The Pampas, the plains of present-day Argentina, figure in the book as the setting for an early colonial mismatch: Spanish settlers sought wealth and labor, but the local hunter-gatherers would neither supply food nor work for them. The contrast with the Spanish conquest of the Guaraní helps explain why Buenos Aires was abandoned while a colonial order based on coerced labor took shape farther inland.

Setting and first encounter

In 1516, the Spanish navigator Juan Díaz de Solís entered the Río de la Plata estuary and claimed the surrounding land for Spain. The region took its name, “River of Silver,” from silver possessed by local people, though the metal that had reached the area actually came from the Inca state in the Andes. On either side of the estuary lived the Charrúas and the Querandí, hunter-gatherers organized in small groups without strong centralized political authorities. They resisted the newcomers; a band of Charrúas killed de Solís as he explored territory he had attempted to claim.

The account presents the Pampas not as an empty expanse awaiting settlement but as a landscape inhabited by peoples whose social organization frustrated the colonists’ plans. The Spaniards wanted resources to extract and labor to command, whereas the Charrúas and Querandí did not provide either on the terms the newcomers sought.

Buenos Aires and abandonment

In 1534, settlers led by Pedro de Mendoza founded a town at the site of Buenos Aires. Its temperate climate seemed hospitable, but that advantage could not compensate for the absence of the wealth and coerced labor the settlers expected. The Charrúas and Querandí refused to feed the Spaniards and would not work when captured; they also attacked the settlement with bows and arrows. The newcomers, unprepared to grow or otherwise provide their own food, went hungry.

The silver associated with the river offered no nearby source of riches: it had come from far to the west, from the Inca state. The Spaniards therefore sent expeditions to find a place with greater wealth and populations they believed they could compel to work. By 1537, an expedition under Juan de Ayolas had traveled up the Paraná River in search of a route to the Incas and encountered the agricultural Guaraní. After a brief conflict, the Spanish overcame Guaraní resistance, founded Asunción, married Guaraní princesses, and established themselves as a new aristocracy. They took over existing systems of forced labor and tribute, placing themselves at their head. Within four years, the Spanish settlers had left Buenos Aires for the new town.

Resettlement and historical significance

Buenos Aires was not resettled until 1580. Its eventual image as the “Paris of South America,” with broad European-style boulevards and wealth derived from Pampas agriculture, stands in sharp contrast to the vulnerable settlement abandoned in the 1530s. That later prosperity should not obscure the initial colonial calculation: the settlers had not come intending to till the soil themselves, but to extract riches and have others provide labor.

The contrast between the Pampas and the Guaraní lands illustrates the book’s broader account of colonial institution-building. Where local people could not be compelled to supply food and labor, the first Spanish settlement failed; where the conquerors could take over established systems of tribute and forced work, they built a hierarchy that served their purposes. The Pampas episode thus shows how the search for labor and extractable wealth shaped the location and form of early Spanish colonial rule.