By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

‘Weapons have given you independence. Laws will give you freedom.’ This pledge to his fellow countrymen from Francisco Paula de Santander, a Colombian independence leader, is inscribed above the doorway of the Palace of Justice in Bogota’s Plaza BolIvar, its paved main square. The inscription has an unintentionally ironic ring to it — and not only because freedom and the rule of law long proved elusive, in Colombia and throughout Latin America. The current version of the palace, of blond stone blocks, dates only from the 1990s. The previous building was destroyed by fire after guerrillas from the nationalist M-19 movement seized it in 1985, taking the Supreme Court hostage. The army, deploying armoured cars, retook the palace after hours of fighting; 95 people, including the Supreme Court justices, died in the confrontation.1 Not far away from the palace are other reminders of the violence that has intermittently dogged Colombia. Near the Congress building on the Carrera Septima, the city’s main artery, a plaque marks the spot where General Rafael Uribe, a Liberal leader of the civil war of 1899 to 1902 — chronicled in Garcia Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude — was assassinated a decade after he had made peace with a Conservative government. Half a dozen blocks to the north along the same avenue a similar plaque marks a still more controversial assassination: Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, a crowd-pulling populist Liberal who seemed assured of victory in Colombia’s 1950 presidential election, was shot at point-blank range by a lone assassin as he left his lawyer’s office. His murder on 9 April 1948 triggered a yet bloodier civil war, known simply as la violencia, which claimed perhaps 180,000 lives. It is still debated today in Colombia whether the killer acted alone or at the behest of the Conservative opposition.

Though falling short of the abysmal standard set by many other parts of the world, notably Europe, political violence has been all too commonplace in Latin America over the past two centuries. In that regard, Colombia occupies a prominent role, though it is unusual partly because armed conflict has continued into the twenty-first century even as it has died away everywhere else in the region over the past decade. Paradoxically, Colombia has another claim to exceptionalism — one for which Santander and his followers can take much credit. The country has an unusually long democratic tradition: with only one brief exception, it has elected civilian governments since the 183os with suffrage arrangements that compared favorably with much of Europe. That statement requires one or two caveats. There were periodic civil wars, mainly between the Liberals and the Conservatives. The murder of Gaitán plunged the country not just into la violencia but also into a short military dictatorship. Civilian rule was restored under a power-sharing pact between the two main parties. This lasted from 1958 to 1974; it brought stability but restricted political competition. And the writ of government has never extended over the whole of a huge and fragmented territory with poor internal communications. Even so, Colombia, along with Costa Rica and Uruguay, stands out from the rest of Latin America: in all three countries, authoritarian dictatorships have been brief and rare. In much of the rest of the region, periods of civilian rule alternated with dictatorship; in some countries authoritarian rule was the norm at least until the 1980s.

As Santander’s injunction makes plain, some of Latin America’s independence leaders of the 1820s wanted to lay the foundations of democratic government. So why has democracy fared so poorly? This chapter will explore that question by surveying the region’s history for the first century or so after independence. History still hangs heavy in Latin America: it is the stuff of contemporary politics, constantly invoked by Hugo Chavez or Mexico’s Zapatista movement or by Argentina’s Peronists, recalled in street names and statues. As Enrique Krauze, a Mexican historian, has said of his country, ‘the weight of the past has sometimes been more present than the present itself. And a repetition of the past has sometimes seemed to be the only foreseeable future.’2 That is especially true in Mexico, but it also applies in many other Latin American countries. It is hard to analyze the prospects for consolidating democracy without regard to this history, to the lessons that Latin Americans draw from it, and the institutions, political traditions and economic practices which it has bequeathed to the region.

The revolt of the 13 British colonies against King George III firmly planted democracy and enlightenment republicanism in the western hemisphere. Along with the writings of the French philosophes and British economic liberalism, the political example set by the founding fathers of the United States exercised a strong intellectual appeal for many of the independence leaders in Latin America. It would not be until the end of the nineteenth century, the age of Arielismo, that ‘anti-Americanism’ would take a firm hold in the region. Yet several things would hold the newly independent Latin American nations back, and impede them from following the United States on its path of democracy and development. These included the nature of the independence struggle itself, the socio-economic order bequeathed by Iberia, geographical factors and consequent economic fragility.

By comparison with the war of American Independence of 1776—82, the fight for independence in Spanish America was longer, bloodier and more destructive. It differed, too, in being triggered by events on the other side of the Atlantic. Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion of Iberia in 1807—8 and his overthrow of the Spanish Bourbon monarchy created a power vacuum at the heart of the empire. In 1808, as news of these developments reached first Caracas, and then Buenos Aires and other colonial centers, Juntas were formed to exercise power. They proclaimed a nominal loyalty to Fernando VII, who was a captive in a French chateau. But discontent among the criollos, as American-born whites were known, had been building for at least a generation. At the start of the nineteenth century, criollos made up some 3.3 million of Spanish America’s total population of 16.9 million.3 They were outnumbered by 7.5 million Indians, 5.3 million mestizos and 776,000 blacks. Many criollos formed part of an incipient middle class of managers, lawyers and other professionals. Others formed part of the economic aristocracy of Spanish America, the owners of the great haciendas and the mines and the merchants and traders. But all of them were excluded from political power.

During his reign from 1759 to 1788, Carlos III, Fernando’s grandfather, had made a vigorous effort to halt his country’s long decline, and to reform its system of colonial rule. These ‘Bourbon reforms’ were in part the result of new ways of thinking. The rationalism of the French enlightenment had an important influence in Iberia. It challenged — albeit moderately at first — the Catholic conservatism that had held Spain and its colonies in its thrall since the Counter-Reformation. In Spanish America, the reforms involved more open trade (but only between ports within the empire, not with other countries), the weakening of the power of the Church (the Jesuits were expelled, for example), and a modest opening to new ideas. Above all, the reforms involved more efficient administration. But that meant a tightening of the control of Madrid over local affairs — a ‘new imperialism’ as John Lynch, a historian of the independence era, puts it.4 In particular, the Bourbons restored a near-monopoly of political office in the Americas to Spanish-born peninsulares (who numbered no more than 40,000 in the empire as a whole around 1800). This applied not just to the viceroys and other senior officials but to membership of the audiencias or high courts: of 266 appointments to audiencias from 1751 to 1808, only 62 were of criollos.5

These reforms had two unintended effects. First, they helped to divide the rich and powerful in both Spain and its colonies into liberal and conservative camps — a division that would last in both places until at least the early twentieth century. In Spain itself, liberalism first showed its hand when opponents of Napoleon convened in Cádiz in i8io a parliament or Cortes — an institution with medieval origins but which had been snuffed out by centuries of absolutism. A majority of the members of the Cortes were reformers: they called themselves Liberals, the first time anywhere that the word was used as a political identity.6 The Cortes proceeded to declare itself sovereign and issue a constitution which called for a parliamentary monarchy and widespread male suffrage. Second, in Spanish America, the reforms rammed home to the criollos that they lacked the political power to defend their economic privilege. That gave rise to grievance, over the trade monopoly and taxes, for example. It also bred disquiet: some criollos came to see Spanish weakness as being as big a threat to their interests as Spanish power. They worried that a power vacuum at the top would threaten social order and private property.

They were haunted by a two-headed specter of popular rebellion. In 1791, inspired by the principles of the French Revolution, the black slaves of the sugar island of Saint-Domingue, France’s richest colony, revolted. ‘It was a terrifying revelation of the explosive force of stifled savage hatred,’ as one account puts it.7 In the first two months, 2,000 whites (or one in five) were killed, i8o sugar plantations and 900 coffee and indigo farms were destroyed and ten thousand  slaves died in fighting, repression or famine. After a dozen years of violence and warfare, in which they successively defeated armies sent by Republican France, Spain, Britain and Napoleon, the former slaves triumphed, and in 1804 Saint-Domingue became Haiti — the second independent nation in the western hemisphere. But such was the destruction and the infighting among the patriots that the victory was a Pyrrhic one.8

Ten years prior to Haiti’s slave revolt, in the mountains south of Cusco, the former Inca capital, an Andean Indian cacique (local boss) called José Gabriel Condorcanqui had rebelled against the viceroy in Lima. He took the name of Tupac Amaru II, after the last Inca. His demands were a vague mixture of opposition to the Bourbon reforms, Inca revivalism and independence. After six months, he was captured and, along with his wife Micaela Bastides, vas executed with great cruelty in Cusco’s main square. His rebellion had extended over much of the southern half of the viceroyalty of Peru, as far i northern Argentina. Some one hundred thousand people died, and there was much destruction of property.9 Although Condorcanqui himself had stressed that his movement was a multi-ethnic one, many of his Indian supporters had been quick to turn their ire on the whites.

The memory of these events meant that many criollos, especially in Peru and Mexico with their large Indian populations, did not at first favor cutting the link with Spain. Even Simon Bolivar, the great Liberator of northern South America, worried about the sheer numbers of the slaves and the mixed-bloocipardos in his native Venezuela, stating: ‘A great volcano lies at our feet. Who shall restrain the oppressed 10 Many historians have thus seen independence not as a progressive revolution in the mould of that of Washington and Jefferson, but rather as a conservative reaction. It was that— but it was more than that. Motives and interests within Spanish America varied, but the desire for the removal of colonial restraints was strong. It expressed itself first in Venezuela and the River Plate region, in part because they were the first to hear the tumultuous news from Spain and in part because as trading colonies they had been hit hardest by the Bourbon reforms. In both places, the criollos, invoking a Spanish tradition of communalism with strong medieval roots, called a cabildo (town meeting), deposed the colonial authorities and proclaimed a governing junta. In Caracas, independence was declared in 1811; in the United Provinces of the River Plate, from which would emerge Argentina, the declaration came five years later. In Mexico alone the cry for independence came from below, from Miguel Hidalgo, a parish priest in the central Bajio region, who raised an Indian horde.

The struggle was almost everywhere protracted and convoluted, taking on the character of a civil war. The patriots were often divided, by local interest as much as by ideology. Social disorder, or the fear of it, caused many criollos to hesitate before breaking the bonds with Spain. The defeat of Napoleon saw Fernando restored to the Spanish throne in 1814, able to dispatch reinforcements to America. An expedition of ten thousand  seasoned troops reached Venezuela in 1815, the darkest period for the patriot cause across the region. These were partly offset by the arrival of 6,000 mainly British and Irish volunteers who fought as mercenaries with Bolivar’s armies. This force apart, Latin America lacked the kind of external support that France had offered the Washington in the United States.

Two things combined finally to surprise South America from Spain’s grasp. The first was better strategy and organization on the patriot side. In southern South America, José de San Martin, an Argentine who had served for two decades as a regular officer in the Spanish army before joining the patriotic cause, pulled off a bold strategic move. He organized and led a force of five thousand troops across the Andes to Chile, through snowy 4,000-metre-high passes, an surprised the Spanish forces there. Having secured Chile, he embarked in the ships of Thomas Cochrane, a swashbuckling British admiral who served the patriot cause as a mercenary, and landed his army in Peru. He (temporarily) freed Lima, which until the Bourbon reforms had been the capital of the whole of Spanish South America and remained a royalist bastion. San Martin’s forces joined up with those of Simon Bolivar. Bolivar himself had recovered from a rout in his native Venezuela in 1812. By allying with the ilaneros (cowboys) of the Venezuelan plains, and through indefatigable generalship, including a march up and over the Andes to Bogota even more demanding than that of San Martin, he had freed northern South America. Spain’s last redoubt in Peru was surrounded and would fall to a multinational army under Bolivar. In 1826, the last remaining Spanish troops surrendered to his forces in Upper Peru (soon to become Bolivia).

The second factor was the twists and turns of peninsular politics, as power in Spain’s restored monarchy oscillated between incipient parliamentary liberalism and absolutist reaction. Spanish strategy was misguided as well as confused. The liberals failed to seek compromises, such as home rule, until it was far too late. Royalist repression was often self-defeating. The Spanish forces sequestered the property of their opponents and, in Colombia for example, executed a number of patriots. On the other hand, the advent of a liberal government in Spain after 1820 prompted the conservative criollos of Mexico to opt for independence. The disorderly Indian armies led by Hidalgo and another radical priest, José Miguel Morelos, had rampaged across half the country to the alarm of the criollos, before being defeated and their leaders killed. In 1821, Agustin Iturbide, a criollo general who had fought for Spain, made common cause with the remaining rebel leaders, proclaimed independence and ruled briefly as emperor of Mexico.

Only in Brazil was independence a less-than-traumatic affair. When Napoleon invaded Iberia, Britain arranged to ship the Portuguese monarch and his court across the Atlantic to Rio de Janeiro. It was the only occasion the history of European empire in which a colony became the metropolis. The result was that it was the Portuguese monarchy that provided Brazil with almost all of the founding institutions, usually the task of a postcolonial government: a centralized administration and bureaucracy; superior law courts; a public library and an academy of fine arts; a school of medicine and law; a national press and national bank; and a military academy.’1 After hostilities ceased in Europe, King Joao VI returned, with some tardiness, to Lisbon. As the Cortes in Portugal attempted to reassert colonial control, Joao’s Jest son, left behind as regent, quickly realized that the price of maintaining monarchy in Brazil was independence. He declared it in 1822 and ruled as Dom Pedro I. Though war with Portugal followed, it was brief and mainly ::led at sea by the skill of Cochrane.’2
The armies involved in the independence wars were not large: Bolivar never more than ten t men into battle. But in some places almost two decades of near-continuous fighting wreaked a heavy toll. Mines had been flooded, farms looted and bridges destroyed. In 1821, the coin produced by the mint in Mexico City from the country’s silver mines totaled just 6 million pesos, down from million pesos a year before the wars.13 Recovery would take decades. With elegance but perhaps some exaggeration, Felipe Fernández-Armesto, an Anglo- Spanish historian, has recently summarized the comparative impact:
the independence wars were, in short, the making of the United States and the ruin of much of the rest of the Americas ... To fight the wars, all the affected (Spanish-American) states had to sacrifice liberties to caudillismo and civil values to militarism ... People in the Americas often speak of the chaotic politics, democratic immaturity, and economic torpor of Latin American tradition as if they were an atavistic curse, a genetic defect, a Latin legacy. Really, like everything else in history, they are products of circumstance, and of the circumstances, in particular, in which independence was won.14

                                                                                                The colonial inheritance

Apart from its costly birth, the second handicap faced by newly independent Latin America was the legacy of the Iberian colonial order, which made ill equipped for democracy and development. Colonial Latin America differed radically from New England or Canada (though less so from the more southerly of Britain’s American colonies). In the sixteenth century, the conquistadores had brought with them a kind of militarized feudalism. This had been honed in the reconquista, the seven centuries of intermittent war that had driven the Moors from Spain. In 1492, in one of history’s more striking coincidences of date, Columbus made his first landfall in the ‘new world’ just as the Muslim emirate of Granada, the last Moorish foothold Iberia, was overrun, completing the reconquista. The Spanish took two other sixteenth-century philosophies across the Atlantic. One was a militant, intolerant Catholicism, derived partly from the reconquista but given more force by the Counter-Reformation with its Inquisition and apparatus of censorship. The Spanish crown tried to control who settled in the Americas indeed it went so far as to obtain a papal bull to uphold its authority to so. In sharp contrast with English-speaking North America, no heretics, dissidents or freethinkers needed to apply. The second guiding philosophy was mercantilism. This doctrine held that gold and silver bullion was the ultimate source of wealth — and not merely another commodity — and that trade was a zero-sum game. So Spain imposed a rigid monopoly of trade with its colonies, and discouraged the production of items that might compete with its own farmers and artisans. The backbone of the colonial economy became the hacienda (the large landed estate with resident serfs), the plantation and the mine. The crown had swiftly imposed central authority on the con quistadores. The principal institution of government was the audiencia, a judicial body but one which was presided over by the king’s representative — the viceroy or captain general — whom it also advised. Though there were also cabildos (town councils) their responsibilities were mior. The crown issued a constant flow of decrees — over 400,000 by 1635, though they were later codified into 6,400.15 Almost from the start, the crown relied on the sale of offices to raise revenue. Several familiar characteristics of Latin American government thus date from the colonial period: centralisation and the blurring of executive and judicial authority.16 To this list one might add a regulatory mania. Legislation in Latin America often embodies an ideal world, impossible to carry out in practice. That gave rise to a famous response among colonial officials: obedezco pero no cumplo (I obey but I do not comply). The result was less the rule of law than the realm of discretion, giving rise to corruption and politically influenced justice.17

Unlike the Pilgrim Fathers (and the Portuguese in Brazil), the Spaniards conquered territories with large populations of native Americans. In Mexico’s central plateau, in Guatemala and in Peru, these had formed sophisticated and wealthy societies based on sedentary farming. At the time of their respective European conquests, Latin America may have contained some 20 million people, compared with some 3 million spread across what would become Canada and the United States. Millions of native Americans died, above all from disease but also from forced labor and conquest itself. But one of the enduring differences between the two Americas is that many more Indians survived in Latin America. The Spaniards quickly realized that they needed Indian labor. Colonial Spanish America became a caste society: a small group of large landowners, officials and clergy ruled over a much larger population of Indians. Spanish absolutism recognized some rights (known as fueros) for its subjects, but these were exercised by groups, not individuals. The Church, the army and militia, some professions and the Indians had their own fueros. Indeed, the Spaniards found it convenient to administer the Indian population through curacas or caciques, local Indian leaders, many of whose privileges were left intact (this arrangement came : be known as the Reptthlica de Indios). Many of their charges suffered servitude in mines and haciendas. Others continued to live in traditional communities, whose lands were given some legal protection. But they paid  tribute to their new overlords.

This arrangement was basically stable. Pre-conquest Indian societies were themselves rigidly hierarchical: the Indians thus swapped a local master for a European one — although the Incas, in particular, had been more paternalist rulers than the Spaniards. The conquest had involved the brutal imposition of a new ideological order as well as a political and economic one. In Mexico City recent excavation has revealed how the Spaniards built their cathedral on top of part of the Aztec Templo Mayor; in Cusco, a Dominican monastery stands on top of the Koricancha (the temple of the sun), the holiest shrine of the Inca empire. The Indian gods had failed, and those of the con quistadores had triumphed. No wonder that the Indians would embrace the Catholic religion while seeking to infuse it with their own practices, beliefs and images (such as Mexico’s Virgin of Guadalupe). No wonder, too, that some of Latin America’s Indian peoples to this day remain suspicious of change and modernization. Their history since the conquest has been one of enforced submission, followed by more or less successful adaptation punctuated by occasional outbursts of rebellion, often of great violence. In places where the Indian population was wiped out (Cuba, Hispaniola), or where Indians were relatively few, nomadic and difficult to subjugate (Brazil), the colonists turned to the mass import of African slaves instead.

Inequality was a fundamental and integral aspect of colonial societies, whether they were based on serfdom or slavery or both. ‘Perhaps nowhere is inequality more shocking,’ noted Alexander von Humboldt, an aristocratic German scientist and traveler, in his essay on New Spain (Mexico) published in i8n. ‘The architecture of public and private buildings, the women’s elegant wardrobes, the high society atmosphere: all testify to an extreme social polish which is in extraordinary contrast to the nakedness, ignorance and coarseness of the 18 Spanish colonial theory did not entertain the idea of racial integration. It envisaged racial separation, partly in order to protect the Indian population from the criollos. Spaniards, criollos and Indians lived under separate laws. Yet over the centuries much racial mixing occurred. Men always greatly outnumbered women among Iberian colonists, and overwhelmingly so at the start. Miscegenation resulted in a large number of mestizos and mulatos, pardos and zambos. In that sense, Spanish colonial society was more fluid than that of British North America (and Portuguese Brazil even more so). The colonial period saw ‘the incomplete development of a heterogeneous hispanic-indigenous-mestizo -criollo society, which to this day exists in ferment’, in the words of Jorge Basadre, Peru’s greatest historian.19 This was even more the case in Mexico.

Even so, the underlying socio-economic divides, broadly speaking, ran along racial lines. The fears, resentments and ignorance which racial difference
generated made that divide all the harder to break down. At the heart of the history of Latin America since independence has been the tension between the beneficiaries of that divide and the gathering forces of socio-political mestizaje.

While Brazil remained intact, by 1830 mainland Spanish America had fragmented into 15 separate countries.20 Given its size, this was inevitable. The new republics extended over an area stretching from the borders of Oregon and Oklahoma to the stony desert of Patagonia. But while some of the new countries, such as those in Central America, looked too small to be viable, others were too big and unwieldy quickly to become coherent nation-states. The most obvious example was Mexico. It would lose half its original territory, as first Texas declared itself independent and then the United States waged a successful war of conquest (1846—8), seizing northern Mexico in the name of its ‘manifest destiny’ to occupy the North American continent.21 Meanwhile, Yucatan was for practical purposes all but independent during the first half of the nineteenth century. In 1849, it asked to be annexed by the United States, but was turned down. It had no road or rail link with Mexico City until as late as the 1950s. Until then, its ties with New Orleans and Havana, via steamer services, were closer than those with the Mexican capital.

Geography placed huge obstacles in the way of development. Distances are vast: Brazil is as large in area as the continental United States, while Argentina (with 37 million people today) is almost as big as India (with 1 billion). The Andes are a formidable barrier to communication, as is the Amazon basin. Most of the more populated parts of Latin America lack navigable rivers. There are no significant ones on the Pacific Coast at all. In South America, three mighty river systems — the Amazon, the Paraná and the Orinoco — traverse the continent from the Andean watershed to the Atlantic. Only in the past decade have the Paraná-Paraguay and stretches of the Amazon been turned into reliable waterways for the transport of bulk cargoes.22 In the high altitudes of the Andes, life is harsh.23 To survive, farmers must exploit microclimates at varying altitudes as well as grappling with erratic rainfall. To do so demands a high degree of collective organization — a world away from the family homestead of bucolic New England. Tropical lowlands pose a different set of challenges, including disease, flooding and hurricanes. While some parts of Latin America get little or no rain, others get far too much: some 70 per cent of Mexico’s total annual average rainfall lands on the state of Tabasco, for example. To cap it all, earthquakes are relatively common along the region’s western mountain spine, and so are volcanic eruptions. Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean suffer frequent hurricanes.

Yet Latin America also possesses geographical advantages. These include abundant natural resources, and much good land. The Pampas of Argentina, Uruguay and southern Brazil form some of the world’s most fertile farmland, blessed with a temperate climate. For much of the nineteenth century, land was abundant in relation to population (which is variously estimated to have totaled only 15 to 20 million at independence). But transport difficulties only began to be eased by the coming of railways in the second half of the nineteenth century, and later by air transport, which flourished as early as the 1920S in countries such as Brazil and Colombia. Contrary to nationalist myth, the railways did much to develop the domestic economy, as well as exports. In southern Brazil, for example, railways gave a big boost to commercial farming aimed at supplying the growing cities.24 Even so, in the larger countries communications between the capital and outlying areas often remained poor until the mid-twentieth century. This stimulated regional political movements and engendered persistent localism as well as impeding internal trade. ‘Its own extent is the evil from which the Argentine Republic suffers ... wastes containing no human dwelling, are, generally speaking, the unmistakable boundaries between its several provinces,’ complained Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, later president of Argentina, in Facundo, his mid-nineteenth- century tract against the evils of caudillismo.25

                                                                                           Caudillos and Modernizers

Spain’s monopoly of trade and high political office during the colonial period meant that the new republics had no experience of self-government, as BolIvar bitterly complained. It would take many of them half a century or more to achieve a degree of stability. Intermittent internal conflict added to the damage inflicted by the independence war. When they were not merely struggles for local or national power, these battles were over how the new republics should governed — and by and for whom. Early efforts to establish a degree of popular sovereignty failed almost everywhere. Most of the new republics lapsed into three decades or more of rule by caudillos or strongmen, most of them army officers of the independence campaigns. Some were enlightened; many were not.

For different reasons, many writers on Latin America of both left and right have stressed the continuities rather than changes associated with independence. Rule by a small ‘white’ elite and the basic inequalities of colonial society were preserved. In some ways they were aggravated: the liberal commitment to private property weakened some of the legal protections for Indian communal land. In many countries, that would allow some degree of land-grabbing by hacendados throughout the rest of the nineteenth century.

Together with mine owners and large-scale traders, the landowners would form an oligarchy, holding political as well as economic power. Yet to stop there is misleading. The removal of the Spanish monopolies on political office, trade and the economy did usher in a new order, but they did so gradually and by no means smoothly. Overall, ‘Latin America was a far more egalitarian place after independence than before. Indians and mestizos rose to positions of power all over Spanish America,’ in the words of David Bushnell and Neill Macaulay, two historians of the nineteenth century in the region.26 The newly independent countries all adopted constitutions based, broadly speaking, on liberal principles. This in itself was notable, given that most of Europe was still in the sway of absolutism. The constitutions were heavily influenced by that of the United States, by its Bill of Rights and the Declaration of the Rights of Man of the French revolution. Though suffrage was limited by property qualifications, usually to only a small percentage of adult males, so it was in Britain and the United States in this period.

In Brazil, Dom Pedro I established a liberal constitutional monarchy which included elements of representative parliamentary government. This involved indirect elections — deputies were picked by provincial electors, and senators chosen by the emperor. Suffrage was relatively wide for the times, with some ii per cent of the total population able to vote for the provincial electors in 1872.27 According to a recent study by Bolivar Lamounier, a Brazilian political scientist, the grafting of this representative element onto the remnants of Portuguese absolutism was essential to maintain government control over such a large country, raven with bloody local rebellions in the first thirty years after independence.28 Under the first emperor’s long-reigning and Brazilian- born son, Dom Pedro 11(1831—89), this incipient parliamentary system worked well for several decades. In the view of Thomas Skidmore, a scholar of Brazil, it offered a political environment comparable to that of Victorian Britain in a much poorer and less developed country.29 The emperor was a fair and honest ruler, an urbane and learned man who took the trouble to learn Guarani, the most widely spoken indigenous language. But the last two decades of his rule, following war with Paraguay which he pursued implacably, were marked by political stagnation. In 1868 Dom Pedro dismissed a Liberal administration, replacing it with a Conservative one. Thereafter, the emperor increasingly became a hostage to advisers who were bent on delaying change — and the abolition of slavery in particular — for as long as possible. This doomed Latin America’s only experiment with monarchy. But the Brazilian empire’s notable achievements had been to keep the vast country united — it was potentially as fissiparous as Spanish America — and to implant a representative tradition.

In the new Spanish-speaking republics, as in Brazil, the basic political split was between liberals, like Santander, who wanted to move swiftly to dismantle the colonial order, and conservatives, such as Bolivar became, who were worried about instability and disorder (‘governability’, one might say). Across the region, the role of the Church became a battleground. It was seen by liberals as a reactionary bastion and as an obstacle to new ways of thinking and by conservatives as a powerful force for social order. Another divide was over federalism: liberals tended to favor decentralization, though not always. Argentina was an exception: there federalism was seen as a way of recognizing regional differences, and of neutralizing the overweening economic power of Buenos Aires, home of liberalism and jealous monopolizer of lucrative customs revenues. Looked at through another optic, liberals were standard- bearers of modernization and of French and British enlightenment thought, while conservatives defended a paternalist social order derived from Church and colony. Such divisions cut across class: artisans and Indians were as likely to support conservatives as liberals, partly because liberals tended to oppose communal ownership of land and to favor lower tariffs on imports. This division is an enduring one. It is reflected in part in two archetypal figures in Latin American politics: the caudillo and what one might call the modernizing technocrat. The modernizers were not always liberals, though they often were, while the caudillos were characteristically, but not necessarily, conservatives, and some (though by no means all) were social paternalists.

Many elements of both these archetypal figures were awkwardly united in the person of Simon Bolivar. He was ‘an exceptionally complex man, a liberator who scorned liberalism, a soldier who disparaged militarism, a republican who admired monarchy,’ as John Lynch put it in a recent biography.30 Bolivar was a cultivated man. He had spent several years in Europe — he famously (and perhaps apocryphally) swore to liberate South America while visiting Rome with his tutor and friend, Simon Rodriguez. While on campaign, his aides lugged around a large trunk of books: Voltaire and Montesquieu were among his favorite reading, but the trunk also included Locke and Bentham.31 He was a great correspondent, and wrote with clarity and vigor. He admired the systems of government of both the United States and Britain, the most democratic of the day. He found slavery abhorrent. He argued passionately for co-operation among the new republics, and is rightly invoked today as a precursor of Latin American integration. He attempted to maintain Venezuela, Nueva Granada (present-day Colombia) and Ecuador united as a single country, Gran Colombia. And yet his chief political legacy is a yearning for strong government and paternalist authoritarianism. He was insistent that without a strong central authority the new republics would fall apart. Though he subscribed to Montesquieu’s doctrine of the separation of powers, what he most liked about the French philosopher was his insistence that laws and institutions should be adapted to a country’s geography and culture. From Rousseau he took the idea that it is the role of the leader to interpret and represent ‘the general will’. In other words, strong and effective leadership is self-legitimating and when necessary should override institutions that guarantee individual liberty. Thus, much as Bolivar admired the United States, he once said that he would rather see the Latin American republics adopt the Koran than US federalism, which was ‘too perfect’. In South America ‘events ... have demonstrated that perfectly representative institutions are not appropriate to our character, our customs, and our current level of knowledge and experience’, he wrote in 1815.32

The definitive statement of Bolivar’s political thought came a decade later, when he was asked to write a constitution for a new republic which had taken his name: Bolivia. This document had some features of liberal democracy: nominally at least, the executive, legislature and judiciary were to be separated, and were to be complemented by a fourth ‘moral’ power, a ‘chamber of censors’ with a scrutinizing function. But Bolivar also included a hereditary senate and a president for life, who would have far-reaching emergency powers and the right to name his successor. This is constitutional monarchy in all but name. This document was swiftly discarded by Bolivia. In 1828, Bolivar assumed the dictatorship of Gran Colombia. He proceeded to undo some of the liberal reforms introduced during his long absence campaigning in Peru by Santander, his vice-president from whom he had become estranged. Bolivar restored the Indian tribute and the privileges of the Church and banned the works of Bentham. Despite his own views on the matter, he never tried to force through a ban on slavery. After Gran Colombia split into its three constituent parts in 1830, Santander, a pragmatic liberal, was elected as president of Colombia and is the founder of its democratic tradition. But he is long forgotten outside his own country. It is the great Liberator who still casts a shadow today.

Bolivar was not himself a caudillo: he always sought to institutionalize authority.33 But his name has long been invoked and misused by authoritarian rulers of far less noble qualities, and far less sense. Venezuelan dictators, starting in the late nineteenth century, found it expedient to establish an official cult of Bolivar. His remains were repatriated in 1842, and in 1876 placed in a giant casket which rests in the national Pantheon, a former church a few blocks up the hill from his birthplace in the centre of Caracas. The latest exponent of the cult is Hugo Chavez, who claims to be implementing a ‘Bolivarian Revolution’ in Venezuela. Chavez included some elements from the Bolivian constitution (such as the ‘moral power’) in Venezuela’s charter of 2001. He shows a Bolivarian disregard for checks on executive power. Although he has not dispensed with elections, Chavez shows every sign of wanting to be president for life.34 But there is no reason to believe that Bolivar, the patrician aristocrat, the instinctive liberal turned pragmatic conservative who admired British parliamentary monarchy, the man who tried to sell his mines to British investors, would have felt represented by Chavez’s militarist populism. This, Lynch observes tartly, is a ‘modern perversion of the cult’ which distorts Bolivar’s ideas; at least past dictators ‘more or less respected the basic thought of the Liberator, even when they misrepresented its meaning.’35

Where Bolivar was arguably too deferential to what he saw as Latin American weaknesses, the modernizing technocrats paid insufficient heed to local realities. They wanted to make the new republics in the image of Europe or the United States. One of the first to try to do so was Bernardino Rivadavia in the province of Buenos Aires, the most important of the (still dis-)United Provinces of the Rio de la Plata, the forerunner of Argentina. Rivadavia, a merchant and lawyer, was an admirer of Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism. He dominated Argentine politics for much of the 1820s, first as chief minister and then as president of Buenos Aires province. He and his supporters founded the University of Buenos Aires and other educational establishments, endowing them with a scientific bias absent from Spain’s scholastic educational tradition. He promoted the theatre and other cultural enterprises. Rivadavia abolished the ecclesiastical and military fueros, restricted Church landholdings, transferred some Church welfare activities to a state- sponsored body, established freedom of worship, and cut the size of the army. He signed a trade treaty with Great Britain. In a debate that echoes to this day, his critics then and since blamed the problems of the textile and wine producers of the interior on Rivadavia’s commitment to free trade. But the problems of these incipient local industries had more to do with inefficiency and distance from markets than with imports. When Juan Manuel de Rosas, a dictator, increased tariffs in 1835 the response of local industries was ‘slow and feeble’.36 From 1870 onwards, policies of Rivadavian inspiration aimed at promoting trade, foreign investment and European immigration would eventually see Argentina become one of the richest countries in the world. Less happily, Rivadavia’s government contracted a loan from Britain, spent it on war with Brazil over Uruguay, and quickly defaulted. His liberalism was tinged with elitism. He tried to control wages, rather than leaving them to the market. And he handed out the best lands of the Pampas on long leases which in practice became grants. Intended to create a middle class of farmers, the measure had the opposite effect: by 1830, just 538 beneficiaries had received a total of o million acres of some of the world’s best farmland. Rivadavia drew up a constitution that would have given Argentina a strong central government — something that conservative federalists in Buenos Aires province, and especially beyond it, were not prepared to accept. In 1827, he headed into exile — like so many subsequent would-be reformers.

The Rivadavians failed partly because they had little understanding of the difficulties of the Argentine interior, and partly because they were simply ahead of their time. Across many of the Spanish-speaking republics, the Liberals’ day would not dawn again until after the 1848 revolution in Europe, which had almost as great an impact in Latin America as in the old continent. In the following three decades, the Liberals — and by now they called themselves thus — would return to power in mariy countries and carry through much of the unfinished business of independence. They laid the basis for republics based on civilian democratic politics and popular sovereignty, even if much of the population was still excluded. In many countries, slavery and the Indian tribute were finally abolished along with the fueros of the Church and the army. Elected civilian presidents began to replace the caudillos, although the vote was generally restricted to adult men and subject to property and literacy qualifications.37

This new flowering of liberalism in the third quarter of the nineteenth century was generally pragmatic and reformist. It coincided with, and was strengthened by, the emergence of Latin America from its post-independence economic torpor. Innovations in transport and communications begat a first age of globalization, in which the region enjoyed sustained export-led growth as a supplier of commodities to the industrial world. Coffee transformed the economies of Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela and Central America; grain, meat and wool did the same for Argentina and Uruguay; oil for Mexico and Venezuela; mining for Chile, Peru, Bolivia and Mexico; and sugar for Cuba, Mexico and Peru. A new urban middle class, of merchants, lawyers and doctors, arose, which though still numerically small was socially significant.

In Mexico, where the mark of church and colony went deeper than almost anywhere else, the Liberal triumph was heavily contested. In the wake of military defeat by the United States in the war of 1846—8, Benito Juárez, a Zapotec Indian from Oaxaca, beat Bolivia’s Evo Morales to the title of Latin America’s first elected president of indigenous descent by more than 150 years. Juárez’s Liberals abolished the military and Church fueros, and banned the Church from owning property. Their Conservative opponents made the fatal mistake of appealing for outside help: France’s Louis Napoleon responded by installing Maximilian, a Habsburg prince and his distant relative, as emperor. The Liberals won the resulting civil war, and the hapless Habsburg perished by firing squad.

Even in Peru, where military men had been politically dominant, in 1872 Manuel Pardo, a young businessman, was elected as the country’s first-ever civilian president, at the head of a promising Civil Party. His election marked the triumph of a new generation of Liberals, exemplified by Francisco Laso, a painter and writer. In a country that had preserved much of the caste society of the colonial period, Laso challenged racial exclusion. His painting The Three Races or Equality before the Law, which today hangs in Lima’s Museum of Art, shows a rich young white boy playing cards with two girls, one black, the other Indian. The girls are presumably servants. Cards in hand, they watch with quiet resignation. But the message of the picture is that they are all equal players of the game. Pardo cut the military down to size, reformed taxes and began to give Peru the rudiments of a modern state. But much of this progress was undone when Chile declared war on Peru and Bolivia in a scramble for the nitrates of the Atacama. Chile won partly because it had British support but mainly because it was a better-organized state. That achievement was the legacy of Diego Portales, a conservative who, like Bolivar, favored strong government. Portales was a minister, but never sought the presidency: he believed in the rule of law rather than of individuals. In the 183os he laid the foundations of a stable political system. In Chile, too, the Liberals gained the ascendant by the 187Os.

The Liberals did not hold sway everywhere. In Colombia, Conservative governments held power from 1885 until 1930. Venezuela and several Central American countries remained in the grip of dictators, although several of these claimed allegiance to liberalism. In many countries, caudillos survived as local strongmen. Much as some Liberals regretted this, they could not be wished away. The caudillos embodied ‘the will of the popular masses, the choice of the people’; they were the ‘natural representatives’ of the ‘pastoral classes’, according to Juan Bautista Alberdi, the pragmatic architect of Argentina’s 1853 constitution (which remains largely in force today).38 Although this constitution gave the federal government the power to intervene in the affairs of the provinces in exceptional circumstances, the long-term price of Argentine unity and internal peace was to allow the caudillos to preserve their fiefdoms in the poorer provinces of the interior. That price would prove to be a heavy one. Much the same went for several other countries.

The Liberal era lasted, broadly speaking, from the mid-nineteenth century until 1930. For all its limitations, the Liberal order represented important progress. In many countries, relatively enlightened civilian governments made efforts to tackle Latin America’s huge deficit in education and transport infrastructure. Even so, in 1900 three-quarters of the 70 million Latin Americans still lived in the countryside, three-quarters were illiterate and average life expectancy was only forty years.39 Shaky as they were, from these foundations there was certainly a chance that Latin America might have gone on to create genuine democracies and sustained development. Yet three things were to conspire to frustrate that chance. First, before it could consolidate its triumph, Latin American liberalism mutated into a new and more authoritarian political philosophy: positivism. Second, Latin America’s underlying inequalities meant that the benefits of economic growth did not reach much of the population. And third, from the outbreak of the First World War, the world economy entered upon three decades of turbulence, while economic development and incipient industrialization in the Latin American countries brought new social tensions.

In the history of political ideas in Europe, positivism is little more than a footnote. In parts of Latin America, it looms large. It is derived chiefly from Auguste Comte, a French social theorist of the early nineteenth century. He saw the key to progress as lying in order and ‘scientific development’, to be implemented by an enlightened intellectual elite. This would be echoed in Rodó’s elitist ‘regeneration’. And it suited the privileged groups of Latin America admirably, seeming as it did to justify restrictions on popular sovereignty. Positivism did promote industrial development, foreign investment, and reforms, for example, of education. But like Bolivar’s thinking, it was another version of enlightened despotism and provided a new justification for authoritarianism. Not for the last time in Latin America, economic and political liberalism were divorced, as modernizing technocrats were happy to serve Conservative dictators who gave them a free rein in economic policy. Like General Augusto Pinochet, Chile’s dictator, or Alberto Fujimori, Peru’s ruler from 1990 to 2000, the positivists championed economic freedom but not political freedom.

When linked to the social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer, positivism seemed to provide a scientific justification for inequality — and indeed for racism.40 In the late nineteenth century, conventional wisdom among educated Latin Americans was that the region’s Indian and black peoples were a brake on progress. One consequence was the promotion of immigration from Europe, though there were other, more powerful motives for that:

South America in particular was sparsely populated. Between 188o and 1915, Argentina received 4.2 million immigrants (chiefly from Spain and Italy) and Brazil 2.9 million (mainly from Italy and Eastern Europe). Though this represented only 23 per cent of the 31 million migrants who crossed the Atlantic in this period (70 per cent went to the United States), it was a significant number for the receiving countries. In 1914, around 30 per cent of Argentina’s population was foreign-born, a much higher percentage than in the United States.41

Positivism was especially influential in the two largest countries in Latin America. In Mexico it buttressed ideologically the long dictatorship of Porflrio Diaz (1884—1914), who had first been elected in 1876 as a liberal. A tough and shrewd mestizo, from Oaxaca like Juárez for whom he had fought against the French, DIaz gave Mexico its first period of stability since the viceroyalty. During the ‘Porfiriato’, a team of modernising technocrats known as the cientificos (scientists) proceeded to lay the foundations of a modern economy and railway system. Diaz respected constitutional forms, duly having himself elected president every four years. But in the words of a contemporary observer, he had ‘demolished the apparatus of government and concentrated all the subdivided power into his own hands’. Another contemporary, Justo Sierra, an educationalist, gave Diaz a friendly warning: ‘There are no institutions in the Republic of Mexico — there is a man.’42 Diaz visited terrible repression on Indians, in the far north-west and the south-east, who stood in the way of progress. Social conditions remained grim: in 1900 one child in two died in the first year of life, while 84 per cent of Mexicans were illiterate.43

In Brazil, positivism inspired the very creation of the republic. As Dom Pedro II clung to his coterie of conservative landholding advisers, agitation against slavery increasingly took on republican tones under the aegis of a group of positivist lawyers and writers. Their leader, Benjamin Constant, lectured in the military academy, and influenced a generation of army officers.44 When Dom Pedro finally yielded and agreed to abolition in i888, it was too late. His action alienated conservatives from the monarchy while coming far too late satisfy liberal elements in the growing cities. Within months, a bloodless military coup ushered in a republic. Brazil adopted a new flag emblazoned with the positivist slogan ‘Order and Progress’. Though the new republic was nominally a civilian democracy, it was a disappointingly elitist affair, dominated by the newly rich coffee barons of the two most prosperous states, São Paulo and Minas Gerais. Though voting became direct, suffrage was more restricted than under the empire. At local level, positivists dispensed with many of the trappings of democracy. State governors gave unconditional support to the federal president; in return, their local Republican parties were given a free hand. Two positivists, Julio de Castilhos and his disciple, Antonio Augusto Borges de Medeiros, ran the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul from 1893 to 1928. They left as their monument in the state capital, Porto Alegre, a fine collection of public buildings in the French belle epoque style — a provincial version of the architectural splendor of Porfirian Mexico City and oligarchical Buenos Aires. These buildings were doubtless intended persuade the gauchos, as the local inhabitants call themselves, that they were well on the way to creating a new Paris in the Pampas. But positivist certainties were to suffer a bruising encounter with social realities in Brazil.

In 1899, a revolt by an obscure millenarian preacher, Antonio Conselheiro, at Canudos, in the parched interior of Bahia state, mushroomed into a tragic confrontation between modernizing technocracy and the traditionalism of the neglected poor. Conseiheiro’s makeshift army of cowherds and peasants defeated three military expeditions, including a column of a thousand crack federal troops backed by field artillery. Canudos was finally quelled only after a four-month siege and weeks of house-to-house fighting involving half the Brazilian army. This episode left 15,000 dead, including some prisoners garroted after they had surrendeid.45 From this tragic clash, some members of Brazil’s political elite drew the conclusion that their country’s common people were too ‘backward’ to benefit from democracy. But others recognized the need to spread the benefits of economic growth.

Argentina was less influenced by positivism. It had embarked on a golden age of economic growth and civilian rule. In 1862 the country had finally achieved internal unity. It quickly acquired the rudiments of a nation state: a national legal system, a bureaucracy, a tax system, a national electoral law, a new national army and two national newspapers.46 From 1890, Argentina advanced steadily towards democracy: in 1916, Hipólito Yrigoyen, a Radical representing a growing middle class, became the first president to be elected under universal male suffrage (though the many foreigners were not allowed to vote). Yet Argentine democracy was being erected on somewhat shaky foundations. The Pampas, whose development was the source of the country’s headlong economic growth, had been fully settled by the First World War. Between them, Buenos Aires and the Pampas accounted for more than 90 per cent of Argentina’s cars and telephones in the early 192os, two-fifths of Latin America’s railways, half of the region’s foreign trade and three-quarters of its educational spending.47 The rest of Argentina’s vast territory was less prosperous. Liberals from Rivadavia to Alberdi and Sarmiento had supported American-style homesteading policies, but had been unable to impose them in the face of oligarchical opposition. The Pampas had been divided up very unequally: according to the 1914 census, the largest 584 farms occupied almost a fifth of the total area, and those of over one thousand  hectares (2,470 acres) more than 60 per cent. The mean average landholding in Argentina was 890 acres, compared with 175 acres in New South Wales and 130 acres in the United States.48

Across the Rio de la Plata in Uruguay, the rise of Montevideo as a port serving parts of Argentina and Brazil similarly spawned a vigorous middle class, reinforced by European migration. Through the medium of the Colorado party, leaders of this social group struck a political alliance with the sheep farmers of the interior. Under José Batile y Ordónez (president, ‘903—7 and 1911—15), Uruguay established the foundations of a modern democracy and one
of the world’s first welfare states. The death penalty was banned and divorce legalized. Legislation imposed the eight-hour working day, social insurance and free secondary education. In a foretaste of policies that would be adopted more widely in the region two decades later, state monopolies were created to run services from the port to electricity generation and insurance. Thanks to this social contract forged by Batilismo, as it was called, Uruguay, the smallest country in South America, has also long been the most egalitarian. Elsewhere, things were very different.

                                                                    Land but not Liberty: A Revolution Creates a Corporate State

In September 1910, delegations from across the world came to Mexico City to celebrate the centenary of Mexican independence — and a quarter-century of ‘peace, order and progress’ under Porfirio Diaz. Within months, the appearance of stability was shattered. After Diaz had claimed to a North American journalist that he would ‘bless’ an opposition, Francisco Madero, the austere scion of a wealthy northern business family, stood for the presidency against the dictator under the banner of ‘effective suffrage, no re-election’. After mobilising support in rallies across the country, he was arrested. Bailed, he escaped to the United States, and re-entered Mexico in February 1911 at the head of 130 armed men. Other rebels launched local risings, many of them unconnected. By May, Madero’s troops captured Ciudad Juárez, the most important customs post on the border with the United States. Faced with a national rebellion that he could not defeat, Diaz finally resigned.

Madero was a liberal democrat, an eccentric Spiritist and medium who believed himself chosen to redeem Mexico, and a man of great personal integrity and decency.49 But he was politically inept. He disbanded his own troops while allowing supporters of the dictatorship to cling to positions of power. He failed to reach agreement with Emiliano Zapata, an Indian peasant leader who had launched his own localized revolution in Morelos, a small central state whose modernized sugar mills had made voracious encroachmnts on peasant land. In 1913, Madero was overthrown and murdered in a coup led by Victoriano Huerta, an army commander backed by the Porfirians and by Henry Lane Wilson, President William Howard Taft’s meddling ambassador in Mexico City. This coup served only to intensify discontent. In 1915, Huerta would in turn be defeated by revolutionary armies sweeping down from the north. They were led by Francisco Villa, a bandit turned follower of Madero, and Alvaro Obregon, a farmer from Sonora, an important centre of commercial agriculture in the north-west, who emerged as the revolution’s most gifted and ruthless military commander. Venustiano Carranza, another northerner, a pre-revolutionary state governor but an admirer of Juárez, became president.

The revolution had long since acquired its own momentum: it had become confused and prolonged series of local and national struggles over power and land. Zapata had raised the ancestral Indian demand for land restitution, under the banner (borrowed via a Mexican anarchist intellectual from Alexander Herzen, a Russian liberal) of Tierra y Libertad (‘Land and Freedom’). But Zapata lacked interest in forging national alliances, or in venturing far beyond the villages of Morelos. He would be betrayed, and shot by federal troops working for Carranza’s government. In 1916, Carranza convoked a constituent assembly in Querétaro, north of MexicoCity, to draw up a new constitution. The resulting document remains in force, though much amended. It was a compromise between Carranza, a liberal in the nineteenth-century tradition but an authoritarian one who believed in a strong executive, and radical social reformers, some of whom had advised Zapata and who had the backing of Obregón. Notably, the constitution declared both land and the sub-soil to be the property of the nation — provisions which sounded socialist but were also throwback to the colonial period when they were vested in the crown.50

It would be another two decades before local rebellions and violent power struggles among the commanders of the victorious revolutionary armies died away. What eventually emerged was a more broadly based nation-state, but one in which power was ruthlessly centralized — not the liberal democracy which Madero had dreamed. The post-revolutionary state was largely the creation of three men: two Sonorans, Obregon and Plutarco ElIas Calles, a conservative former teacher and local police chief; and Lázaro Cárdenas, the last of the revolutionary generals to become president and a reformer with socialist leanings. The great achievement of the post-revolutionary system was bring lasting stability by institutionalizing political conflict and allowing regular political renewal. Thus, almost uniquely in Latin America, in Mexico the army was politically neutralized. In 1928, Calles created an official hegemonic political party, known (after 1946) as the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). The PRI system was a civilian one. It gave the president the powers of an absolute monarch — but only for six years. Though was allowed to choose his successor, once out of office the president was a political nobody. He could not be re-elected. The constitution was nominally federal. During his presidency (1934—40), Cárdenas suppressed the remnants the separation of powers: he purged the Congress and the state governors, and scrapped Carranza’s idea of appointing judges for life. After Cárdenas, the president had all the levers of power. Congress and governors did his bidding, but they did form channels through which grievances could be funneled upwards to the president. All this was carefully legitimated through elections. The PRI ruled by consent and co-option when possible, and by electoral fraud and violence only when necessary. The system paid more than lip-service to the myths of the revolution. Its rule was less elitist than the Porfiriato. Its main characteristics were a corporate state, social reform and nationalism.

Cárdenas re-organized the ruling party, as a mass organization on functional lines, with sections for peasants and workers (and later for middle-class professionals). He put into practice many of the social aspirations of the radicals in the Querétaro assembly. He distributed 18.4 million hectares of land among i million peasants in the form of ejidos, a term which dated from preHispanic communal landholdings. But the land was not owned directly by the communities and individual farmers, as Zapata had wanted. Under Cárdenas’s system, while the community enjoyed the use of ejido land, the state remained its owner. The peasants were tied into the PRI system. They were demobilized, not empowered. They had won land but not freedom.51 Nor did many of them escape poverty. Cárdenas also set up a national trade union confederation. The PRI guaranteed to private industrialists and other capitalists political stability, subsidised credit and an expanded and protected domestic market — provided they played the rules of the political game. The Church, too, was subordinated to the state: the 1916 constitution echoed the fierce anti-clerical laws of Juárez, though these were applied with decreasing severity after the 1920s.

If the PRI had an ideology, it was nationalism — the party even adopted the national flag and colours as its own emblems and Mexico came to define itself in rhetorical opposition to the United States. During the revolution, the United States twice sent troops to Mexico: in 1914 President Woodrow Wilson sent marines to Veracruz, to prevent arms from reaching Huerta; when in March 1916 Villa, resentful at American recognition of the Carranza government, briefly raided the border town of Columbus, New Mexico, Wilson dispatched a futile ‘punitive expedition’ under General John Pershing (who the following year commanded a much more significant force in France). Even so, in the view of Alan Knight, a historian of the revolution, ‘at no point can it be said that US policy ... was primarily responsible for making or breaking a regime south of the border. Still less could Standard Oil, or any other corporation, make a similar claim.’52 But the generous concessions made by the Diaz regime to foreign capital, especially in mining and oil, angered the revolutionaries. They argued that the oil companies, both Standard Oil and the British-owned El Aguila, operated as states within a state, and evaded taxes. In 1938, Cárdenas acted: the nationalized the oil industry, declaring el petróleo es nuestro (‘the oil is ours!’), though he paid compensation. A state company, Petróleos de Mexico (Pemex), was given a monopoly over the industry. Post-revolutionary ideology also embraced indigenismo — an intellectual current that called for the integration of the Indian into the mainstream of society.

At several junctures, Mexico might have taken the more democratic road espoused by Madero. In the early 192os, a Liberal Constitutionalist Party pushed for municipal autonomy and the separation of powers. Such sentiments inspired some of the backers of a failed rebellion in 1923. In 1929, José Vasconcelos, who as Obregon’s education minister had been a patron to Diego Rivera and his fellow muralists, stood for the presidency on a platform of maderista democracy. But he was defeated by Calles’s machine, which employed the electoral fraud and strong-arm tactics which would become the PRI system’s less attractive trademarks.53 In the event, under the PRI Mexico adopted many elements of corporatism, the ideology championed and discredited by Southern European fascisi in Mussolini’s Italy, Franco’s Spain and Salazar’s Portugal. But the PRI was not grossly repressive, and it was essentially pragmatic, not revolutionary. Some of its presidents, like Cárdenas, veered left. Others were right-wing: Miguel Alemán (1940—6) forged a wartime alliance with the United States and was friendly to private business. The PRI co-opted the left — especially writers, artists and academics — but it was also anti-communist. The PRI’s rule gave Mexico stability, and laid the basis of a modern nation-state and an industrialized economy. From 1930 until at least 1968 it was highly successful. The economy grew at an annual average rate of 4 per cent from 1929 to 1950, accelerating to 6.4 per cent from 1950 to 198O. On the whole, there was social peace. The PRI system mimicked the outward forms of liberal democracy. But in reality it was ‘the perfect dictatorship’, as Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian novelist, said in 1990. The system had huge defects: corruption, lack of political and media freedom, massive waste and inefficiency, all of which became more important as time went by.

The Mexican revolution and its aftermath had a singular political influence in much of Spanish-speaking America. Other countries faced the same challenges as Mexico, of consolidating a modern nation-state, of industrialization, the growth of cities, the emergence of an organized working class; they, too, saw the rise of new political currents, such as nationalism, socialism and corporatism. One early admirer was Victor Raül Haya de la Torre, an exiled Peruvian student leader. He founded the Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (APRA) as a continental movement in Mexico City in 1924, and then as a political party in Peru in 1930. APRA’s founding ‘international maximum programme’ called for action against Yankee imperialism, the political unity of ‘Indo-America’ (as Haya called Latin America in deference to its indigenous peoples), the nationalization of lands and industries, the internationalization of the Panama Canal, and international solidarity.55 This smacked of radical socialism, but Haya favored a broad non-communist front, in which the middle class would take the lead along with workers and indigenous peasants. In his long life — he died in 1979 while president of a Constituent Assembly preparing the return of democracy to Peru — his ideas went through various evolutions. ‘Since its creation, APRA has been a study in contradictions,’ as Julio Cotler, a Peruvian sociologist, has put it.56 in Peru, APRA would at first flirt with revolutionary violence, and always retained a conspiratorial flavor. But Haya’s preference, if allowed, was to compete for power through elections. He said that APRA would respect democratic liberties. Haya became increasingly conservative, but many in his party yearned for a Mexican-style corporate state and nationalization of American mining companies in Peru.57 The army repeatedly intervened to prevent APRA winning power; it would take office only in 1985, under the inept leadership of Alan Garcia. Even so, Haya was a hugely influential figure in his country’s politics and beyond. He supported the campaign in Nicaragua of Augusto Sandino, a dissident liberal general, against a government backed by American marines.58 APRA became the transmission belt for the ideas of the Mexican revolution to South America.

The Liberal order had lasted for two decades longer in South America than in Mexico. Its death knell was sounded by the Wall Street crash of October 1929 — as it was in Europe. If the Great Depression did not amount to a decisive turning point in Latin America’s economic history, it certainly marked a sharp political rupture. The impact of the depression on employment and living standards was severe. Ten countries in the region saw the value of their exports fall by more than half between 1928 and 1932. No other country in the Western world was as badly affected by the crash as Chile, whose trade fell by 83 per cent between 1929 and 1932. In Chile and Cuba income per head fell by a third.59 Many governments defaulted on their foreign debts for the first time since the mid-nineteenth century. Across the region, the depression prompted discontent and agitation by fledgling labor unions, many of anarcho-syndicalist persuasion, and small left-wing political parties. In El Salvador, an attempt at an insurrection by the small Communist Party was crushed in a bloodbath. In Peru, risings by APRA and the Communists were repressed. In Chile, a brief socialist republic was declared by Marmaduque Grove, an air-force officer and uncle of Salvador Allende. Cuba saw a short- lived revolution by radical students and army sergeants.

Conservatives felt threatened by mass demonstrations and the new leftwing parties. Some looked to military rule to save them from the masses. Some were attracted by fascism, especially in its Mediterranean form of corporatism. Many on the left, too, would be attracted by corporatism. In Latin America, Mussolini and Franco were more influential than Marx and Lenin. Within two years of the Wall Street crash, army officers had sought or taken power in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Peru and three Central American countries (Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras).60 In 1933, the army took power in Cuba. In Argentina, the crash ended fifty years of broadly stable civilian rule. It found the second administration of Hipólito Yrigoyen, the elderly leader of the Radical Party, fiscally exposed: his efforts to cut a vast budget deficit undermined his political support. In September 1930, a military junta took power. It was not particularly repressive, and it presaged a decade of civilian- military rule. But in deciding that it would accept as legal the junta’s edict, the Supreme Court elaborated a dangerous doctrine of revolución triunfante — or might is right.61 For half a century after i3o, that doctrine brought Argentina instability and the subordination of civilian politics to the armed forces. In Chile, the lasting impact was in reverse: a wave of protest and anti-militarism swept away Carlos Ibañez, a moderate conservative military dictator. Two brief military interventions followed. But exceptionally, democratic and constitutional rule was strengthened, lasting until the overthrow of Salvador Allende in 1973. Exceptional, too, was Colombia: in an election in 1930, the Liberals ended fifty years of Conservative rule, helped by the impact of the crash and their opponents’ divisions. A period of vigorous social reform followed. Many of the Latin American economies recovered fairly swiftly from the depression, thanks both to renewed export growth and Keynesian measures of state intervention and import-substitution industrialisation. But politics had changed for ever. Only in a few smaller countries did ‘oligarchical’ liberalism survive the crash.

Mexico was unique in institutionalizing corporatist nationalism. But its revolution was strongly echoed four decades later in Bolivia. In 1951, the National Revolutionary Movement (MNR), a mainly middle-class party but with support among miners, workers and peasant farmers, won an election. Robbed of power by a military coup, in 1952 it staged a popular rising. For three days, the MNR’s urban militias fought army conscripts in La Paz. The battle was turned in the MNR’s favor by the arrival of a contingent of armed miners, and by splits in the security forces. Some 500 people died, but the old order had been toppled.62 The MNR’s leader, Victor Paz Estenssoro, a university teacher of economics, was installed as president. His government enacted universal suffrage, nationalized the tin mines which provided the main export, and broke up most of the haciendas on the Altiplano, handing over the land as family plots to the Indian resident serfs. A serious effort was made to provide universal education, at least at primary level. And for the first time Indians were allowed to enter the Plaza Murillo, La Paz’s main square and the site of the cathedral, the presidential palace and the Congress. The MNR would be the dominant political force in Bolivia for the next half- century, but it neither achieved the supremacy of the PRI nor tamed the armed forces.

Elsewhere, corporatism tended to be articulated by charismatic nation- builders — old—fashioned caudillos in a new, more powerful incarnation. In this form, political scientists have often preferred to label corporatism as populism. The most prominent populists included Brazil’s Getulhio Vargas, who as governor of Rio Grande do Sul was heir to that state’s positivist tradition, and who became president through a civilian-military coup in 1930. Vargas ruled as a dictator from 1937 to r945, and then was elected president again in 1950. In Argentina, Juan Perón, an army colonel, ruled from 1945 to 1955; the movement he founded has remained the dominant political force in Argentina to this day. But Perón did not hold a monopoly on Argentine populism: Yrigoyen’s Radicals also had strong populist streaks. In Venezuela, Acción Democratica (AD), with which Peru’s APRA had especially close links, evolved from populism to social democracy. AD dominated Venezuelan politics for much of the period between the 1940S until the rise of Hugo Chavez. There were some differences between these movements. For example, Perón’s government of 1945—55 was the closest Latin America came to a fascist regime. It gave refuge to at least i8o Nazis and their collaborators, including such notorious figures as Adolf Eichmann, Eduard Roschmann, Joseph Mengele (who was later in Brazil) and Klaus Barbie (who moved on to Bolivia).63 During the dictatorship of the Estado Novo (‘New State’), Vargas also flirted with fascism. Haya de la Torre was, at least for parts of his career, closer to democratic socialism though APRA was organised on corporatist lines. Of the larger countries, only Colombia and Chile remained relatively aloof from populism.

In Latin America, unlike in Russia and the United States, populism was an overwhelmingly urban movement and ideology.64 It was above all a political response to urbanization, and to what was seen as the elitist and exclusionary politics of the pre-193o ‘oligarchical’ republics. It reflected what Jorge Castafleda, a Mexican writer and politician, has called the ‘unfulfilled Latin American dream of painless modernity’.65 The original populist movements flourished from the mid-192os to the mid-196os — though populism has enjoyed an unanticipated recent revival in the region. They promoted industrialisation, a policy on which local industrialists, the middle class and organized labor could all agree. Populist movements were multi-class electoral coalitions. Their leaders deliberately talked of el pueblo (the people) rather than, say, la clase obrera (the working class). As well as nationalism, they injected the concept of lo popular into Latin American political vocabulary (meaning for and by the people), as in their claim to lead ‘popular’ governments. Their programme involved protection and subsidies for local industry, and political representation and welfare provision for the urban masses. This in turn involved an expansion of the role of the state in the economy and society, which generated new jobs for the middle classes. Populist movements opposed foreign domination and the power of what they called the agro-export ‘oligarchy’. Although they often proclaimed themselves to be ‘revolutionary’, these movements were reformist — unlike parties of the Marxist left, they aimed to mitigate class conflict rather than stimulate it. Even so, populist movements were often seen as a threat by conservative agro-exporting interests (and by the United States). In a way they were: they - sought to redistribute resources from farming to the cities. The result was that populists were often the target of repression. Another distinguishing characteristic of populist movements was their reliance on charismatic leadership. The populist leaders were often great orators or, if you prefer, demagogues. Ecuador’s most emblematic populist leader, José Maria Velasco, famously said: ‘Give me a balcony and I will become president.’ This was no idle boast: his campaigning skills saw him elected president five times— though his lack of governing skills, and the fierce opposition he generated among conservatives, saw him ousted four times by the army. Such leadership exalted an almost mystical bond between leader and masses. This sometimes involved the use of religious imagery or techniques, as with Haya de la Torre.
For better or for worse, populism was the political vehicle through which many Latin American countries entered the modern era of mass politics and bigger government. Its achievements included a boost to industrialization, and an improvement in social conditions for favored sectors of the urban workforce. Workers received tangible benefits, such as paid holidays, pensions and health provision. Those benefits were sufficient to encourage remarkably durable loyalty among the beneficiaries, as the longevity of the PRI and Peronism in particular illustrate. Perón’s social reforms deprived Argentina’s small Socialist and Communist parties of working-class support; they were never to regain it. Whereas liberals and positivists had often looked abroad for inspiration, populists promoted a ‘national culture’, rescuing indigenous people and their cultural artifacts from official neglect.

In these respects, populism played an analogous role to social democracy in Europe. But there were important differences. Overall, populism had a negative impact on Latin American democracy and development. Four defects stand out. First, although it employed electoral means, populism was in many ways less than democratic. As Paul Drake puts it, populist leaders ‘were devoted to expanding popular participation but not necessarily through formal, Western democratic mechanisms’.66 Perón, Vargas, and Haya ‘repeatedly exhibited dictatorial propensities toward their followers and opponents. They apparently favored controlled, paternalistic mobilization of the masses more than uninhibited, pluralistic, democratic competition.’67 In fairness, their conservative opponents, too, were often less than democratic. In Argentina, even a liberal such as Jorge Luis Borges, the writer, came to believe that Peronism showed that his country was not ‘ready’ for democracy.

He argued at one point that military dictatorship was a necessary evil to prevent Peronism from remaining in power. A second, linked failing was the reliance on charismatic leadership. Max Weber, the German sociologist, defined charismatic authority as being exercised by an individual who is ‘set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional qualities’.68 Weber contrasted it with two other forms of authority, traditional and rational-legal. As Weber’s definition makes clear, charismatic leadership is inimical to the rule of law
— or indeed the separation hf powers and the construction of democratic institutions. Populist leaders relied on a direct bond between themselves and the masses: not for nothing did they emerge simultaneously with the radio and the cinema. Eva Perón had worked as an actress in radio soaps; like FDR, Getülio Vargas made regular radio broadcasts to Brazilians. They established political clienteles, rather than creating citizenship. Benefits came from loyalty, not as a matter of right. The reliance on charisma was one reason why populism was inherently unstable.

Third, perhaps the most disappointing feature of populism was its failure to make a serious attack on inequality. In contrast to Mexico and Bolivia, where revolutions broke the political power of the traditional hacendados, other populist leaders usually excluded the poorest sections of the masses
— the peasantry — from their coalitions. Populist governments made no attempt to extend the franchise to illiterates, nor to implement land reform. And in attempting to transfer resources from agriculture to industry, such as by controlling food prices, they were impoverishing peasant as well as landlord. Their reliance on inflation, rather than thoroughgoing tax reforms, to finance government hurt the poor disproportionately too. This was but one aspect of a fourth defect of populism: its economic policy. Populist governments were not alone in pursuing statist protectionism: by the 196os many military dictatorships did too. But the constant tension in populist governments between industrialization and welfarism (as Drake puts it) led them to rely on over-expansionary macroeconomic policies and made them prey to extreme economic volatility. While claiming to champion the creation of a modern state, the clientelist approach to politics adopted by many populist leaders led them to create inefficient public bureaucracies stuffed with their supporters.

Some of these weaknesses, combined with the opposition that populists aroused among some powerful conservative groups, meant that from the 19308 on, Latin America’s incipient democracies were subject to chronic instability, and to what came to be known as the pendulum effect, as civilian governments alternated with dictatorships. In the aftermath of the Second World War, an external conflict would intensify these political battles in Latin America, to tragic effect.
 

1. Many believe that the army overreacted. Debate still rages as to whether the M19 was acting at the behest of drug traffickers. The files of many drug cases were among those consumed by fire during the assault.

2. Krauze, Mexico: Biography of Power, p. xlii.

3. These estimates are from Alexander Von Humboldt, the great German scientist- explorer who travelled widely in Spanish America in 1799—1804. They are quoted in Lynch, John (1986), The Spanish American Revolutions 1808—182 6, 2nd edition, WW Norton & Company, New York, p. 19.

4. Ibid., p. 2.

5. Ibid., p. i8.

6. Carr, Raymond (ed.) (2000), Spain: A History, Oxford, p. 198.

7. Parry, J H, Sherlock, Philip and Maingot, Anthony (1987), A Short History of the West Indies, 4th edition, Macmillan, p. 140.

8. France did not recognise Haiti’s independence until 1825, and then only after the new state agreed to pay reparations of 150 million francs (later reduced to 6o million); Haiti did not repay the resulting debt until 1922. In January 2004, Haiti’s government commemorated the bi-centenary of independence. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was to be overthrown shortly afterwards, used the occasion to demand that France repay the reparations which, with interest, he said, amounted to $21.7 billion.

9. Walker, Charles F (1999), Smoldering Ashes: Cuzco and the Creation of Republican Peru, 1780—1840, Duke-University Press, p. 13.

10. Lynch, The Spanish American Revolutions, p. 24.

11. Maxwell, Kenneth (2003), ‘Why Was Brazil Different?’, in Naked Tropics: Essays on Empire and Other Rogues, Routledge, p. 156. See also Wilcken, Patrick (2004), Empire Adrift, Bloomsbury.

12. Harvey, Robert (2000), Liberators: Latin America’s Struggle for Independence 1810—1930, John Murray, Part 4.

13. Bushnell/Macaulay, The Emergence of Latin America, p.59.

14. Fernández-Armesto, The Americas: A Hemispheric History, pp. 126—7.

15. Thomas, Hugh (iz), Cuba or The Pursuit of Freedom, Eyre & Spotiswoode, pp. 45—56.

16. Ibid., p. 46.

17. See Vargas Llosa, Liberty for Latin America, pp. 28—9.

18. Quoted in Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America, p.37.

19. Basadre, Jorge (1987), Peru: Problema y Posibilidad, 5th edition, Libreria Studium, Lima, p. 281.

20. Panama was a province of Colombia until 1903, when it declared independence in a rebellion inspired by the United States.

21. The author of the phrase was John L O’Sullivan, the young editor of the New York Morning News. In 1845 he wrote that the US claim to the Oregon Territory was justified ‘by the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us.’

22. Some Latin Americans had long seen the potential for river transport. ‘The Mississippi is not more available for commerce than the Paraná; nor do the Ohio, Illinois or Arkansas water a larger or richer territory than the Pilcomayo, Bermejo, Paraguay and so many other great rivers,’ noted Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, an Argentine writer and later president, in 1845.

23. ‘In the Central Andes, the majority of people traditionally resided above 2,500 metres, where adverse corollaries of altitude include rugged terrain, fragile topography, steep slopes, poor soils, limited farmland, short growing seasons, high winds, aridity, elevated solar radiation, erratic rainfall, precarious nutrition, cold and hypoxia. Hypoxia is the technical term for low oxygen tension due to elevational decrease in barometric pressure. It is a pervasive source of chronic stress on all life ... cold and anoxia oblige people to eat more ... Consequently, it costs measurably more to support life and civilisation in mountains than in lowlands.’ Moseley, Michael E (2001), The Incas and Their Ancestors, Thames and Hudson, London, p. 27. The author is referring to pre-conquest life, but many of these factors apply today. Tourists to Cusco or to Lake Titicaca get a brief taste of some of these deprivations.

24. Lewis, Cohn M, ‘Public Policy and Private Initative: Railway Building in São Paulo 1860—89’, University of London, Institute of Latin American Studies Research Papers No. 26, 1991.

25. Sarmiento, Domingo F (1998), Facundo: or, Civilization and Barbarism, Penguin Classics, London, p..

26. Bushnell/Macaulay, The Emergence of Latin America, p. 53.

27. Lamounier, BolIvar (2oo5) Da Independência a Lula: dois séculos de polItica brasileira, Augurium Editora, São Paulo, p. 80.

28. Ibid., pp. 43—68.

29. Skidmore, Thomas E (1999), Brazil: Five Centuries of Change, Oxford University Press, p. 48.

30. Lynch, John (2006), Simon BolIvar: A Life, Yale University Press, p. xi.

31. Bolivar, Simon, El Libertador, p. xxx.

32. Bolivar, SimOn, ‘The Jamaica Letter’, in El Libertador, p. 23.

33. Lynch, Simon BolIvar, p.77.

34. Colombia’s FARC guerrillas and Cuba’s communist regime also pay rhetorical obeisance to Boilvar.

35. Lynch, SimOn BolIvar, p.304.

36. Lynch, John (2001), Argentine Caudillo: Juan Manuel de Rosas, Scholarly Resources, Wilmington, Delaware, p.72.

37. There were occasional exceptions. In Colombia, a Liberal constitution in 1853 included universal male suffrage and popular election of the Supreme Court. In one province, the Liberals enacted female suffrage, but this was struck down by the Court before it could be implemented. Bushnell/Macaulay, The Emergence of Latin America, p. 212. Chile abolished the property qualification (though not the literacy requirement) for voting in 1874 (ibid., p. 237).

38. Shumway, Nicolas The Invention of Argentina, University of California Press, p. 183.

39. Thorp, Progress, Poverty and Exclusion, pp. 1—2.

40. See Wiarda, The Soul of Latin America, Chapter 6.

41. Klein, Herbert S, ‘Migracao Internacional na Historia das Americas’, in Fausto, Boris (ed.) (1999), Fazer a America: A Imigracao em Massa para a America Latina, Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, pp. 13—31.

42. Quoted in Krauze, Mexico: Biography of Power, pp. 217 and 231.

43. Ibid., p. 219.

44. Not to be confused with Benjamin Constant, a liberal politician of the French revolution after whom the Brazilian was named.

45. For an extraordinary account by an observer of this campaign, see da Cunha, Euclides, Os Sert0es, translated as Rebellion in the Backlands, Picador, 1995. Mario Vargas Llosa drew heavily on da Cunha’s book in his novel War of the End of the World. During the Canudos campaign, the army set up a camp on Monte Favela, a bill overlooking the settlement. As a result, the word favela entered the Portuguese language to describe a shantytown.

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