Argentina

From the Diaguita, Guarani and Mapuche worlds of the Rio de la Plata to a Spanish viceroyalty, the independence declared at Tucuman in 1816, an age of mass immigration, the Peron era, and a hard road back to democracy after the dictatorship of 1976-1983.

Argentina's history begins with the many Indigenous peoples, from the Diaguita of the northwest and the Guarani of the riverine northeast to the Mapuche and the hunter-gatherers of the Pampas and Patagonia, who inhabited the land long before Spanish ships entered the Rio de la Plata in the sixteenth century. Buenos Aires was founded in 1536, abandoned, and refounded in 1580, and for two centuries the region was a remote corner of Spanish America until the Viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata was created in 1776. The May Revolution of 1810 set the country on the road to self-government, and on 9 July 1816 the Congress of Tucuman declared independence as the United Provinces. Decades of civil war between Buenos Aires and the provinces followed, resolved by the Constitution of 1853 and the rise of a liberal republic that drew millions of European immigrants between roughly 1880 and 1914. The twentieth century was dominated by the figure of Juan Peron and the movement he founded, and then by the military dictatorship of 1976 to 1983, whose Dirty War forcibly disappeared thousands of people and which collapsed after defeat in the 1982 Falklands/Malvinas War, opening the way to the democracy restored in 1983.