10.6 — Latin America

Simón Bolívar led armies across the Andes, liberated six countries, and wrote near the end of his life that he who serves a revolution ploughs the sea.

He died in 1830, aged 47, on his way into exile, ill, poor and politically defeated — having freed a continent and failed entirely to hold it together.

Understanding why is the point of this chapter, because Latin America began independence with resources, territory and educated elites, and did not become what North America became.

Why it happened when it did

The trigger was in Europe, not America.

In 1808 Napoleon invaded Spain, deposed the king and installed his own brother (Chapter 10.4).

That created a legitimacy vacuum. Spanish American colonies were, in constitutional theory, possessions of the Spanish crown rather than of Spain. With the king deposed, sovereignty arguably reverted to the people of each kingdom.

So the first juntas formed in 1808–10 declaring loyalty to the deposed king Ferdinand — governing in his name until he returned. When he did return in 1814 and attempted to restore absolute rule and colonial control, those juntas had been governing themselves for six years and did not wish to stop.

The grievances underneath

They had been accumulating for a century.

Peninsulares — people born in Spain — held nearly all senior offices. Criollos — people of Spanish descent born in America — were excluded from the top of the administration and the church regardless of wealth or ability. This is the core grievance and it is a grievance of an elite.

The Bourbon reforms of the eighteenth century made it worse, centralising administration, raising taxes and reducing creole participation.

Trade restrictions required commerce to pass through Spain, which meant Spanish middlemen and Spanish prices.

And there had been risings from below already. Túpac Amaru II's rebellion in Peru in 1780–81 mobilised indigenous and mestizo populations against tribute and forced labour, and was suppressed with extreme brutality — he was executed by dismemberment in the main square of Cusco. The memory of it made creole elites wary of mass mobilisation, which shaped how they conducted their own revolutions.

The wars

Two main campaigns converging.

Bolívar in the north. Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and the territory that became Bolivia. His most celebrated operation was crossing the Andes in 1819 through high passes in the rainy season to attack New Granada from an unexpected direction, losing many men to cold and altitude and arriving where the Spanish had no forces.

San Martín in the south. An Argentine officer who had served in the Spanish army against Napoleon, he crossed the Andes from Argentina into Chile in 1817 — a logistical feat of a similar order — liberated Chile, then went by sea to Peru.

The two met at Guayaquil in 1822 for a private conversation whose content is unknown. San Martín withdrew from public life afterwards and went to Europe, leaving the completion to Bolívar.

And Haiti's role should be recorded (Chapter 10.5). Bolívar, defeated and in exile in 1815, was given refuge, money, arms and ships by President Pétion of Haiti, on the explicit condition that he abolish slavery in the territories he freed. He did, progressively, and slavery ended across most of Spanish America over the following decades.

Brazil went differently and it is instructive. The Portuguese royal family fled to Brazil in 1807 ahead of Napoleon, making Rio the capital of the Portuguese empire. When the king returned to Portugal in 1821, his son stayed, declared independence in 1822, and became Emperor Pedro I. Brazil became independent as a monarchy, with almost no fighting, and stayed united, where Spanish America fragmented into eighteen republics. It also kept slavery until 1888, the last country in the Americas to abolish it.

Why the successor states struggled

This is the analytical part and it connects to Chapter 9.4.

Extractive institutions were inherited intact. The colonial economy was built around mining, plantations and coerced indigenous labour, and independence changed who collected the rents rather than how they were generated. The hacienda, debt peonage and the concentration of land ownership continued.

And this is exactly Chapter 9.4's reversal of fortune. The regions that were richest and most densely populated in 1500 — the Aztec and Inca cores — attracted the most extractive institutions, and are poorer today than the sparsely populated regions where settlers built institutions for themselves.

Extreme inequality of land, which persisted for two centuries and which is the root of most twentieth-century Latin American political conflict.

Racial hierarchy survived independence. Formal legal equality coexisted with a casta system of social ranking by ancestry, and indigenous and African-descended populations remained at the bottom.

No tradition of self-government. Chapter 10.2's contrast is the sharp one: the North American colonies had elected assemblies that had been legislating and taxing for a century and a half before independence. Spanish America had none. The institutions that had to run the new republics did not exist and had to be invented under fire.

Fragmentation. Bolívar's Gran Colombia — Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador and Panama — broke apart within a decade. The Central American federation fragmented. Geography did some of it: the Andes, the Amazon and the distances made central control very difficult with the transport available. Regional elites did the rest.

And the caudillo pattern followed. A strongman with a personal armed following, ruling by force, legitimacy resting on his person rather than on an office. Wars between and within the new states were frequent, and the Paraguayan War of 1864–70 killed a very large proportion of Paraguay's male population.

Bolívar's own conclusion, in his last letters, was despairing. He wrote that America is ungovernable, that those who serve a revolution plough the sea, and that the only thing to do in the country was to emigrate.

And he had himself made dictator in 1828 in an attempt to hold Gran Colombia together, which is the pattern this Part keeps encountering.

The nineteenth century afterwards

Economically, Latin America integrated into the world economy as an exporter of commodities — Argentine beef and wheat, Chilean nitrates and copper, Brazilian coffee and rubber, Bolivian tin, Cuban sugar.

And that shaped the politics. Commodity export enriches landowners and mine owners, requires little education, and produces enormous swings in revenue with world prices (Chapter 1.12). The elites it created had no interest in mass education or in industrialisation.

British and later American capital financed the railways, ports and utilities, and the term "informal empire" describes the relationship reasonably: political independence with economic dependence.

The United States asserted a regional role early. The Monroe Doctrine of 1823 declared the hemisphere closed to further European colonisation. It was unenforceable at the time and became the basis for American intervention later — Chapter 12.4 covers the twentieth-century record, which includes repeated interventions in Central America and the Caribbean.

What went right

A chapter this critical should note the achievements.

Slavery was abolished across the continent — earlier in the Spanish republics than in the United States or Brazil, and it was a direct commitment of the independence movements.

Formal legal equality and republican constitutions were adopted almost universally, which was not the norm anywhere in the world in 1825.

The states have largely survived within their independence-era borders, with fewer inter-state wars over the following two centuries than Europe managed.

And the twentieth century saw real gains in literacy, life expectancy and urbanisation, and the region has been substantially democratic since the 1980s after a period of military dictatorships.

Where this shows up in your life

Latin America is the standing comparison case for India in development economics — a region that became independent 120 years earlier, with better resources and a smaller population, and which has been stuck in what economists call the middle-income trap: rich enough that low wages no longer confer advantage, and without the education, institutions and technology to compete at the frontier.

The lessons India draws from it are the ones in Chapter 9.14: land inequality unaddressed, education neglected, commodity dependence, and elites without an interest in broad development.

And Bolívar's despair is worth sitting with, because it is what a competent and idealistic leader concluded after succeeding militarily and failing politically. Winning independence and building a state are different problems, and the second is much harder. Chapter 6.25 shows India doing the second one well, which is why that chapter matters more than it looks.

What the next page covers

Chapter 10.7 covers the European nationalism that reshaped the map — the revolutions of 1848 that broke out in fifty countries within months and failed almost everywhere, what nationalism actually is and where the idea came from, and how Italy and Germany were each assembled out of dozens of separate states within a single decade, with consequences for the next century that Chapter 11.2 has to deal with.