Illegal Enslavement in Brazil’s Southern Border and the Paraguayan War, 1864–70

This paper argues that cases of illegal enslavement in the Southern border of the Brazilian Empire was one of the causes of the outbreak of the Paraguayan War (1864-1870). From the 1840s to the early 1860s, cases of illegal enslavement led by Brazilian slave catchers were frequent. They would kidnap free women and their children in northern Uruguay and sell them into slavery in Brazil. This process, which took place in the context of the Guerra Grande in Uruguay (1839-1851) and the abolition of the trade on enslaved Africans to Brazil (1850), generated increasing tension on the border, to the point of having contributed to the interruption of diplomatic relations between Brazil and England in 1861 and for the Brazilian invasion of Uruguayan territory in 1864.