When you look at the map it is easy to see that the country of Uruguay is an anomaly.
It shouldn’t exist.
Clearly, this should be a part of Brazil.
Or, at the very least Argentina.
It isn’t as if invasion is difficult here.
This isn’t some mountainous country or some swamp.
The entire place is either coast or pastureland.
You don’t need to know history to look at a map and know
that this country just can’t be here by accident.
Yet, Uruguay exists.
They aren’t Brazil.
They aren’t Argentina.
And despite no deep claim to nationhood
and their neighbours literally being ten and to eighty times their population,
they’ve remained free and independent for nearly two hundred years.
Uruguay exists because a cattle smuggler became a national hero.
It exists because Napoleon kicked out a king and that guy somehow became an Emperor.
But most of all, it exists because the people here found a way to balance the forces that surround them.
Forces that they know they could forever ride but never hope to control.
This season is going to touch on a number of different points of Uruguayan history,
but today’s episode is simply meant to answer one question: how does it even exist?
By 1680, Portugal was finally free.
Rebellion, civil war, and European mass conflict had meant that after nearly twenty years under Spanish rule,
they were once again a kingdom of their own.
Most importantly, their victory had been so complete that other than their stronghold in North Africa,
Spain had even agreed to internationally recognize their total control
over the colonies that they had founded.
In many ways, this was the most important thing that was laid out in that entire treaty.
As without that one stipulation, Portugal would have had little chance to remain even
a continental power, let alone a world one.
But it did remain, which meant that in 1680, the colonial dominance of Portugal was supreme.
It was their seat at the table of the world.
It would let them swing their weight around.
Hell, it was their weight to swing.
And they more than anyone understood the value of keeping those holdings secure.
The colony of Brazil was by then enormous.
It was unruly, nearly lawless in parts, and absolutely teeming with economic potential.
But while their true control lay somewhere between defacto and dejure, Brazilian claims of ownership
extended to an area nearly the size of the entirety of Western Europe.
But 1680’s South America wasn’t the same landscape as a generation before.
Taking new land was no longer as simple as just setting foot on it and leaving fifty soldiers
in the name of the Queen.
Now it took investment and post civil war Portugal had little of that to fill.
So for the incoming King, the plan was to harden up.
To solidify the massive Empire that they already had.
Borders had yet to be truly determined on many of the frontiers
and that is where he would focus his energy.
After all, this wasn’t an era of Google maps.
For the most part, it wasn’t an era of maps period.
So naturally, claims were imperfect and ownership was fluid.
In the great game of colonization it wasn’t just finding, you also had to keep.
And when it came to Brazil, there were few regions more at risk than the Cisplatina,
its Southernmost region.
It remained theirs only on paper, and with the growing town of Buenos Aires just across a river,
it felt like only a matter of time before the Spanish took what they felt was rightfully theirs.
To the Spanish in the Rio de la Plata, controlling the Cisplatina was about more
than just enviable pastureland.
It was about controlling this river.
Trade and security of their capital city meant keeping the land around it under their control.
And that meant taking it from the Portuguese and defending it as their own.
Just as they've done on every other border of Brazil.
So even if a map said that it made perfect sense that this be a part of that great Portuguese empire.
That really didn’t matter that much to the concerned citizens of Buenos Aires.
Both sides did what their position naturally demanded that they do.
Portugal built a fort just on the mouth of the River Uruguay.
Basically within sight of Buenos Aires.
And in turn, Spain feeling threatened struck back.
So as Spain waxed and Portugal waned, it swapped hands.
Spanish and Italian colonists flooded in, and with the founding of Montevideo,
and Portuguese influence being pushed back, it became the Banda Oriental.
The Eastern Bank.
And generation after generation would see that exact same battle fought back and forth.
Spanish and Portuguese soldiers marching over the same battlefields fighting
for the same influence over the same ranches.
That is, until their worlds collapsed.
When Napoleon invaded Iberia in the early 1800’s, he sent a shockwave through the entire world.
It was perhaps the single most important event in the history of either of the American continents,
although for the most part it isn’t much talked about beyond Spanish texts for whatever reason.
But with the governments of the Iberian peninsula destroyed, colonies were forced to make
some seriously hard decisions.
Do they want to try to stay with a crown that no longer exists and hope that something coalesces in Spain
that gives them structure again?
Or do they want to rebel like the colonies did to Britain in the North?
In Brazil, the King had fled from Lisbon and now set his colonies as the new centre of the Empire.
He would never return to Portugal but at least it kept him in control.
The Spanish had no such luck.
And with Spain in flames, the voices for freedom that had long been crying out in the colonies
started to grab some guns and do something about it.
Across the Spanish speaking world, but particularly centred on South and Central America,
the collapse saw a surge of violence and civil war.
It saw so much violence that today it would be almost unimaginable.
Republicans fought Federalists fought Unitarians fought Royalists.
Cities fought cities.
Cities fought the countryside.
Everyone wanted their say, but nobody would get it without a fight.
And in Uruguay, then merely a subsectioned part of the otherwise gigantic Spanish colony of Rio de la Plata,
the cries of independence could never be heard alone.
With a population in the low tens of thousands, few expected to leave the crisis independent.
Few certainly expected to lead themselves.
Least of all the man who most provided that independence.
Jose Gervasio Artigas was born to a wealthy family but all he wanted to do was rustle cattle.
You know how it is.
There isn’t much to do out on a ranch in Uruguay in the late 1700’s.
It's not exactly like you can go out to the movies.
Plus, this was a man of passion.
He was an ideologue, a follower of the believes of the American Thomas Paine.
So despite his wealth, this was a man of the gaucho.
A true cowboy soldier.
A guy who put his money where his mouth was.
A smuggler and an outlaw.
For a rich boy, what I'm trying to say, this guy's hands showed some grit.
As a wild young man in a turbulent world, he only ever joined the army to get a bounty off his head.
Kinda of a join or die situation, he went with the former.
Kind of wise of him.
The government needed men who could ride and shoot, and they would deal with his cattle business later.
So at least for Artigas, being drafted wasn’t actually that bad.
I mean after all, he already believed in the cause anyway.
Plus, it saved his life.
So they gave him a few hundred men and sent him to fight for his freedom.
For their freedom.
For everyone's freedom.
And while from here on out you could write an entire textbook on the intricacies
of the political turmoil of those next few decades, it's easier to just say that he did.
He fought everybody.
He fought Spain.
He fought Buenos Aires.
He fought Montevideo.
He fought his enemies, and he fought his friends.
And despite getting victory after victory, eventually the oldest enemy in the book returned to Uruguay
And Artigas lost.
In the turmoil of the Spanish civil war, Brazil decided to make hay while those guns shined.
And with an expeditionary force larger than Uruguay’s army could even dream of being,
almost as large as Montevideo’s entire civilian population, there was nothing that he could do.
When Brazil crushed Artigas, they exiled him and turned the country back to what it had once been before.
With him died Banda Oriental and was raised from the ashes again Cisplatina.
But as always, Brazil’s grip didn’t last long.
Artigas may have been no longer in the country, but the ideals he was fighting for were
in the minds of many other men.
He was more a symbolic realization, for the first time perhaps even, of a uniquely Uruguayan mindset.
These were the people of the Eastern Bank.
Colonists caught between worlds.
They were not Argentinian, they were not Brazilian.
They wished to neither be controlled by the traitors of Buenos Aires or the invaders from Rio de Janeiro.
They wished nothing more than freedom.
Liberty, or death.
So in 1825, only three years into Brazilian rule, Uruguayan elites got together and
declared their independence for the final time.
They called themselves the thirty-three Orientals.
Which even though it's unimportant I think is worth noting, because there weren’t thirty three of them
and the only reason they said there were is because of that number’s meaning to Freemasons.
They were trying to signal to other leaders around South America that they were revolting.
Which is very interesting, but an entirely different episode for the future.
One that I am sure will attract many reasonable and rational comments.
With independence declared, naturally the war returned.
And while Brazil did its best to hold off the rebels and their backers in Buenos Aires,
in the end it just wasn’t enough.
International pressure and mounting troubles at home led the Emperor to sign
a declaration of independence for the Eastern Bank.
At the very least, if he couldn’t control them, nobody else would be able to as well.
They would be the buffer.
Sort of a state between.
And while for the next seventy years politicians with the not so secret backing of both sides
would rage civil war in Uruguay, by the end of the 20th century, it was clear that they had failed.
For the next hundred years, this nation would exist in a period of relative stability,
peace and most important of all, freedom.
Today, the region has few cries for war with their tiny neighbour.
Modern Uruguay is held as an example of relatively good, human-oriented country
in a tough economic climate.
Compared to their neighbours on either side, they seem to be doing better on almost every index.
They're by no means perfect.
Nobody here would ever claim that they are.
But Uruguay exists.
And not because of some accident of fate, either.
But because they learned the balance.
This is Rare Earth.
Wow, all those words and I didn’t even mention the genocide.
Ok ok, next time.