The history of Argentina

Argentina stretches from the subtropical forests of the Chaco to the sub-Antarctic tip of Tierra del Fuego, and for most of human history this immense land was home to many Indigenous peoples living by farming in the Andean north and by hunting on the pampas and in Patagonia. Spain colonised it slowly from the sixteenth century, first from Peru and later through the port of Buenos Aires, which became the capital of a new viceroyalty in 1776. Independence, won between 1810 and 1816, was followed by decades of civil war, then by a liberal state that conquered the Indigenous south, drew millions of European immigrants and made Argentina one of the richest countries in the world by 1914. The twentieth century brought Peronism, repeated military coups, the state terror of the Dirty War and defeat in the Falklands, and since 1983 an unbroken democracy that has struggled with recurring economic crises.

People reached the southern cone of South America at the end of the last Ice Age. Sites in Patagonia show hunters there more than 12,000 years ago, and in the Cueva de las Manos in Santa Cruz province, generations of painters left hundreds of stencilled hands and scenes of guanaco hunts, the oldest roughly 9,000 years old. Over the following millennia the peoples of the region developed very different ways of life according to the land they lived on.

The north-west, where the Andes and their valleys meet the desert, was the most densely settled. Farming villages grew maize, beans, squash and potatoes on terraced and irrigated fields, herded llamas, and made fine pottery and metalwork in a sequence of cultures that archaeologists call Condorhuasi, La Aguada and Santa María. By the fifteenth century the Diaguita and Calchaquí peoples lived in fortified towns, such as Quilmes, with populations of several thousand. Around 1480 the armies of the Inca Empire under Topa Inca Yupanqui pushed south into these valleys, building roads, storehouses and fortresses and taking metal and labour as tribute. Inca rule lasted only about half a century, but it tied the north-west to the Andean world of Peru.

Elsewhere life was organised differently. In the north-east the Guaraní cleared forest for maize and manioc along the Paraná and Uruguay rivers. The Chaco was home to hunting, fishing and gathering peoples such as the Qom (Toba), Wichí and Mocoví. On the pampas the Querandí hunted guanaco and rhea, and in Patagonia the Tehuelche followed the herds across the steppe. In Tierra del Fuego the Selk'nam hunted on land while the Yaghan travelled the channels by canoe. In the colonial centuries the Mapuche, from the Chilean side of the Andes, moved east onto the pampas in growing numbers, mixing with local peoples and building trading and raiding networks based on the horses and cattle the Europeans had introduced.

The first Europeans in the Río de la Plata estuary were probably Portuguese navigators around 1512, followed in 1516 by the Spanish explorer Juan Díaz de Solís, who was killed by local people on the shore. In 1520 Ferdinand Magellan wintered at San Julián on the Patagonian coast before finding the strait that bears his name. Sebastian Cabot explored the Paraná in the late 1520s, and the hope of silver gave the region its name, the River of Silver. In 1536 Pedro de Mendoza founded a first Buenos Aires, but hunger and attacks by the Querandí forced its abandonment in 1541, and the survivors moved upriver to Asunción, the new centre of Spanish settlement in Paraguay.

The interior was settled from the north and west instead. After the conquest of Peru, expeditions came down from the Andes, founding Santiago del Estero in 1553, the oldest continuously inhabited city in the country, then Tucumán, Córdoba in 1573, Salta and Jujuy. From Chile came the founders of Mendoza and San Juan. Buenos Aires was refounded in 1580 by Juan de Garay, who came from Asunción. All of these lands belonged to the Viceroyalty of Peru, ruled from Lima as part of the Spanish Empire.

Conquest met long resistance. In the north-west the Diaguita and Calchaquí fought the Spanish in the Calchaquí Wars, which flared repeatedly from the 1560s until 1667. At their end the Spanish broke up the defeated communities and marched the people of Quilmes hundreds of kilometres to a reduction near Buenos Aires, where a city still carries their name. The Chaco and the pampas south of the Salado River remained outside Spanish control for the entire colonial period.

For two centuries the region was a poor periphery. Spain required trade to pass through Lima, so goods for Buenos Aires officially travelled overland across the Andes, and the city survived on smuggling, much of it with the Portuguese and later the British. The interior supplied mules, textiles and food to the silver mines of Potosí in Bolivia, while on the pampas wild cattle and horses multiplied and gave rise to the gaucho, the mounted herdsman of mixed descent.

In the north-east, Jesuit missionaries from 1609 gathered Guaraní communities into mission towns, where tens of thousands of people farmed, built stone churches and made music under the friars' direction. The missions protected the Guaraní from slave raids from Brazil but also reshaped their society, and they declined after Spain expelled the Jesuits in 1767. The Jesuits also founded the college at Córdoba that became one of the oldest universities in the Americas.

Buenos Aires was also a port of the Atlantic slave trade. Enslaved Africans worked as domestic servants, artisans and labourers, and by the end of the eighteenth century people of African descent made up a substantial part of the population of Buenos Aires and the interior cities, a history long overlooked in national memory.

In 1776 the Spanish Bourbons, worried by Portuguese expansion, created the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, with its capital at Buenos Aires. It joined present-day Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Upper Peru, including Potosí. Freer trade from 1778 turned the city into a busy port exporting hides and silver, and its population grew rapidly.

The crisis of the empire came from Europe. In 1806 and 1807 British forces seized Buenos Aires and then attacked it again, and both times they were defeated by local militias rather than Spanish troops, which gave the creoles, the American-born Spanish elite, new confidence. When the Napoleonic Wars brought the French occupation of Spain and the captivity of Ferdinand VII, the question of who should govern in the king's absence became urgent. On 25 May 1810, after news that almost all of Spain had fallen, an open town council in Buenos Aires replaced the viceroy with a governing junta. The May Revolution began the Argentine part of the Spanish American wars of independence.

The new authorities in Buenos Aires tried to hold the whole viceroyalty but could not. Paraguay went its own way, the Banda Oriental across the river became a battleground, and armies sent north into Upper Peru were defeated repeatedly by royalist forces from Peru. In the north-west the gaucho leader Martín Miguel de Güemes held the frontier against royalist incursions. Manuel Belgrano created the blue and white flag in 1812, and on 9 July 1816 a congress at Tucumán declared independence.

The decisive campaign was led by José de San Martín, born in Yapeyú in the old mission lands and trained as an officer in Spain. Concluding that the royalist stronghold in Peru could be reached only through Chile, he built the Army of the Andes at Mendoza and in early 1817 led it over passes more than 4,000 metres high. Victories at Chacabuco in 1817 and Maipú in 1818 secured the independence of Chile alongside Bernardo O'Higgins. San Martín then sailed for Peru and proclaimed its independence in Lima in July 1821. After meeting Simón Bolívar at Guayaquil in 1822 he withdrew from public life, leaving Bolívar to finish the war, and died in exile in France in 1850.

Independence did not produce a single state. For four decades the country was divided between Unitarians, who wanted a centralised government led from Buenos Aires, and Federalists, who defended the autonomy of the provinces and their regional strongmen, the caudillos. Bernardino Rivadavia became the first president in 1826, but his centralist constitution was rejected by the provinces, and a costly war with the Empire of Brazil over the Banda Oriental ended in 1828 with the creation of independent Uruguay.

The dominant figure of the period was Juan Manuel de Rosas, a rancher and Federalist who governed Buenos Aires province from 1829 to 1832 and from 1835 to 1852 with sweeping powers. He controlled the customs revenue of the port, defied French and Anglo-French naval blockades, and used a political police, the Mazorca, to terrorise opponents, many of whom fled into exile. In 1833 he led a campaign against Indigenous peoples south of the frontier. Argentine historians still divide sharply over him: liberals remember a tyrant, nationalist revisionists a defender of sovereignty. During these years Charles Darwin, travelling on HMS Beagle, met Rosas on the Río Negro and described the frontier wars.

Rosas was overthrown in 1852 at the Battle of Caseros by Justo José de Urquiza, governor of Entre Ríos, with Brazilian and Uruguayan support. A constitutional convention adopted the federal constitution of 1853, but the province of Buenos Aires refused to join and remained a separate state until its army under Bartolomé Mitre defeated the Confederation at Pavón in 1861. Mitre became the first president of a united Argentina in 1862.

The presidents who followed, Mitre, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento and Nicolás Avellaneda, built the institutions of a modern state: a national army, railways, telegraphs and a public school system. Argentina joined Brazil and Uruguay in the War of the Triple Alliance against Paraguay from 1864 to 1870, a war that devastated Paraguay and gave Argentina territory in the north-east.

The new state also set out to seize the lands still held by Indigenous peoples. On the southern frontier, Mapuche and other leaders such as Calfucurá had long combined treaties and trade with the government with large raids on frontier towns and ranches. In 1878 and 1879 the war minister, General Julio Argentino Roca, led the campaign known as the Conquest of the Desert, although the land was neither empty nor desert. Troops armed with modern rifles swept the pampas and northern Patagonia to the Río Negro and then pushed on into the Andes and the far south until the mid-1880s. Soldiers killed well over a thousand Indigenous people in the main campaigns, and the army took prisoner more than 15,000. Families were separated, men were sent to labour on sugar plantations or in the army, women and children were handed out as servants in Buenos Aires, and prisoners were held on the island of Martín García, where many died of disease. Much of the conquered land passed in huge estates to a small number of owners.

The violence did not end there. In Tierra del Fuego, ranchers and gold prospectors in the 1880s and 1890s hunted the Selk'nam, and with disease and removal to missions the people were almost destroyed within a generation. Campaigns in the Chaco from 1884 subdued its peoples, and in 1924 police and ranchers at Napalpí in the Chaco killed hundreds of striking Qom and Mocoví workers. In 2022 a federal court declared the Napalpí massacre a crime against humanity. Defenders of the Conquest of the Desert long presented it as a defence of settlers and a civilising mission, while many historians and Indigenous organisations today describe it as genocide.

Roca, president from 1880 to 1886 and again from 1898 to 1904, led a conservative oligarchy that ruled through managed elections. In 1880 the city of Buenos Aires was federalised as the national capital. Railways built largely with British capital fanned out across the pampas, and refrigerated ships allowed beef to reach Europe. Argentina became one of the world's great exporters of wheat, maize, wool and meat, and by the eve of World War I it was among the ten richest countries in the world by income per head.

To work the land and build the cities, the state encouraged European immigration. Around six million people arrived between the 1850s and 1930, most of them Italians and Spaniards, with many others from France, Germany, Britain, the Ottoman Levant and the Russian Empire, including a large Jewish community. Perhaps half stayed. By 1914 roughly a third of the population had been born abroad, and Buenos Aires had become a great modern city of tenements, cafés and tango.

Immigrant workers also brought anarchism and socialism, and strikes were met with repression. The middle classes demanded a share of power through the Radical Civic Union. In 1912 the Sáenz Peña Law introduced secret and compulsory voting for men, and in 1916 the Radical Hipólito Yrigoyen won the presidency. The Radicals governed until 1930, a period that also saw the bloody suppression of strikes in Buenos Aires in the Tragic Week of 1919 and of rural workers' strikes in Patagonia in 1921.

The Great Depression collapsed export prices, and in September 1930 General José Félix Uriburu overthrew the elderly Yrigoyen, the first of six successful military coups between 1930 and 1976. Conservative governments then held power through electoral fraud in what became known as the Infamous Decade. In 1933 the Roca-Runciman Treaty guaranteed Argentine meat a share of the British market in exchange for concessions to British companies, which nationalists denounced as subservience. Argentina stayed neutral for most of World War II and declared war on Germany and Japan only in March 1945.

In 1943 a group of nationalist officers seized power. One of them, Colonel Juan Perón, who had observed the regime of Benito Mussolini in Italy, took over the labour department and built a following among trade unions by backing wage rises, pensions and labour courts. When rivals in the army arrested him in October 1945, a mass demonstration of workers in the Plaza de Mayo on 17 October forced his release. He won the presidential election of February 1946.

Perón's government nationalised the British-owned railways, the telephones and the central bank, expanded social welfare and used export earnings to promote industry. Real wages rose sharply and organised labour became a pillar of the state. His wife, Eva Perón, ran a vast charitable foundation, campaigned for women's suffrage, granted in 1947, and became an object of devotion for the poor, the descamisados, until her death from cancer in 1952 at the age of 33. The regime also censored the press, purged universities and jailed opponents. After the war it gave refuge to many Nazi war criminals, among them Adolf Eichmann, a central organiser of the Holocaust, whom Israeli agents seized in Buenos Aires in 1960.

As the economy weakened and Perón clashed with the Catholic Church, opposition grew. In June 1955 navy aircraft bombed the Plaza de Mayo, killing more than 300 people, and in September a military uprising called the Liberating Revolution drove Perón into exile. Peronism was banned, but it remained the loyalty of most workers, and no government could rule without its votes. Elected presidents Arturo Frondizi and Arturo Illia were overthrown by the army in 1962 and 1966. The regime of General Juan Carlos Onganía from 1966 closed Congress and sent police into the universities, and in 1969 a revolt of workers and students in Córdoba, the Cordobazo, shook the dictatorship. Amid the Cold War and the example of the Cuban revolution, led in part by the Rosario-born Che Guevara, armed groups appeared, above all the left-wing Peronist Montoneros and the Marxist People's Revolutionary Army.

Perón returned from Spain in 1973 and was elected president with 62 per cent of the vote, but the Peronist movement was already fighting itself between its left and right wings. He died on 1 July 1974 and was succeeded by his third wife and vice-president, Isabel Perón. Under her government the right-wing death squad known as the Triple A, organised from within the state, murdered hundreds of leftists, guerrilla attacks continued, and inflation soared.

On 24 March 1976 the armed forces overthrew Isabel Perón and installed a junta headed by General Jorge Rafael Videla, which called its rule the National Reorganisation Process. Claiming to fight subversion, the regime carried out a systematic campaign of state terror against guerrillas and against a far wider circle of trade unionists, students, journalists, priests, lawyers and others suspected of left-wing sympathies. People were kidnapped by plain-clothes squads and taken to hundreds of secret detention centres, the largest at the Navy Mechanics School (ESMA) in Buenos Aires, where they were tortured and most were killed. Many were drugged and thrown alive from aircraft into the sea in the so-called death flights.

The victims became known as the disappeared. The official commission set up after the dictatorship documented close to 9,000 cases, while human rights organisations estimate that as many as 30,000 people disappeared. Hundreds of babies born to prisoners were taken and given to military or allied families; the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo have since traced more than 130 of them. From 1977 the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo marched weekly in front of the presidential palace demanding to know the fate of their children, despite the disappearance of some of their own founders. The regime cooperated with other South American dictatorships in Operation Condor. It hosted the 1978 football World Cup while the killings continued, and the same year it came close to war with Chile over islands in the Beagle Channel, a dispute settled through papal mediation in 1984.

By 1981 the economy was in crisis, with soaring debt and inflation. In December General Leopoldo Galtieri took over the junta, and on 2 April 1982 Argentine forces invaded the Falkland Islands, which Argentina calls the Malvinas. Argentina regards the islands as inherited from Spain and taken illegally by Britain in 1833, while the United Kingdom bases its sovereignty on continuous administration since 1833 and on the wish of the islanders, who are mostly of British descent, to remain British. The government of Margaret Thatcher sent a naval task force. A British submarine sank the cruiser General Belgrano on 2 May with the loss of 323 lives, Argentine aircraft sank several British ships, and British troops landed in May and advanced on Stanley. Argentine forces surrendered on 14 June. The war killed 649 Argentine and 255 British service personnel and three islanders. Argentina maintains its claim by peaceful means, and in a 2013 referendum islanders voted almost unanimously to stay a British territory.

Defeat discredited the military, and elections in October 1983 were won by the Radical Raúl Alfonsín. His government created the national commission on the disappeared, whose report, Nunca Más (Never Again), appeared in 1984, and in 1985 the Trial of the Juntas sentenced Videla and other commanders, a rare case of a civilian court trying the leaders of a recent dictatorship. Under pressure from army revolts, Congress then passed laws halting further prosecutions in 1986 and 1987, and President Carlos Menem pardoned the convicted commanders in 1989 and 1990. Those laws were annulled in 2003 and declared unconstitutional in 2005, and trials for crimes against humanity resumed, leading to hundreds of convictions.

Alfonsín's presidency ended in hyperinflation in 1989. His Peronist successor Carlos Menem broke with his movement's traditions, privatising state companies and in 1991 pegging the peso to the US dollar, which ended inflation and brought several years of growth. Argentina was struck by two terrorist bombings, of the Israeli embassy in 1992 and of the AMIA Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires in 1994, which killed 85 people. The fixed exchange rate eventually made exports uncompetitive, and recession began in 1998. In December 2001, as the government froze bank withdrawals in the corralito, riots left dozens dead and President Fernando de la Rúa resigned. The country defaulted on close to 100 billion dollars of debt, the largest sovereign default to that date, and the peso was devalued. Poverty rose to more than half the population.

Recovery came under the Peronist Néstor Kirchner, president from 2003 to 2007, and his wife Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, president from 2007 to 2015, helped by high prices for soya and other commodities. Their governments restructured the debt, expanded social programmes, renationalised the pension system and the oil company YPF, and reopened the dictatorship trials. In 2010 Argentina became the first country in Latin America to legalise same-sex marriage. In their later years inflation returned, currency controls spread, and the country was divided between supporters and opponents of Kirchnerism. In 2013 the Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, was elected pope as Francis, the first pope from the Americas; he died in April 2025.

The centre-right Mauricio Macri, president from 2015 to 2019, lifted currency controls and settled with creditors, but a currency crisis in 2018 led him to take the largest loan in the history of the International Monetary Fund. The Peronist Alberto Fernández, with Cristina Fernández de Kirchner as vice-president, governed from 2019 to 2023 through the COVID-19 pandemic and a renewed surge in inflation. The governing coalition lost its majority in Congress in the mid-term elections of 2021, and in 2022 the national football team won its third World Cup.

In November 2023 the libertarian economist Javier Milei, a newcomer to politics, won the presidential run-off with about 56 per cent of the vote against the Peronist Sergio Massa, and took office on 10 December with annual inflation above 140 per cent. His government devalued the peso and imposed deep cuts to public spending and subsidies. Poverty rose sharply in early 2024 before falling later that year, while inflation slowed to about 31 per cent in 2025 and the economy returned to growth. In June 2025 the Supreme Court upheld a six-year prison sentence and lifetime ban from office for Cristina Fernández de Kirchner for fraud in the award of public works contracts. Milei's party, La Libertad Avanza, won the mid-term elections of October 2025 decisively, and in February 2026 Congress passed his reform loosening the labour laws. Argentina also completed its withdrawal from the World Health Organization in March 2026.