the peninsulares (those born in Spain), and the two groups often had different political agendas. The peninsulares had every reason to maintain the imperial system that propped up their privileged position in society; the criollos had no such incentive. This laid the groundwork for revolution.

Revolution and Independence