Montevideo, the capital, long a center of royalist sympathies and for some years hostile to the revolutionary government in Buenos Aires, was reunited with La Plata in 1814.
Elsewhere the people of the province followed the fortunes of Jose Gervasio Artigas, an able and valiant cavalry officer, who roamed through it at will, bidding defiance to any authority not his own.
Most of the former viceroyalty of La Plata had thus, to all intents and purposes, thrown off the yoke of Spain.
Chile was the only other province that for a while gave promise of similar action.

Here again it was the capital city that took the lead.
On receipt of the news of the occurrences at Buenos Aires in May, 1810, the people of Santiago forced the captain general to resign and, on the 18th of September, replaced him by a junta of their own choosing.
But neither this body, nor its successors, nor even the Congress that assembled the following year, could establish a permanent and effective government.

Nowhere in Spanish America, perhaps, did the lower classes count for so little, and the upper class for so much, as in Chile.
Though the great landholders were disposed to favor a reasonable amount of local autonomy for the country, they refused to heed the demands of the radicals for complete independence and the establishment of a republic.

Accordingly, in proportion as their opponents resorted to measures of compulsion, the gentry gradually withdrew their support and offered little resistance when troops dispatched by the viceroy of Peru restored the Spanish regime in 1814.

The irreconcilable among the patriots fled over the Andes to the western part of La Plata, where they found hospitable refuge.
But of all the Spanish dominions in South America none witnessed so desperate a struggle for emancipation as the viceroyalty of New Granada.
Learning of the catastrophe that had befallen the mother country, the leading citizens of Caracas, acting in conjunction with the cabildo, deposed the captain general on April 19, 1810, and created a junta in his stead.