Rise of the Republic of Argentina

The rise of the Argentine Republic was a process that took place in the first half of the 19th century in South America. The Republic has its origins in the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, a colony of the Spanish Empire. The King of Spain appointed a viceroy to oversee the governance of the colony. The 1810 May Revolution deposed the viceregal representative and, along with the Argentine war of independence, started a process to replace the foreign monarchy with an indigenous republican state. All proposals to organize a local monarchy (as in the contemporary Empire of Brazil or the First Mexican Empire) failed, and no local monarch was ever crowned.

The national organization saw disputed about the type of relation that Buenos Aires should maintain with the other provinces, either as a centralised government or as a federation. The supporters of each project would wage the Argentine Civil Wars as the Unitarians and Federals. Some provinces of the former viceroyalty (turned first into the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata and then into the Argentine Confederation) tried to secede, some of them remained as independent countries up to modern day (as Bolivia or Paraguay) and others would rejoin Argentina (as the Republic of Entre Ríos). Two unitarian constitutions were promulgated and then rejected; the definitive one would be the federal Argentine Constitution of 1853, which is still in force.