violence in america--8/18/26

18 Aug 2026

violence in america--8/18/26

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Today's selection -- From They Called It Peace by Lauren Benton. Violence in the earliest days of the Europeans in the Americas:

“Histories of nineteenth-century imperial violence often treat naval and land campaigns separately. They also tend to focus on actions within a single empire, an approach that associates imperial violence with projects of imperial and national state formation. But protection emergencies unfolded in structurally similar ways on land and sea, and trends toward political consolidation do not fully explain the dynamics of violence. Even as empires expanded their jurisdiction in pluripolitical regions and opposed Indigenous autonomy, serial acts of violence did more than incorporate unruly territories and subjects. They made Indigenous polities subject to being variously assigned by Europeans to the status of subjects, rebels, or enemies.

“We can glimpse the way bundled protection emergencies resolved into war in the Río de Ia Plata in the early nineteenth century. The region was home to Guarani recently released from Jesuit missions, as well as seminomadic groups labeled ‘pagans’ by Spaniards and Portuguese, and it was bounded by ranching concerns and crisscrossed by itinerant traders and smugglers. Years of encroachment by Portuguese and Spanish settlers and slavers had splintered Indigenous groups and encompassed them in networks of trade and labor. Charnias and Minuanes were among those actively trading with settlers and in some cases operating as clients or proxies of the Portuguese as they sought to extend their influence. At the turn of the nineteenth century, the region's political economy centered on a lucrative contraband trade in hides, only partially channeled into official circuits. Spanish and Portuguese elites were experimenting with ways to project power into the countryside in order to privatize wild herds and establish title to land.

“Like many other regions, the Rio de la Plata was a site of militarization and new forms of patrolling. Militias on horseback were organized in major towns. We get a sense of the goals and politics of patrolling by examining efforts to step up rural policing in the hinterlands of Montevideo. In the 1770s and 1780s, the Montevideo town council began to appeal to Madrid for a show of military force in the countryside through the creation of partidas–sorties of specialized military outfits into the interior. The viceroy complied, and in 1796 he created a force of blandengues in Montevideo modeled on a similar corps founded in 1752 in Buenos Aires. Viceroy Áviles explained in Buenos Aires in 1800 that the main goals were ‘to contain the raids of the charnias and minuanes ... and to bring into civil and Christian society that other class of vagrants, even more pernicious, who are dispersed throughout the countryside.'

Blandengue by Johann Moritz Rugendas

“In advocating the creation of blandengue forces, Spanish officials routinely characterized the countryside as the disorderly domain of rustlers, smugglers, thieves, and indios–a region of chronic conflict in desperate need of order. Increasingly, Charruas and Minuanes were singled out for ‘pacification.' Blandengue captains were themselves partly responsible for this shift in rhetoric. Many of the men in the new force were recruited, through an act of amnesty, from among groups of fugitives subsisting on occasional work or smuggling and closely identified with the itinerant poor of the countryside. José Gervasio Artigas, who would become the leader of a backcountry revolution in the Banda Oriental, was a blandengue captain and a former smuggler.

“The first forays of blandengues against Indigenous communities intensified violence in the region by producing an uptick in Indigenous attacks on estancias. Some of these attacks were undoubtedly reprisals for blandengue raids in which Indigenous women and children were taken as captives and sold or assigned as quasi-slaves to estancias and urban households. In 1799, the viceroy insisted on mounting two attempts to negotiate for peace with Indigenous groups, with one expedition led by the blandengue official Juan Ventura Ifrán.

“The diary of Ifrán's patrol, written in 1799, conveys the sheer tedium of backcountry patrolling. The force of about fifty blandengues was bogged down by heavy winter rains and had difficulty even locating Indigenous bands with whom to parley. It was only after two months of travel that Ifrán finally encountered some camps of the ‘Minuana nation.’ He was able to convince about twenty-two Minuanes to accept the ‘protection’ of his forces and accompany the troops to a settlement–though later the quasi-captives would desert the expedition. Ifrán’s group then located a larger band of Minuanes. Attempts to convince the cacique of the group, Masalana, to follow Ifrán to a settlement did not go well. Masalana declared that he would rather ‘die in the countryside,’ and he withdrew with his followers across the Uruguay River to avoid further interactions.

“The militarization of the region could not be reduced to the logic of European-Indigenous tensions. Christianized Native people operated across these groups and at crucial moments drove negotiations. Christians in Masalana’s group urged the cacique not to trust Ifrán’s forces because they had no ties to ‘true Christians.’ The diary also shows how the failure of one set of negotiations could set up violence in the next encounter. Soon after Masalana withdrew, Ifrán's party came across another Indigenous encampment. This time Ifrán ordered his men to sneak up on the settlement at night. He claimed that he instructed one of the Christian Charrúus accompanying the blandengues to shout out an offer of peace at dawn, but in fact his forces were already in position to attack and it was no surprise when a skirmish broke out. Ifrán's men killed five Minuanes. The rest fled, leaving a sizable herd of horses–probably the intended target of Ifrán's group all along; the soldiers immediately took possession of them.”