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[First Page] [119], (1) Lines: 0 to 5 ——— 0.17702pt ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [119], (1) Juan Manuel Casal 7. Uruguay and the Paraguayan War The Military Dimension The story of the Oriental Division in the ParaguayanWar is a tale of the gradual decimation of a handful of bold warriors,veterans of many engagements, who had always fought for their caudillo, Gen. Venancio Flores, and their political faction, the Uruguayan Colorado Party.1 This division contributed 1,500 soldiers to the allied army, of whom only 150 survived the fighting. From the Uruguayan point of view,the country’s involvement in this war was an inevitable and unwanted consequence of the ongoing conflict between its two major political factions,the Colorados and the Blancos. For Uruguayans the ParaguayanWar was exclusively a Colorado war. In early 1865,after a twoyear campaign,General Flores overthrew the Blanco-supported government. Brazil and Argentina gave Flores significant support to achieve this objective, and he saw no alternative but to join those countries in their war against Paraguay. The Blancos not only opposed the war, many of them fought on the Paraguayan side. This chapter analyzes the endemic discord between Blancos and Colorados that brought about Uruguayan participation in the Paraguayan War. Second, it examines how Flores’s forces shaped a new national army that contributed its finest soldiers to the Paraguayan campaign,from which many never returned. It also considers the role of the Oriental Division in the fighting; after performing noteworthy operations at the initial stages of the campaign,it became an almost insignificant force,assigned to inconsequential tasks, and was largely forgotten by the Uruguayan government. Blancos and Colorados Nineteenth-century Uruguayans could not escape the fate of becoming either Colorados or Blancos. In fact these designations involved something more than partisan allegiances. They represented different and antagonistic political cultures that oriented the worldviews of every Uruguayan. The Blanco and Colorado factions originated as rural and urban caudillo groups in the 1830s, with clienteles and all the other characteristics of distinct patronage structures. In a country with less than 130,000 inhabitants (by 1835), a very low population density, and a weak state, it is no wonder that people 120 Uruguay and the ParaguayanWar [120], (2) Lines: 51 ——— 0.0pt PgV ——— Normal P PgEnds: T [120], (2) sought protection from caudillos and inevitably became identified with their political factions.2 Civil wars between Colorados and Blancos did the rest. The killing of heads of households and their eldest sons, the violence against families, and the confiscation of livestock and lands all created an unyielding and mutual hatred. Allegiance to the causes espoused by the dead seemed altogether natural. It upheld carefully crafted partisan familial traditions and,in the end, two antagonistic cultures. Blancos and Colorados even co-opted European immigrants, who came by hundreds of thousands during the second half of the nineteenth century to practically replace the existing Uruguayan population . Moreover, as both parties had traditional or caudillo sectors as well as conservative and liberal factions, people of different political temperaments could accommodate their ideas and beliefs within each party.This is possibly the reason why Colorados and Blancos still exist today. Between 1856 and 1865, after a long civil war that associated Blancos with Argentine Federalists and Colorados with Argentine Unitarians (and the Brazilians), some prominent figures in both parties tried to break with the past and implement a “Fusionist” policy that in theory would bring together the two inimical groups. Fusionism attempted to create a national consciousness and to avert the threat that the old transnational connections of both parties posed for Uruguay’s future. Many Colorados and Blancos endorsed this movement, and for the first time it was possible to see the two groups working together in legislative chambers, public administration, and the armed forces. In 1858, however, a dogmatic faction of the Colorado Party,the conservatives,supported by the Unitarians of BuenosAires,revolted against Fusionism. Gabriel Pereira, an erstwhile Colorado and the first Fusionist president,crushed the revolt and ordered the execution of its defeated leaders. These executions, which occurred at Paso de Quinteros along the Negro River, awoke smoldering partisan hatreds, and the Colorados, both conservative and traditional,accused the government of serving“Blanco purposes ” and demanded revenge for “the martyrs of Quinteros.” Such was the weight of partisan culture. After the Quinteros episode, President Pereira had to subdue some lesser Colorado revolts and eventually banished from Uruguay many Colorado military men whom he deemed adversaries...

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