The Animated History of Argentina

The Winged Hussar pin is available now. Hurry and order yours now before they run out, or get one for free by supporting my channel on Patreon. This episode is supported by CuriosityStream. Head to curiositystream.com slash Sweeney and also get access to my streaming service, Nebula. What do you get when you cross a shipping port, a large fertile plain, and one of the harshest geographic frontiers on the planet? A truly unique Argentina. We have talked a lot about how features like mountains and rivers set up natural barriers and transport networks, but what happens when a country is built around a single nucleus? Say, the Rio de la Plata? I mean, it couldn't be more perfect, right? This was the main entrance that connected to every major southern navigable river on the continent, perfect for cultivating large civilizations and colonial empires. But in a way that is very uniquely different from the rest of South America, growth would actually be majorly hindered here in both its pre-Columbian and its colonial era. Modern day Argentina had to overcome these obstacles. What is sometimes called the Black Sheep of America, the home of independence, would become one of the wealthiest migrant nations the world has yet known, thanks in large part to those three factors. This is Terra Argentina, Land of Silver. Okay, first misconception out of the way, Argentina's modern borders don't actually contain all that much silver, and there is of course a fourth geographic feature that makes up its landscape. The gargantuan Southern Andes Mountains hugs its entire western border, and it is in these mountains where some of the continent's limited empires thrived, the most famous of which were the Inca. Recognising its Incan past, the sun god Inti today adorns the Argentine flag, which gives testament to the power and influence this Quechua-speaking empire had in the Andes. We won't be going into too much detail about the Inca in this video, I don't want to poach too much from Bolivia and Peru, but their conquest as they winded their way down the Andes caused a migration, the first in a long series of migrations that shaped Argentina. Thousands of the Mampuches, themselves a semi-settled people, resisted the Inca or fled into the low Patagonian plateau. So many in fact that we actually know very little about the small number of nomadic people who already lived there, since they became thoroughly assimilated into the Mapuche life. And this was all happening around the same time that the Spanish were expanding their own holdings in America, which sort of shows you why the long navigable rivers had no civilizations to speak of like you'd expect, because large scale settlement of these areas hadn't really had time to happen yet. By the time Francisco Pizarro, the Spanish conquistador, arrived at the borders of the Inca in 1528, the empire was long past its peak, ravaged by civil war and European diseases, which left the vast kingdom ripe for conquest. The vice-reality of Peru was established on the bedrock of the Incan societal infrastructure, and suddenly the economic centre of the continent had shifted to its capital, Lima. The Argentine coast as you can see is actually pretty far from this new capital, but that didn't stop many of the explorers in this region seeking alternative ports. Rumours of vast amounts of silver hidden somewhere in the continent teased these explorers for years. They know it's in there somewhere if they could just find out how to get there, until they struck gold, or more specifically silver, at the Rio de la Plata. Giovanni Cabot was so convinced of the land's potential for wealth that he named it Terra Argentina, Land of Silver in Latin, and his son Sebastian Cabot would years later name the massive river estuary that he spent years exploring the Rio de la Plata, or River Plate, since to those in the know, Plate was a nickname for silver at the time. And it was in this river system that Argentina's first, albeit short-lived, settlement of Senti Espiritu was established in 1527, until one of the native tribes, uh, vetoed it. Famous Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan is also credited for naming America's after the Patagons, a word meaning giants, a race of humongous native tribes rumoured to inhabit the land. But hey, at least we got a half-decent winter apparel company name out of it. Falklands, side note. These rocky and uninhabited islands were claimed to be discovered by the English explorers in the 16th century, which sounds credible if you ignore the French, Spanish and Dutch claims to have done the same thing, and the Portuguese maps that already recorded it being there. I'm sure this won't cause any confusion later. The Rio de la Plata's potential as a large commercial shipping port was realised almost immediately by these explorers, and it wasn't long before a few settlements had been built along its various rivers, the most famous of which, Buenos Aires, was named after the good winds that had brought the sailors safely to the land. And soon, the government of the Rio de la Plata was formed within the Viceroyalty of Peru. And here is where we get to talk about the factors that would hinder its potential for growth. Firstly, it was held back by Spanish rules restricting all trade in the New World to be through the port of Lima, the capital, meaning that most of the trade done in this area was illegal. And this relegated unimportance left Buenos Aires very vulnerable to attacks from the native Indians, and also the Portuguese, who curiously built two forts right across on the other side of the river. Oh don't mind us, nothing to see here. So reforms were eventually put forward by decree in 1776 to separate the Rio de la Plata into its own Viceroyalty. If you remember the episode on Mexico, this is part of the Bourbon reforms. Now although this did help the port, the trade of silver specifically was still restricted to Potosi, which Buenos Aires deeply resented. So some of the settlers turned to a new industry, one where they would have more control, beef. Surrounding the port of Buenos Aires is an area called the Pampas, one of the largest and most grazing friendly regions on the planet. Even without the care of a drover, cattle herds would naturally reproduce and multiply into huge populations. And it wasn't long before Spanish settlers began moving into the Pampas to raise and sell livestock. Soon the beef industry in particular became the colony's main export. But as the farming expanded, their strained relationship with the Mapuche would continue, as the frontier became more opaque. Second Falklands side note, the plot thickens. By this point the Falklands had been settled by both the French and the British, neither of whom had known about the other. The Spanish negotiated to purchase France's settlement and then expelled the British, while still recognizing their claim. But after the American War for Independence and the upcoming Peninsula War, both Spain and Britain would formally leave the colony, making it a haven for mostly small-scale fishermen, while each leaving a plaque promising to one day return. Yeah right, I'm sure it'll all be fine. By now we have a slowly thriving settlement on the cusp of creating its own self-sufficient economy. But how exactly did it become the Argentina we know today? The answer is death by a thousand cuts. Independence movements rarely occur in isolation, there's always a myriad of factors happening somewhere in the world that leads to a colony breaking away from its empire. And Buenos Aires had never had the best relationship with Spain to begin with. So with its growing middle class in the age of enlightenment, the Napoleonic Wars broke out, which weakened Spain's control. The Argentines didn't take too kindly to the British showing up at their doorstep and assuming the valuable Pampas was free real estate. Buenos Aires had to fend for itself in this situation, with very little help from faraway Spain. And this started to stoke a feeling of unity among the population. The British invasion had lit a powder keg of revolution. The May Revolution, which created the United Provinces of the Rio de la Plata, was not the first to occur in Latin America, but it was the first to be successful. And Argentina is sometimes referred to as South America's birthplace of independence for that reason. Not only for its success, but also for its role in aiding other parts of the continent like that of General José de San Martín, who crossed the Andes mountains to attack royalists in Chile and Peru. And in continuing the long-held Sweeney Channel tradition, we're going to gloss right over these wars, there's plenty of military history out there for you to consume, and instead get down to brass tacks. Argentina's first attempted government was the Congress of Tucumán, which both Uruguay and the Liga Federal, who favoured a confederation, refused to attend. But this all amounted to the square root of nothing when the Liga took control of government after the Battle of Cepeda, while the rest of Uruguay got invaded by the Brazilian Portuguese. Again, glossing over here. When discussing post-independence South America, we inevitably have to talk about civil war. Argentina is no exception. A lot of these early conflicts can be traced to the way in which Spain ruled its colonies, and how these independent nations inherited that political bureaucracy. In this case, Buenos Aires favoured a strong central government, and a trade monopoly reminiscent of the Viceroyalty, and supported by the Unitarian Party. Whereas the other provinces, the Federalist Party and the rural ranches of the Pampas, called Gauchos, favoured a more devolved confederacy. Gauchos were wild and rugged cowboys, straddling the frontier with the indigenous Patagonia. Mostly made up of mestizos who created and maintained the massive cattle industry, and they had become quite powerful by this point. Some in fact accumulated so much power and wealth they became caudillos, the Spanish word for warlord. Remember that question we posed about what happens when an entire nation's economy is centred around one nucleus? Well, it's not really a shocker that when you have warlords, you tend to have wars. And one caudillo in particular, Juan Manuel de Rosas, managed to drum up enough support to install himself as governor and de facto dictator of the United Provinces. Now de Rosas is definitely a character we need to talk about, as the guy really knew how to play some next level 4D chess when it came to power. Firstly, he made himself popular with many of the Southern Gauchos by waging war against the natives of Patagonia, in addition to creating some nifty Argentine folklore, such as the famous native hero warrior, Yancatruz, who fought off de Rosas, and although he is seen as an Argentine hero today, only made de Rosas more popular at the time. He led campaigns against the rival state of Peru and Bolivia, got himself blockaded by the British and French, which may seem random, but hey, these guys were kind of everywhere at the time. And although these wars wreaked havoc on the average citizen, they did nothing but increase de Rosas' popularity, especially with the caudillos, because wars use up a tremendous amount of horses, men and supplies, and they were open for business. Armies of Gauchos fighting in far-off wars made the Gaucho an inseparable part of Argentine identity, and their meat rations cooked over open coals became the national dish of Argentina, the asado. Back home, de Rosas was a political mastermind as well, often playing the Unitarians and the Federalists off of one another to his own benefit, like when he created the Argentine Confederation, even though he was a Buenos Aires native, to put a check on the Unitarians' power. But all good things must come to an end, and for de Rosas, this would occur in 1852, where an alliance of Brazil, Uruguay and the caudillo of the state of Entre Rios overthrew Buenos Aires at the Battle of Caceros, and that caudillo, Gusto Jose de Orquiza became president. Buenos Aires thought this was no bueno, and seceded from the Federation, started a civil war, won that civil war, and restored the Unitarians to power. I know that might be a lot of information squeezed into a very small time frame, but the main takeaway here is that after decades of war, Buenos Aires and the Unitarians were ultimately victorious. Bartolomé Mitre would become the new president of the Argentine Republic, and the age of caudillos was over. Wacky Patagonian side note. Hey, see all this stateless land inhabited by the Mapuche? Say, if you were to move in there, make a couple friends, you could theoretically create and rule your very own kingdom, and that's exactly what this French lawyer, Antoine de Thunin did in 1860. This all lasted all of two years until he was captured by the Chilean government, declared insane and expelled back to France to live out the rest of his days, vowing to his dying breath that he would one day return to reclaim his kingdom and free his people, most of whom had never heard of him. Argentinians have a saying, Los Argentinos descendemos de los barcos. Argentines are descendants of the boats. The overwhelming vast majority of its population is made up of the descendants of migrants, more than half of them from Italy, followed by Spain and then Germany. This was because President Julio Roca had introduced liberal economic reforms to open up a free market economy, and for this reason Argentina was heavily invested into by US and European industry, which in turn attracted tens of thousands of working class immigrants seeking a higher standard of living, particularly for Italians who found the culture and language to be similar enough to their own. Italian and German migration was so high that it had a huge effect on its cuisine and culture and its, uh, semi-friendly relationships with fascist regimes? Wait, what? Yeah, let's put a pin in that and get back to war and corruption. Okay. Pulling back the curtains on Argentina's early success reveals a framework of corruption and warmongering at its foundation. Devastating wars had been waged which bolstered the nation's wealth, like the conquest of the desert which subjugated the Mapuches of Patagonia and expanded the livestock industry, as well as the war of the triple alliance against its rival Paraguay, the deadliest conflict on South American soil to date. And during all this time it had set up a sophisticated network of corruption which caused a great amount of wealth disparity. And if you know anything about corruption, you'll know that it's easy to skim a little off the top when things are going well, but as soon as the money stops flowing, the system starts to collapse. And that's exactly what happened during the Great Depression. Foreign investment and migration suddenly ceased after decades of growth and the economy seemed beyond revival. And so would begin a cycle of coup d'etats starting the infamous decade. The Nationalist Liberation Alliance, as well as the conservative landowning elite called the Concordancia, introduced widespread electoral fraud to keep themselves in power. Although in some good news, it seems that all those civil wars had really given them a bad taste for all the killing that went on, since Argentina is one of the few nations to not have actively fought in either world war. And in the case of the second, this was due to the fact that Argentina still had really good relationships with Germany, Spain, and Italy, since their population was mostly from these countries. As a matter of fact, very controversially, the Argentine populace were largely sympathetic to the fascist cause, which despite our hindsight of history, was unfortunately not all that uncommon at the time. Two notable fascists even briefly seized power in Argentina itself and paved the way for perhaps the most noteworthy of Argentina's presidents, Juan Perón. Now here's where things get a little messy because Perón is a wildly controversial figure, who borrowed from both the right and the left in his policies in a unique kind of populism called Peronism. Although he did advocate for and support some civil liberties, he also crushed his political opponents in his three non-consecutive terms. And even more controversially, the reason why half of you probably clicked on this video, he was one of the main architects of the Ratlines, smuggling fugitive fascists and Nazis for refuge into Argentina. Perón's motives for aiding fugitives such as Ante Pavelic and SS officer Adolf Achmann is still hotly debated to this day, but the regime's harboring of these war criminals has certainly left a stain on Argentine history. And now for the reason that the other half of you clicked on this video, our last Falkland side note. By the 1980s, Argentina had been taken over by an American-backed military coup, who feared the rise of not only communists in Latin America, but also the legacy of Perón, and ensuring American commercial interests in this region. For a decade, the US-backed military junta waged the so-called Dirty War, killing and abducting tens of thousands of political opponents and leftist organisers. And it was in this extremely unstable climate where the government routinely organised death squads against its own people, that Leopoldo Galtieri and Jorge Anaya decided to give the Argentine people a new enemy to distract them, and they invaded the British-held Falkland Islands. The military regime took a bet that Britain, who was in the process of decolonisation, wouldn't lift a finger to protect its rocky outpost. But this turned out to be wrong, and they were swiftly defeated in an undeclared war. Now, propaganda about this war is still influential in both nations to this day. As an example of some of the hypocrisy and dangerous proxy conflicts that occurred during the Cold War, the world was left with a very tough question to ask itself. If it could really justify starting wars to satisfy the egos of headstrong leaders like Galtieri and Britain's Margaret Thatcher, and also how important a rocky outpost on the other end of the world really is to a former world empirical power. And I hope I can leave that question with you today as well. If you like education-ish content like mine, I'd highly recommend checking out my streaming service, Nebula, which other thoughtful, education-y creators like myself built as an alternative platform for our content. Here you can watch amazing Nebula originals, like Extra History's video on controversial Indian leader Tipu Sultan, that challenges our ideas of historical legacy and hindsight, which is extremely relevant today. 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