Why is Argentina’s Independence Day celebrated on July 9?

( Spanish) — A year has passed since Napoleon’s final defeat in Waterlooin June 1815. The Spanish monarchy, dissolved years ago by Francehas been restored, and King Ferdinand VII is preparing to launch a final offensive against the revolutionaries in America.

This is the world and the America in which the independence of the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata, the future Argentine Republic, was proclaimed on July 9, 1816, 206 years ago.

What exactly happened in 1816?

The military situation in that southern winter of 1816 was dramatic. The United Provinces had been defeated a year earlier by forces loyal to Spain: it happened in Sipe-Sipe, current Bolivia. While Jose maria morelos and pavonin Mexico, was captured shot and Simon Bolivar, in Venezuela, it was also overtaken by the royalists, among other setbacks for the independentistas.

In March 1816, the United Provinces convened, in this context, a congress in the city of San Miguel de Tucumán.

In the Congress of Tucumán the future of the country was discussed, and especially its possible independence from the Kingdom of Spain, a decision postponed by many years of war, despite the fact that Colombia Y Venezuelaamong others, had already proclaimed –but not consolidated– their own independence.

The United Provinces of the Río de la Plata, in fact, emerged after the revolution of May 1810, when the inhabitants of the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, with capital in Buenos Aires, decided in an open council to take power from the viceroy. .

The wait for independence

“The one in 1810 is a revolution because from then on many things will change, but there was still no independence sentiment, we still did not want to break with the Spanish monarchy,” Camila Perochena, a historian at Torcuato di Tella University, told . Radio. “We were also not aware that we were making a revolution, but they begin to discover it as the revolution is happening.”

The causes for this revolution are many and complex, within the framework of a long historical process.

But the trigger is one, rebuild the historian Jose Luis Romero. In May 1810, the residents of Buenos Aires received the news that Napoleon Bonaparte’s French troops, who invaded Spain in 1808 -creating tensions in the colonies ever since-, had triumphed in all the battles and that the Spanish resistance in The name of King Ferdinand II –deposed in 1808 and replaced by Joseph Bonaparte, brother of the French emperor– has ended.

“Currently, historians recommend putting the emphasis on 1808, on the change that occurs when Fernando VII goes to prison and the Crown is left headless. This political process that takes place in Spain is the cause of the revolution, which is an eminently political process with consequences economics,” Perochena said.

With the complete defeat in Spain, the authority on which the viceroys depended, representatives of the Spanish king in America, had expired, as the historian points out Naomi Goldman in his book “The people want to know what it is about! Hidden history of the May Revolution”.

The war between the patriots, who sought to form new states in America –with different and conflicting visions, more or less close to independence–, and the royalists, who defended the authority of the Spanish Empire, began almost immediately and focused , especially, in the current territories of Peru and Bolivia (then part of the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata), where the Spanish military presence was greater.

But although the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata went to war against the Spanish Empire, there was still hesitation in declaring independence due to the different views among the revolutionaries about facing greater autonomy or self-government or moving forward with an absolute break, as Goldman points out. Especially in the face of a possible restoration of the Spanish monarchy after the first French defeat in 1813 and the final one in 1815, while the differences between Buenos Aires and the provinces began to grow.

The proclamation in Tucumán

Those doubts seem to dissipate, in part, that July 9, 1816, when the General Constituent Congress of Tucumán unanimously declared independence, just at the worst moment of the war, after Napoleon, heir to the French Revolution and involuntary promoter of the American revolutions, he is defeated and exiled, and the monarchical restoration begins throughout Europe and America.

The 29 deputies gathered In San Miguel de Tucumán, representatives of the provinces approved the proclamation in Spanish, but also in Quechua and Aymaratwo of the main languages ​​of the indigenous peoples who inhabited the United Provinces.

A mural with images of the late Argentine hero José de San Martín, in La Paz, Bolivia, on December 19, 2020. (Credit: JORGE BERNAL/AFP via Getty Images)

“We solemnly declare to the face of the earth that it is the unanimous and indubitable will of these Provinces to break the violent ties that linked them to the kings of Spain, to recover the rights that were stripped from them, and to invest themselves with the high character of a free and independent of King Ferdinand VII, his successors and metropolis”, says the independence act of the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata, taken from the Library of Congress of Argentina.

After the declaration, a new phase begins in the Argentine War of Independence and in the emancipatory conflicts throughout America, and in time they would declare their independence. Chili (1818), Peru (1821), Mexico (1821), Ecuador (1822) and bolivia (1825), among others.

Thus, General José de San Martín, the main military leader of the United Provinces, crossed the Andes mountain range in January 1817 and defeated the royalists in Chile. Then the Argentine and Chilean troops landed in Peru in 1820, and in 1822 it took place in Guayaquil the famous meeting between San Martín and Simón Bolívar.

The Argentine War of Independence culminated in 1824 with the victory of the patriots, and the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata they changed their name to that of the Argentine Republic in the Constitution of 1826.

But the modern history of the country, and of the entire continent, was just beginning.