By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 29 October 2025

“Banda Oriental del Uruguay” (the Eastern Bank of the [Rio/River] Uruguay) was a zone populated by four main Native tribes, all of them nomadic hunter-gatherers and fisherman, whose chiefdoms were more decentralised assemblages than geographic settlements. The lack of resources and population was among the reasons Uruguay was claimed relatively late by the Spanish, after the arrival of Juan Díaz de Solís in 1516, and remained largely uninhabited for about a century. The first permanent Spanish settlement in Uruguay was the Jesuit mission at Santo Domingo de Soriano founded in 1624. Cattle were introduced into Uruguay about a decade earlier and some farmers entered the territory, but it was only after Uruguay became a strategic flash-point on the contested Spanish-Portuguese frontier later in the seventeenth century that the Spanish started to seriously settle Uruguay.

As a counterweight to the Portuguese encroaching from Brazil, symbolised in the planting of the city of Colonia del Sacramento in 1680, which the Spanish repeatedly captured, the Spanish established Montevideo on Uruguay’s natural harbour in 1726. In subsequent decades, control of Uruguay was not only contested between Spain and Portugal, but between Uruguay-based Spanish military officials and the Spanish governors in Buenos Aires, who would ultimately prevail by having Uruguay incorporated into the new Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata after 1776, bringing a modest but noticeable increase in the centralisation and bureaucratic rationalisation of Imperial administration.

Internally, Uruguay in the eighteenth century became an important Spanish military and naval station, and an economic port. One effect was that the population was both thickened and altered via the slave trade: African slaves were introduced and an Afro-Uruguayan population was created. Another effect was to make Uruguay a centre of smuggling: the legitimate economy primarily exported hides, tallow, and salted meat (tasajo), but all kinds of contraband came in. The competition for access to these black market revenue streams led to the formation of competing militias and armed gangs, layered onto the ranching infrastructure, which struggled with one-another and with the Natives, creating fiefdoms overseen by petty proto-caudillos that set down patterns of loyalty and enmity that persist in various ways. A militarised and lawless frontier zone, Uruguay was Latin America’s “Wild West” on the eve of the anti-Spanish rebellions.

The Spanish were deposed in Uruguay in 1820 after a nine-year war and the country was almost immediately annexed by Brazil. The annexation was annulled by internal rebellion and Argentine intervention, with Britain mediating a settlement that granted Uruguay independence in 1828. Uruguay then served as a buffer State between its two giant neighbours, Brazil and Argentina, and they both meddled incessantly in its internal affairs.

This dynamic, of Uruguay as a theatre of proxy war, and the legacy of being a frontier zone, meant that institutions in the State were weak, even the Catholic Church that provided services and an anchor of social order elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere, and institution-building proved difficult. This aggravated instability and corruption. For example, the de jure authorities were often not the real power-brokers across Uruguay, necessitating bribes to de facto local strongmen to get anything done, and those ambitious to be the strongman could only attain the position by violence. And while Uruguay lacked the powerful standing army that most Latin American States had—and which often controlled politics—it was no less dominated for most of the nineteenth century by military men, or perhaps more precisely militiamen.

In 1836, two political parties were established that defined Uruguay’s politics throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth century:

• The Blanco Party (or National Party) was the more conservative and rural party, based in the interior, supported by landowners and ranchers, its concerns focusing politically on decentralisation and provincial autonomy, and economically on local interests, thus it was protectionist and its main external allies were the Federalist Party in Argentine Confederation, which was in power in the crucial Buenos Aires Province under Juan Manuel de Rosas (r.1825-52) at the time.
• The Colorado Party was the more liberal and urban party, based in Montevideo, its support base anchored in merchants and intellectuals, who favoured a “modern”, centralised political structure domestically and free trade abroad, disposing them to look on Britain, France, Brazil under its liberal Emperor Pedro II (r. 1831-89), and the Argentine liberals gathered around the Unitarian Party as allies.

By the time the two parties were founded, a low-level civil war was effectively underway in Uruguay based on the conflicting interests they represented—and their foreign supporters. In 1839, outright conflict erupted and raged until 1851, remembered as the “Great War” (Guerra Grande). The Colorados were victorious, with the support of all their allies, and the Argentine entanglement in the war led to Rosas’s downfall and a series of civil wars that ended with the collapse of the Federal structure in Argentina and the emergence of a unitary State.

Colorado hegemony in the second half of the nineteenth century led to some development and reasonable prosperity, expanding ranching and meat exports, but political instability remained dire. It was unusual for an Uruguayan president to serve more than two years; on the one occasion the General Assembly voted in a Blanco president, in 1860, his reign was terminated by a Brazilian invasion; and amid the intra-Colorado political shenanigans and coups that removed various leaders—some on justifiable constitutional grounds that they were trying to become caudillos—there were repeated Blanco rebellions.

The “Revolution of 1897”, the penultimate Blanco uprising, concluded in a peace accord that while it did not result in Blanco presidents taking power—the first one after this was in 1959—did result in a degree of power-sharing at the departmental level and the State implementing some Blanco policies. Politics was interrupted by a brief period of de facto Blanco caudillo rule under Aparicio Saravia (r. 1903-04), but his defeat and the State more fully living up to its promises to take account of Blanco interests thereafter ameliorated the violent tendency in Uruguayan politics. For the next half-a-century, the issues underlying Uruguay’s semi-perpetual civil war were essentially institutionalised as a struggle within peaceful politics—a reasonable definition of democracy.

The early twentieth century saw Uruguay reformed along the Progressive lines of the era: strengthening and centralising the State, creation of State-owned enterprises, an increased welfare safety-net and labour protections, and secularisation that culminated in the disestablishment of the Roman Catholic Church in 1917 as part of a constitution that also separated executive powers to guard against caudilloism.

It largely worked: the Uruguayan economy boomed in the inter-war years on the back of meat and wool exports, and constitutionalism held with one exception: a coup in 1933 by Gabriel Terra resulted in a half-decade of authoritarian, but not terrifying, rule. Terra’s program accorded with the Progressivism of the Uruguayan elites—he imposed various “rights” (to work, healthcare, food), legal equality between the sexes, decriminalised homosexuality—and after he was forced into retirement by a stroke in 1938 most of his reforms were maintained.

The transition back to constitutional practice was quite smooth for Uruguay and the emphasis on democratic “normalisation” in the early 1940s heavily tilted the country towards a pro-Allied stance in the Second World War. Uruguay severed relations with the Axis States in 1942 and declared war on Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in early 1945 in preparation for joining the United Nations.