Argentine Independence
On 9 July 1816, delegates meeting in the northern city of San Miguel de Tucumán declared the independence of the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata from Spain and from any other foreign power. The declaration did not create the modern Argentine state, which took decades more to take shape, but it gave the revolution in the Río de la Plata a clear legal and political goal and is still celebrated as Argentina's national day.
The roots of the declaration lay in the crisis of the Spanish monarchy. In 1808 Napoleon forced the abdication of the Spanish king and placed his own brother on the throne, leaving the empire's colonies without a legitimate authority. In May 1810, the leading men of Buenos Aires, then the capital of the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, set up their own governing junta, claiming to rule in the name of the deposed king Ferdinand VII. This May Revolution began a long and unstable process. Buenos Aires tried to hold together the former viceroyalty, but Paraguay, the Banda Oriental (modern Uruguay) and Upper Peru (modern Bolivia) each went their own way, and many interior and littoral provinces resisted Buenos Aires's leadership.
By 1816 the situation was precarious. Ferdinand VII had returned to his throne in 1814 and was restoring absolutist rule, and Spanish forces were reasserting control across much of South America. Royalist armies still threatened the northwest from Upper Peru. Meanwhile, the provinces were divided, and several of them, led by José Gervasio Artigas, did not send delegates to Tucumán. The congress that did meet there included representatives mainly from the interior and from Buenos Aires, and it debated what form of government a new state should take, with some favoring a monarchy.
The declaration itself was issued in the congress's sessions in July, and a fuller version, adding the phrase about freedom from other foreign powers, followed a few days later. The statement was also published in Quechua and Aymara, a sign of the importance of the indigenous population of the Andean north, though historians debate how far this reflected real political inclusion.
Independence still had to be won. José de San Martín, governor of Cuyo, was preparing to lead the Army of the Andes across the mountains to Chile and then toward Peru, a campaign that helped secure the revolution beyond Argentina's borders. At home, however, the country soon fell into conflict between centralists and federalists. The congress's attempt to establish a stable national government collapsed in 1820, and Argentina would not have a lasting constitution until 1853. The Tucumán declaration thus marks a beginning rather than an ending: the moment when a contested revolutionary movement committed itself openly to full sovereignty.