AHC: Peasant Uprising in Argentina

I'm working on my first TL, and while I've got a good idea of what's going to happen, I need a peasant rebellion to begin the process, sometime in the first half of the 19th century. I'm not sure when the best time for such an uprising would be.

Any help you can provide would be very much appreciated. Merci beaucoup.
 
I'm working on my first TL, and while I've got a good idea of what's going to happen, I need a peasant rebellion to begin the process, sometime in the first half of the 19th century. I'm not sure when the best time for such an uprising would be.

Any help you can provide would be very much appreciated. Merci beaucoup.

well, it's a bit hard, since by mid XIX Argentina didn't have a large population of peasants, at least not in central Argentina. The richest land in Argentina, the Pampas, were very sparsely populated. In that sense, it was quite different from Mexico, or other Latin American countries, that had large population of oppresed peasants (that is, people who grow crops), mostly from Amerindian descent, and apt to rebelion.

What you had in central Argentina by then where scattered "gauchos", a sort of Hispanic cowboys, who where good on horses and worked mostly with horses or cattle. Unlike American cowboys, they were poorer, and didn't own much land (if any). They worked for different landowners, and were allowed to change who they worked for.

They where very active during the first half of the XIX century, fighting first in the last stages of the Independence war, and later in the civil war. But their leaders, their "caudillos" where very rarely gauchos. Most of them where either military men or populist rich land owners, such as Rosas. These leaders sometimes improved the situation of gauchos, which made them quite popular, but didn't really change their situation or radically improved their material conditions.

I guess that if some of these populist leaders was overthrown at the peak of their popularity by members of the opposite political faction (the Unitarians), you might have a gaucho rebelion. Maybe if Rosas falls earlier?
IOTL, nobody rebel when he fell. But maybe, if he had fallen in the hands of an Unitarian like Lavalle instead of another caudillo like Urquiza, and this Unitarian acts drastically against the supporters of Rosas (including the gauchos) a rebelion might be possible...

The other option would be a rebelion in the Northwest, like in Santiago del Estero, where you did have some peasants... but it would have been easily repressed.

The third option would be to wait till the pampas where populated by farmers, mostly of European descent, and have a larger "Grito de Alcorta" (1912) (a rebelion of small farmers in Santa Fe, mostly of Italian descent, who rented land).
 
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Thanks for your help. Perhaps a victory by General Paz could provide a starting point for a rebellion, as he's a Unitarian like you mentioned. They did seem rather prone to Reigns of Terror, and that makes them good for these things. Thanks, I'll have to go work with that.
 
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