https://therepository.org/codice/Latin American history told through the document: engravings, chronicles and archives, each one credited.enhttps://therepository.org/codice/ep16-the-army-of-the-andes-bought-710-men-from-their-owners/https://therepository.org/codice/ep16-the-army-of-the-andes-bought-710-men-from-their-owners/Tue, 08 Sep 2026 18:00:06 +0000The Army of the Andes has a published ledger, and it contradicts the monument twice. The enrolment was compulsory, not voluntary. And the single most expensive item in the account was not artillery — it was 710 enslaved men, purchased from the households that owned them.https://therepository.org/codice/ep15-san-martin-asked-for-the-job-nobody-else-would-take/https://therepository.org/codice/ep15-san-martin-asked-for-the-job-nobody-else-would-take/Tue, 08 Sep 2026 01:00:06 +0000In 1814 a colonel asks to be sent to the emptiest corner of the country, six hundred miles from any battlefield. It looks like the end of a career. Six months later the government tries to take the posting back, and the town will not give him up.https://therepository.org/codice/ep14-the-defeat-that-made-san-martin-refuse-to-fight/https://therepository.org/codice/ep14-the-defeat-that-made-san-martin-refuse-to-fight/Thu, 03 Sep 2026 18:00:06 +0000Manuel Belgrano loses his army twice in six weeks, hands what's left to the man replacing him, and stays on as his subordinate -- and that man's first order as commander is not a battle plan. It's a retreat.https://therepository.org/codice/ep13-the-battle-san-martin-s-own-report-left-out/https://therepository.org/codice/ep13-the-battle-san-martin-s-own-report-left-out/Tue, 01 Sep 2026 16:40:06 +0000San Lorenzo is the fifteen-minute fight that made Jose de San Martin's reputation -- but the two things everyone repeats about it, the dying soldier's last words and who that soldier actually was, come from somewhere other than the official report San Martin wrote that same week.https://therepository.org/codice/ep12-the-coup-that-made-him-famous-for-the-wrong-reason/https://therepository.org/codice/ep12-the-coup-that-made-him-famous-for-the-wrong-reason/Sun, 30 Aug 2026 14:25:16 +0000Jose de San Martin's first appearance in this history is not a mountain crossing. It's a colonel pointing artillery at his own government's fort, forcing out an administration that had never lost an election -- and the assembly his coup exists to produce will only do half of what it promised.https://therepository.org/codice/ep11-the-junta-that-voted-out-the-man-who-built-it/https://therepository.org/codice/ep11-the-junta-that-voted-out-the-man-who-built-it/Thu, 27 Aug 2026 10:03:13 +0000He drafted the founding decrees of a revolution, launched its newspaper, and became its most demanding voice. Seven months later, the same government he built voted him into the minority -- using the exact principle he had used to build it.https://therepository.org/codice/ep10-the-city-that-executed-the-man-who-saved-it/https://therepository.org/codice/ep10-the-city-that-executed-the-man-who-saved-it/Wed, 26 Aug 2026 02:42:04 +0000The same city that fired a viceroy without asking permission in the last episode does it again in 1810 -- this time for good. And within three months, the government born from that act puts the hero of the last episode in front of a firing squad, for doing exactly what made him a hero in the first place: acting without Madrid's permission.https://therepository.org/codice/ep09-the-colony-that-fired-its-own-viceroy/https://therepository.org/codice/ep09-the-colony-that-fired-its-own-viceroy/Sun, 23 Aug 2026 17:45:36 +0000A British force smaller than the census this series already counted took the capital of a silver empire in two days. The viceroy ran, with the treasury -- and lost that too. Twice in fourteen months, Buenos Aires gets invaded, and both times the government built to defend it does not. The city does. And then it fires the man Madrid appointed, without asking.https://therepository.org/codice/ep08-the-smugglers-who-became-the-government/https://therepository.org/codice/ep08-the-smugglers-who-became-the-government/Sat, 22 Aug 2026 12:48:25 +0000Spain's answer to a war it did not start was not more soldiers. It was an entire new government, and the biggest fleet it had ever sent to South America. This is how the port two episodes called a crime became a capital -- and how the same decree quietly rerouted a mountain of silver to go with it.https://therepository.org/codice/ep06-the-port-that-was-illegal-for-a-hundred-years/https://therepository.org/codice/ep06-the-port-that-was-illegal-for-a-hundred-years/Thu, 20 Aug 2026 22:35:45 +0000In fifteen ninety-five the Spanish Crown closed the port of Buenos Aires to trade, and kept it closed for most of the next hundred years. The port never stopped working for a single one of them. The strange part is not the smuggling. The strange part is who was keeping the books.https://therepository.org/codice/ep05-the-coin-that-lied-to-three-continents/https://therepository.org/codice/ep05-the-coin-that-lied-to-three-continents/Thu, 20 Aug 2026 03:00:30 +0000In the sixteen thirties, bankers in Genoa and Antwerp began weighing silver bars stamped with the mark of Potosi -- and refusing them. The silver was short. It took Madrid another fifteen years to act, and by then the most trusted coin on earth was carrying a quarter less silver than it claimed, in three continents at once.https://therepository.org/codice/ep04-the-mountain-that-was-spent-before-it-was-mined/https://therepository.org/codice/ep04-the-mountain-that-was-spent-before-it-was-mined/Wed, 19 Aug 2026 13:30:34 +0000In sixteen fifty the richest city in the Americas stood four thousand metres up, on a plateau where almost nothing grows and nothing at all is manufactured. It was there for one reason, and the reason was a mountain. You have heard a number about that mountain. Nobody ever counted it. What was counted is in the paperwork.https://therepository.org/codice/ep03-the-empire-that-ran-on-knotted-string/https://therepository.org/codice/ep03-the-empire-that-ran-on-knotted-string/Mon, 17 Aug 2026 15:04:56 +0000Two million square kilometres. Twelve million people. Administered, taxed and fed from a single capital — without writing, without the wheel, without draught animals, and without money. That sentence is usually delivered as a list of things they lacked. It is the wrong way round.https://therepository.org/codice/ep02-the-letter-nobody-opened-1-189-pages-sent-to-a-king-who-never-read-the/https://therepository.org/codice/ep02-the-letter-nobody-opened-1-189-pages-sent-to-a-king-who-never-read-the/Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:34:23 +0000In 1615 a man in the Andes finished a letter he had been writing for thirty years. It ran to 1,189 pages and 398 drawings, and it was addressed to the king of Spain. The king never read a line of it. You have probably heard it was then lost for three centuries — and that is the part that is not true.https://therepository.org/codice/ep01-how-168-men-captured-an-empire-of-twelve-million/https://therepository.org/codice/ep01-how-168-men-captured-an-empire-of-twelve-million/Sun, 16 Aug 2026 13:54:39 +0000On 16 November 1532, one hundred and sixty-eight Spaniards walked into a valley held by an army of eighty thousand. By sunset the emperor of the largest state on earth was their prisoner, and not one of them was dead. The arithmetic everyone repeats is not wrong — it is just not the reason.