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The defeat of the Spanish was followed by a long civil war between unitarians and federalists. Unitarians thought that Buenos Aires should lead the less-developed provinces, as the head of a strong centralized government. Federalists thought instead that the country should be a federation of autonomous provinces, like the United States. During this period, the government would kidnap protestors, and torture them for information.
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What today is commonly referred to as the Independence of Argentina was declared on July 9, 1816, by the Congress of Tucumán. In reality, the congressmen who were assembled in Tucumán declared the independence of the United Provinces of South America, which is one of the official names of the Argentine Republic. The Federal League Provinces, at war with the United Provinces, were not allowed into the Congress. -
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Rosas' reluctance to call for a new assembly to write a constitution led General Justo José de Urquiza from Entre Ríos to turn against him. Urquiza defeated Rosas during the battle of Caseros and called for such an assembly. The Argentine Constitution of 1853 is, with amendments, still in force to this day. The Constitution was not immediately accepted by Buenos Aires. In 1862 Bartolomé Mitre became the first president of the unified country.
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The Beagle conflict began to brew in the 1960s, when Argentina began to claim that the Picton, Lennox and Nueva islands in the Beagle Channel were rightfully hers.
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On March 11, 1973, Argentina held general elections for the first time in ten years. Perón was prevented from running, but voters elected his stand-in, Dr. Hector Cámpora, as president. Cámpora defeated his Radical Civic Union opponent. Cámpora won 49.5 percent of the votes in the presidential election following a campaign based on a platform of national reconstruction. -
In 1971, Chile and Argentina signed an agreement formally submitting the Beagle Channel issue to binding Beagle Channel Arbitration. On May 2, 1977, the court ruled that the islands and all adjacent formations belonged to Chile. See the Report and decision of the Court of Arbitration -
The depression, which began after the Russian and Brazilian financial crises, caused widespread unemployment, riots, the fall of the government, a default on the country's foreign debt, the rise of alternative currencies, and the end of the peso's fixed exchange rate to the US dollar.
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The economy shrank by 28 percent from 1998 to 2002. In terms of income, over 50 percent of Argentines lived below the official poverty line and 25 percent were indigent (their basic needs were unmet); seven out of ten Argentine children were poor at the depth of the crisis in 2002.