2024-02-28 03:30:00
Provincial law 5146 says verbatim in its first article: “The city of Viedma is recognized as a pre-existing community, founder and builder of the emancipation process of the Argentine Nation due to the role and function played in the area of the former Fuerte del Río Negro. , founded on April 22, 1779 under the name of Fuerte y Población “Nuestra Señora del Carmen” and which also included the current towns of Viedma and Carmen de Patagones.”
This declaration is inspired by the claim that my province makes of the key role it had – through its capital – in the time of construction of our sovereignty to the southernmost tip of the Homeland. Indeed, the Río Negro Fort was founded by Spain immediately after England lost its colonies in the United States. As a result, the Crown decided to have a permanent presence in Patagonia because it feared that the territory and its sea could be lost in the hands of the United Kingdom.
To achieve this objective, Spain decides to send an Andalusian farmer to found a population with the capacity to sustain itself by working the land. Francisco de Viedma and about thirty farming families gave birth to that population on the banks of the Negro River, from which the current cities of Viedma and Carmen de Patagones became.
The Río Negro Fort was the base for the projection of the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, first, and of the nascent Argentina later, to the extreme south. It is no coincidence that Luis Piedrabuena was born in this place where he learned to sail when he was barely nine years old or that Viedma was the capital of the National Territory of Patagonia from 1878 to 1884.
But among all the relevant events that we can point out, the most significant is, without a doubt, the combat of March 7, 1827 when the residents of the Río Negro fort had to join the few regular troops that were there to defend the port of the invasion commanded by an officer of English origin, James Shepherd, and who, under the orders of the Empire of Brazil, arrived in command of a force composed of five warships and 600 infantry.
In an epic combat, the Creole forces of the Negro River defeated the invaders in the framework of the war that our country was waging at that time over the dispute over the eastern province of Uruguay and assured the dominion of Patagonia that would have remained in the making if the Captain Shepherd’s forces would have achieved their objective.
The combat of March 7, 1827, together with the Vuelta de Obligado (1845) and the Battle of Malvinas (1982), is one of the three milestones in the defense of our territorial sovereignty that we proudly claim despite the general ignorance that history official, biased by Buenos Aires centralism, has been in charge of silencing.
In this time of contempt that my province and Patagonia are subject to by the Milei government, I think it is appropriate to remember the historical origin of what we are so that the Casa Rosada stops seeing us as an empty space of commitment and national determination. or as a space to extract their wealth in exchange, if possible, for nothing.
Vice Governor of Río Negro
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