With Irala begins a long period of anarchy in the nascent history of the Río de la Plata. Violent, bloodthirsty, personally courageous captain, devoid of any moral sense, very vile in private life, he, according to the naive expression of the chronicler Schmidel, adopted on earth the rule of Satan in hell. Against the new adelantado Alvaro Núñez, called Cow Head, the brave and honest discoverer of Florida, who arrived in the Platense region in 1542, he hatched plots and intrigues, culminating in the sedition of April 25, 1544: the Núñez was imprisoned, sent to Spain and condemned, and only much later the Council of Indie, having reviewed the trial, released him and rehabilitated him, assigning him an indemnity pension. Thus Irala continued to dominate between Paraguay and Peru, in constant conflict with the royal authorities, but giving the crown vast new territories in Paraguay and Brazil, and accompanying the conquest with an incredible massacre of Guaranís. Irala, therefore, can be considered the first caudillo del Plata, the founder of a system that will have serious consequences in the most delicate periods of the formation of the Argentine people. The anarchy is accentuated after his death in 1557 and the Cabildo, a vague semblance of municipal administration, and the first bishop of Paraguay, Pedro de la Torre, participate in the struggle of the caudillos ; until, at the end of 1573, the third adelantado Juan Ortiz de Zárate arrived in the Rio della Plata, whose nephew, Juan de Garay, had just (15 November) founded the city of Santa Fe de la Vera Cruz ; while Cabrera, governor of Tucumán (then dependent on the viceroy of Peru), founded the city of Córdoba la Llana (July 6). The principal centers of the future Argentine Republic were thus clearly established; but Buenos Aires still remained in the desolate depopulation desired by Irala. Juan de Garay himself, understanding the supreme importance of that port, already frequented by the smugglers who came down from Upper Peru and Paraguay, decided to repopulate it: a memorable date in Argentine history. On 11 June 1580, in the precise point of today’s Plaza de Mayo, the Garay, representing the adelantado Juan de Torres de Vera y Aragón (son-in-law of Ortiz de Zárate, who was deceased in ’76), founded the “city of the Holy Trinity and port of Santa Maria of Buenos Aires”. He had moved from Asunción in March 1580 with about seventy soldiers, almost all Creoles (i.e. Spaniards born in colony), a few dozen Indian families, the Franciscan Juan de Rivadeneyra, a thousand domesticated horses, two hundred cows and some bulls, five hundred sheep, etc. It is clear that in the mind of Garay, a great connoisseur of South American lands and possibilities, the persuasion had penetrated that not the fantastic Peruvian treasures, obsession of the previous conquerors, but agriculture and cattle breeding were to constitute the future wealth of the adelantazgo platense. The layout of the city was immediately proceeded, more or less according to the rules contemplated in the Leyes de India, the distribution of the islands to the settlers, the assignment of land in the surroundings. The official documents of the foundation and distribution have been preserved (and were first published by De Angelis), and in them we find, in addition to some doubts, a purely Italian name, that of a Venetian Bernabeo, to whom solar no. 99 (currently corner Defensa and Moreno), and allows itself a suerte of 3000 varas in the Sant’Anna valley. Only a few years after the repopulation, Buenos Aires and its hinterland they had given a solemn denial to the concept, which had prevailed for more than half a century, that the lands of Plata were the poorest on the American continent. Traffic began with the centers of the Brazilian coasts, to which flour, tallow, horsehair and leather were sent; and through Buenos Aires passed the products of the government of Tucumán and the provinces of Upper Peru. But in 1594 a royal coupon called for the strict observance of the provisions on the prohibition of trade and the enclosure of ports, and in vain protested against it, exposing the serious damage of the colonists, the viceroy of Peru, Marquis de Cañete, supported by the Audience of Charcas. It was only in 1602 that some permits began to be obtained.

According to baglib.com, in the meantime, after having participated, in large majority, in the repopulation of Buenos Aires, the generation of the Creoles, impetuous, rebellious, who considered themselves, jure loci, absolute mistress of the territory and began to look upon the Spanish conquerors as intruders, who yet they had given her life. While Garay was waiting for the division of the lands of Buenos Aires, a first sedition broke out in Santa Fe (June 1580), replacing the Spanish authorities with the Creole ones: a short-lived success, which did not delay the reaction, with the assassination of the revolutionaries. And when, in 1583, Garay, on his way to Santa Fe, was caught in his sleep and killed by the Indians; citizens of Buenos Aires (porteños), appealing to a coupon of 1537, asked the open Cahildo (the municipality and the most conspicuous vecinos) to elect the governor and captain general. The Spaniards supported a nephew of the Adelantado, known as Dog Face, the Creoles one of their own, the Santafesino Juan Enciso Fernández. The conflict, although not bloody, is to be reported, like the sedition of Santa Fe, as the beginning of that dualism that was to lead, albeit after more than two centuries, to the independence of Latin America. New cities were being founded around this time (1588): San Juan de Vera de las sei Corrientes, which today, simply Corrientes, is an important border town of the Republic, and Concepción del Bermejo, which had little life: destroyed the city by the Indians in 1632 the residents went to increase the population of Corrientes. With the departure of Torres de Vera (1591) the adelantazgo system ended, and that of the governorate took over: first governors Hernando Arias de Saavedra, Fernando de Zárate, Juan Ramírez de Velasco and Diego Valdés y de la Vanda. Under the latter there were the new severe restrictions on trade, to which we have already mentioned, and which had been required by the intensification of the smuggling of gold and silver from Potosi: smuggling that would have ended up by ruining the official trade. through Panama.