History of Argentina

In 1502, the navigator Amerigo Vespucci and his party became the first Europeans to arrive here. Spanish navigators Juan Díaz de Solis and Sebastian Cabot visited in 1516 and 1526 respectively. In 1536, Pedro de Mendoza established a small settlement around Buenos Aires, which was abandoned in 1541 due to resistance from the indigenous inhabitants.

Further colonial efforts came from Paraguay, Peru, and Chile. Francisco de Aguirre founded Santiago del Estero. Londres was founded in 1558, Mendoza in 1561, San Juan in 1562, San Miguel de Tucumán in 1565, and Juan de Garay founded Santa Fe in 1573 , the same year that Jeronimo Luis de Cabrera founded Córdoba. In 1580, Garret went south and rebuilt Buenos Aires. In 1596, St. Louis was founded.

Compared with the real money in Bolivia and Peru, the economic potential in Argentina was not valued by the Spanish Empire. Therefore, it remained part of the Viceroyalty of Peru until the Viceroyalty of La Plata was established in 1776 with Buenos Aires as its capital.

When Buenos Aires repelled two British invasions in 1806 and 1807, the introduction of Enlightenment ideas and the precedent of bourgeois revolution had already brewed criticism of the autocratic monarchy. Napoleon's invasion of Spain gave the independence factions in Argentina and even Spanish America an opportunity. The process of replacing the viceroyalty with Argentina began. In the May Revolution of 1810, Governor Cisneros was replaced by the First National Assembly. The new Buenos Aires government was made up of local people. In its first conflict during the War of Independence, it crushed loyalist counterrevolutionary efforts in Córdoba, but suffered defeat on the east coast, Upper Peru, and Paraguay, which later became independent states.

The revolutionaries split into rival centralist and federal factions, and their struggle became a theme in Argentina's early days of independence. In 1813, Congress appointed Gervacio Antonio de Posadas as Argentina's first supreme commander. In 1816, the Tucumán Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence. A year later, Martin Miguel Guermes destroyed the loyalists in the north. General José de San Martín defended Chile's independence across the Andes. Later, his army captured the Spanish stronghold in Lima and declared Peruvian independence. The centralized constitution formulated in Buenos Aires in 1819 was quickly abolished by the federalists.

In 1820, the Battle of Sipeda between the centralists and the federalists ended with the supreme command's rule. In 1826, Buenos Aires instituted another centralized constitution and appointed Bernardino Rivadavia as the country's first president. The interior provinces soon revolted, forcing him to resign and abandon the constitution. Civil war resumed between the two factions. The prevailing federalists established the Argentine Confederation in 1831, led by Juan Manuel de Rosas. His trade protection policies angered Britain, France and other countries and inland provinces. His regime successively withstood the French blockade, the Confederate War and the joint British and French blockade, avoiding further reduction of territory. However, in 1852, another powerful Military leader Justo José de Urquiza overthrew him and became president, establishing liberalism and federalism with the 1853 Constitution. Buenos Aires, whose monopoly was destroyed, seceded from the Confederacy until its defeat in 1859. After defeating Urquiza at the Battle of Paón in 1861, Bartolomé Miter established his position in Buenos Aires and was elected the first president of the reunited country. Together with his successors Domingo Faustino Sarmiento and Nicolás Avellaneda, he established the foundations of the modern Argentine state. In 1864, Argentina participated in the Triple Alliance War and obtained part of the former Paraguayan territory. The second desert expedition eliminated the indigenous people as an obstacle to development, allowing Argentina to conquer Patagonia first.

Since Julio Argentino Rocca took office in 1880, economic liberal policies have been strengthened by ten consecutive federal governments. The wave of European immigration inspired by the policies has reshaped Argentina's economy. political, economic and cultural aspects.

From 1870 to 1910, the immigration wave and the reduction of mortality caused the population to increase five times; the railway mileage increased sharply from 503 kilometers to 31,104 kilometers; the annual export of wheat increased from 100,000 tons to 2.5 million tons, and the application of offshore refrigeration ships Prompted annual beef exports to increase from 25,000 tons to 365,000 tons, making Argentina among the top five exporters in the world; thanks to the secular free public compulsory education system, the literacy rate surged from 22% to 65%, which is higher than that in the United States. The level of most Latin American countries will still be high fifty years from now. In 1908, Argentina became the seventh largest economic country in the world, with per capita income on par with Germany. Buenos Aires has also transformed from a "large rural area" into an international "Paris of South America".

However, nature’s gifts have long masked the problem. The large landowner oligarchy monopolizes vast areas of land, making Argentina's wealth concentration much more serious than that of the United States. It also makes Argentina go further and further down the old path of single export and deviate from the path of industrialization. And the economic subordination to Britain continues. In 1891, the Radical Civic Union (Radical Party) was established in the voice of the emerging middle class against the oligarchic ruling group and demanding political democracy. The threat of armed uprising prompted conservative President Roque Saenz Pe?a to enact a secret ballot law for ordinary men in 1912. As a result, the leader of the Radical Party, Ippolito Yrigoyen, was elected president in 1916. He introduced socioeconomic reforms to include family farmers and small businesses in aid. Argentina remained neutral in World War I, but during Yrigoyen's second reign, Argentina was unable to escape the unsaleable agricultural products brought about by the global depression. Peron created the political philosophy known as "Peronism". He nationalized key industrial and public facilities, improved wages and working conditions, paid off all foreign debt, and achieved almost full employment. His wife, Eva Perón, played a central political role. In 1947, she pushed Congress to grant women suffrage and brought unprecedented social relief to disadvantaged groups. Her premature death in 1952 made countless citizens who regarded her as their savior and idol cry. In 1951, Peron was successfully re-elected, but overspending quickly exhausted the huge foreign exchange brought by World War II. The economic decline, widespread corruption, the fading of the lady's aura, and the conflicts with the Catholic Church caused by the passage of the divorce law have gradually made it lose its basis for governance. In 1955, the navy bombed the Plaza de Mayo in an assassination attempt on the president, and a few months later, in what the military called the Liberator's Revolution, Peron was forced from power and went into exile in Spain.

The new national leader, Pedro Eugenio Aramburu, became an enemy of the Peronists and banned the resulting demonstrations, and the organized activities of the Peronists turned into the ground. Arturo Frondisi of the Radical Party won the ensuing election. He adopted measures such as partial privatization and encouraging investment to achieve self-sufficiency in energy and industry, reversed the long-standing trade deficit, and lifted the ban on Peronism. The resurgence of the Peronist Party dissatisfied the military, and he was also dismissed by the military. Pull down. Senate President José María Quito responded quickly and became acting president in accordance with the constitution, and the Peronist Party was banned again. Arturo Illa, elected in 1963, led the country to achieve all-round development, but his attempts to legalize the Peronist Party failed, and Juan Carlos Onganía, who sought indefinite military rule, led "Argentina" Revolution" to overthrow him.