La Rioja Province is an inland region of northwestern Argentina whose political and economic history helps explain why the country’s elegant capital can look unlike the rest of the nation while remaining connected to a broader Latin American pattern. The province’s colonial extraction, its nineteenth-century warlord politics, and its later accommodation with Buenos Aires made the interior’s interests part of Argentina’s institutional settlement rather than an exception to it.

Setting and Colonial Economy

La Rioja lies in the mountains far to the northwest of Buenos Aires. At the time of the Spanish conquest of the Americas, the area was an outlying part of the Inca Empire and had a dense Indigenous population. Spanish rule established encomiendas there, and the resulting economy was organized around extraction: the region produced food and bred mules for the miners at Potosí. In this respect, La Rioja resembled the mining regions of Peru and Bolivia more than the prosperous image associated with Buenos Aires.

Warlord Politics and the Interior

In the nineteenth century, La Rioja produced the warlord Facundo Quiroga. He ruled the area lawlessly and marched his army on Buenos Aires, making the province part of the political struggle between the interior and the capital. The later national settlement did not simply extend Buenos Aires’s institutions across the country. It rested on agreements between the interior provinces and Buenos Aires, including a truce in which La Rioja’s warlords agreed to leave the capital alone so that it could make money. In return, Buenos Aires’s elites gave up on reforming the institutions of the interior.

Menem and the National Settlement

The province’s continuing place in national politics is illustrated by Carlos Saúl Menem. He was born in Anillaco, in La Rioja Province, rather than in Buenos Aires, and served three terms as the province’s governor before becoming a national political figure. His background draws attention to the distance between the capital’s celebrated architecture and Argentina’s less visible interior, whose political preferences were incorporated into the national order.

Significance

The contrast between Buenos Aires and La Rioja is not evidence that Argentina escaped the extractive institutional patterns found elsewhere in Latin America. The book argues that the bargains between the capital’s elites and the interior embedded the latter’s political preferences in Argentine institutions, helping to produce an institutional path similar to those of other extractive Latin American countries. La Rioja is therefore significant both as a region with its own history of colonial extraction and provincial power, and as a case that reveals how Argentina’s national institutions were shaped through accommodation rather than uniform reform.