Extradition, Rebellion, Migration, and Commerce in a 19th-Century Andean Borderland

In late 1869, a gruesome murder of merchants by a group of former rebels in the Argentine-Chilean Andes set off an extradition case by the Argentine government as the men escaped into Chile. The case was the culmination of a decade of attempts to monitor and ultimately install bi-national governance in the mountainous borderland primarily as a way to check the comings and goings of rebels who threatened the new Argentine Republic’s stability and legitimacy. The details of the case illustrate the intersection of Argentine political conflict in the 1860s and the history of the making of this borderland through the crisscrossing not just of rebels, but more importantly of migrants, merchants, mining capitalists, and others who increasingly traveled between the two countries in response to rapid economic changes occurring on both sides of the mountains. This paper shows the centrality of this borderland and the people who made it in shaping the contours of nineteenth-century nation-state formation in the Southern Cone through two conclusions. Firstly, the extradition case itself reveals how the Argentine national government worked to neutralize the political stakes of both rebel ‘crimes’ and cross-border commerce to get the Chilean national government to cooperate on controlling the border. Secondly, the case illustrates how local and provincial officials had played a pivotal role in formulating early foreign policy in Argentina.