Buenos Aires Province - History

History

The inhabitants of the province before the 16th century advent of Spanish colonisation were aboriginal peoples such as the Charrúas and the Querandíes; but their culture was lost over the next 350 years. They were subjected to a virtual genocide from which few survived. The survivors joined other tribes or have been mostly absorbed by Argentina's European ethnic majority.

Pedro de Mendoza founded Santa María del Buen Ayre in 1536 and even though the first contact with the aboriginals was peaceful, it soon became hostile. The city was evacuated in 1541. Juan de Garay re-founded the settlement in 1580 as Santísima Trinidad y Puerto Santa María de los Buenos Aires.

Amidst ongoing conflict with the aboriginals, the cattle farms extended from Buenos Aires, whose port was always the centre of the economy of the territory. Following the creation of the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata at the end of the 18th century, the export of meat, leather and their derivatives through the port of Buenos Aires was the basis of the economic development of the region.

Jesuits unsuccessfully tried to peacefully assimilate the aboriginals into the European culture brought by the Spanish conquistadores. A certain balance was found at the end of the 18th century, when the Salado River became the limit between both civilizations, and despite frequent malones (aboriginal attacks on border settlements). The end to such situation came as late as 1879 with the Conquest of the Desert (Conquista del Desierto) in which the aboriginals where almost completely exterminated.

After the independence from Spain in 1816, the city and province of Buenos Aires became the focus of an intermittent Argentine Civil War with other provinces. A Federal Pact secured by Governor Juan Manuel de Rosas in 1831 led to the establishment of the Argentine Confederation and to his gaining the sum of public power, which provided a tenuous unity. Ongoing disputes regarding the influence of Buenos Aires, between Federalists and Unitarians, and over the Port of Buenos Aires (the prime source of public revenue at the time) fueled periodic hostilities. The province was declared independent on September 11, 1852, as the State of Buenos Aires, but concessions gained in the 1859 Pact of San José de Flores and a victory at the Battle of Pavón led to its reincorporation into the Argentine Republic on December 17, 1861. Intermittent conflicts with the nation did not truly cease until 1880, when the city of Buenos Aires was formally federalized and, thus, administratively separated from the province itself.

La Plata was founded in 1882 by Governor Dardo Rocha for the purpose of becoming the provincial capital. The equivalent of a billion (1880s) dollars of British investment and pro-development, education and immigration policies pursued at the national level subsequently spurred dramatic economic growth. Driven by European immigration and improved health, the province's population, like Argentina's, nearly doubled to one million by 1895 and doubled again by 1914. Rail lines connected nearly every town and hamlet in the province by 1914; indeed, many developed around the new railway stations, themselves.

This era of accelerated development was cut short by the Wall Street Crash of 1929, which caused a sharp drop in commodity prices (99% of Argentine exports were, at the time, agricultural in nature) and led to a halt in the flow of investment funds between nations. The new Concordance and Perón governments funded ambitious lending and public works programs, visible in Buenos Aires Province through the panoply of levees, power plants, water works, paved roads, municipal buildings, and (particularly during Perón's 1946-55 tenure) schools, clinics and massive regional hospitals.

The province's population, after 1930, began to grow disproportionately quickly in the suburban areas around the city of Buenos Aires. These suburbs had grown to include 4 million out of the province's total 7 million people in 1960. Much of the area these new suburbs were developed on, however, (particularly the poorer ones) consisted of wetlands and were prone to flooding. To address this, Governor Oscar Alende initiated the province's most important flood-control project to date, the Roggero Reservoir. Completed a decade later, in 1971, the reservoir and associated electric and water-treatment facilities encouraged still more, and more orderly, development of the Greater Buenos Aires region, which today includes around 10 million people (2⁄₃ of the provincial population); but, it did not address worsening pollution resulting from the area's industrial growth, which had made itself evident since around 1920. This problem has been at its worst along the Reconquista River west and north of the city of Buenos Aires; over 4 million people (one in 10 Argentines) today live on the Reconquista's basin. Of these, about a million still live with seriously compromised water quality, despite the province's numerous (sometimes counterproductive) efforts to remedy the issue.