The discussion that was ongoing when the Consulate of Buenos Aires was created, in mid-1794, of which Manuel Belgrano would be its first secretary, was about whether hides, main item of legal and illegal export of rioplatense, they should be considered “fruits of the country” or not.
The issue, which gave rise to a long lawsuithad begun in 1793 and was linked to another of the great businesses of that time: the slave trade.
Two years earlier, a royal decree had established a mechanism to which, with a curious meaning of words It was called the “free black trade.”
By the way, it was not that Africans could trade freely, but that They could be trafficked as slaves by any Spanish subject who obtained permission from the king to introduce them into the colonies.
Since the metropolis wanted, at the same time, to encourage this “horrendous trade” (as Belgrano calls it in his Autobiography) and prevent it from precious metal drainagearticle 2 of that royal decree, of November 24, 1791, established that in payment for the “pieces of the Indies”, that is, slaves, “fruits of the country” could be exported.
One of the main beneficiaries of these permits in Buenos Aires was a merchant, salter and naval shipowner named Tomás Antonio Romero, who tried to export leather using that franchise for the “fruits of the country”, which caused the rejection of the Buenos Aires merchants.
Viceroy Arredondo authorized the merchants to meet in a deliberative “Board” to address the issuewhich congregated, on March 27, 1794, 86 personages, among whom stood out José Martínez de Hoz, Martín de Alzaga, Martín de Sarratea, Jaime Alsina and Vergés and several of those who would shortly afterwards integrate the Consulate: Juan Antonio Lezica, Diego Aguero, Antonio Garcia Lopez, Francisco Ignatius of Ugarte and Francisco Antonio of Climbing.
The ruling of that “Board of Commerce” was that hides should not be considered “fruits of the country,” and therefore should be prohibited at customs in Buenos Aires and Montevideo that Romero shipped them in payment for their “imports” of slaves. (1)
It was not a humanitarian motivation that generated this rejection, but rather a competitive one: Martínez de Hoz, Álzaga, Sarratea and Balbastro too They trafficked in that “trade” with own licenses.
As Belgrano points out in his Autobiography: “This gave rise to a great dispute over whether hides, the main branch of commerce in Buenos Aires, were fruits or not; the men of the Consulate They decided that the hides were not fruitsand, consequently, they should not be understood in those of the grace of extraction instead of blacks.
Despite the rejection of the members of the Buenos Aires ConsulateIn 1797, Romero obtained a royal order allowing him to export “leather and other fruits” for the introduction of a thousand slaves.
Others slave traffickerslike Pedro Duval and José Demaría, would take advantage of similar franchises.
That year Romero founded the insurance company “La Confidence” with Julián del Molino Torres.
1. Guillermo Palombo and Luis Miguel de Igarzábal Clausse, “The ‘great file’ of the fruit lawsuit (1794-1795)”, Temas de Historia Argentina y Americana magazine, no. 21 (2013), page. 89-126, available in the digital repository of the Argentine Catholic University: http://bibliotecadigital.uca.edu.ar/repositorio/revistas/grande-expediente-pleito-frutos.pd.