Congress of April 1813
Congress of April 1813
Congress of April 1813, an important meeting convened in the headquarters of José Artigas on 5, 6, 13, and 20 April 1813, during the second siege of Montevideo, at which for the first time Artigas fully expressed his federalist ideas. Artigas had returned from his "Exodus," that is, the emigration that resulted from the Montevideo and Buenos Aires peace accord. The Constituent Assembly that was meeting in Buenos Aires to determine the fate of the provinces that had belonged to the Viceroyalty of Río de la Plata solicited Artigas to send delegates. As requested, he convened the Congress of April, also known as the Congress of Three Crosses, for the place near Montevideo where it was held (near the present-day Hospital Británico).
Artigas maintained that the Constituent Assembly must be recognized "by agreement" and not "out of obedience." The conditional clauses for recognizing the provinces in question were drawn up, along with a set of instructions the six delegates were to take to the Assembly. The delegates were rejected by the Assembly on technicalities, the real reason perhaps being the federalist character of their proposals, which ran contrary to the "unitarism" or "centralism" of Buenos Aires. Despite Artigas's efforts to appeal, the delegates were again rejected. The opposition of unitarism and federalism remained a clearly defined cause of the revolution in Río de la Plata. Artigas attempted to reach an agreement with General José Rondeau, commander of the forces of Buenos Aires in the second siege of Montevideo, but the confrontation between the two factions was by then inevitable.
See alsoArtigas, José Gervasio .
BIBLIOGRAPHY
John Street, Artigas and the Emancipation of Uruguay (1959).
Washington Reyes Abadie, Artigas y el federalismo rioplatense (1974).
Washington Reyes Abadie and Andrés Vázquez Romero, Crónica general del Uruguay, vol. 2 (1984).
Additional Bibliography
Barrios Pintos, Aníbal. Historia de los pueblos orientales: Sus orígenes, procesos fundacionales, sus primeros años. Montevideo: Academia Nacional de Letras, 2000.
Goldmen, Noemí, and Ricardo Donato Salvatore. Caudillismos rioplatenses: Nuevas miradas a un viejo dilema. Buenos Aires: Eudenba, Universidad de Buenos Aires, 2005.
Maggi, Carlos. La nueva historia de Artigas. Montevideo: Ediciones de la Plaza, 2005.
Narancio, Edmundo M. La independencia de Uruguay. Montevideo: Editorial Ayer, 2001.
Ribeiro, Ana. Los tiempos de Artigas. Montevideo: El País, 1999.
JosÉ de Torres Wilson