Latin America, history of

Introduction

      history of the region from the pre-Columbian period and including colonization by the Spanish and Portuguese beginning in the 15th century, the 19th-century wars of independence, and developments to the end of World War II.

 Latin America is generally understood to consist of the entire continent of South America in addition to Mexico, Central America, and the islands of the Caribbean whose inhabitants speak a Romance language. The peoples of this large area shared the experience of conquest and colonization by the Spaniards and Portuguese from the late 15th through the 18th century as well as movements of independence from Spain and Portugal in the early 19th century. Even since independence, many of the various nations have experienced similar trends, and they have some awareness of a common heritage. However, there are also enormous differences between them. Not only do the people live in a large number of independent units, but the geography and climate of their countries vary immensely. The inhabitants' social and cultural characteristics differ according to the constitution of the occupants before the Iberian conquest, the timing and nature of European occupation, and their varying material endowments and economic roles.

      Since the Spanish and Portuguese element looms so large in the history of the region, it is sometimes proposed that Iberoamerica would be a better term than Latin America. Latin seems to suggest an equal importance of the French and Italian contributions, which is far from being the case. Nevertheless, usage has fastened on Latin America, and it is retained here.

      This article treats the history of Latin America from the first occupation by Europeans to the late 20th century, with an initial consideration of the indigenous and Iberian background. For more-detailed coverage of the area prior to European contact, see pre-Columbian civilizations. For additional information about the European exploration and colonization of Latin America, see colonialism (European exploration). For information about the individual nations of Central America, South America, and the Caribbean, see specific country articles by name—e.g., Brazil, Venezuela, and Argentina. The physical and human geography of the continents, with some historical overview, are provided in the articles North America and South America. There is also a separate article Latin American literature. For discussion of major cities of Latin America and their histories, see specific articles by name—e.g., Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, and Mexico City.

The background

      Though the conditions of pre-Columbian America and 15th-century Iberia are beyond the scope of Latin American history proper, they must be given consideration in that connection. Not only did the geography of precontact America persist, but both the new arrivals and the indigenous inhabitants long retained their respective general characteristics, and it was the fit between them that determined many aspects of Latin American evolution.

The indigenous world and the word “Indian”

      From the time of Columbus and the late 15th century forward, the Spaniards and Portuguese called the peoples of the Americas “Indians (American Indian)”—that is, inhabitants of India. Not only is the term erroneous by origin, but it did not correspond to anything in the minds of the indigenous people. They had no word meaning “inhabitant of the Western Hemisphere,” and most of them seem not to have adopted any equivalent even after centuries of contact. Any such word refers to commonalities seen from the outside and not to any unity perceived by the inhabitants of the Americas themselves. The indigenous peoples were greatly varied, far more so than the Europeans; they were spread over a vast area and only faintly aware of each other from one major region to the next.

      Nonetheless, the indigenous peoples had several things in common. They were closely related to one another in biological terms, and their languages, though they cannot be shown to have a common origin, tend to share many general features. All shared an isolation from the great mass of humanity inhabiting Eurasia and Africa, who were in some way in contact with one another. The inhabitants of America all lacked immunities to diseases common in Europe and Africa. They had some impressive innovations to their credit, including the domesticated plants of Mesoamerica and the Andes, but all had been kept apart from things that had long since spread over much of the rest of the globe, including steel, firearms, horses, wheeled vehicles, long-distance shipping, and alphabetic writing. As a result, the indigenous peoples, once in contact, were very vulnerable to the outsiders. Epidemics raged wherever intruders appeared; with their materials and techniques the Europeans were able to conquer whenever they felt it imperative to do so. There is, then, at times, a need for a common term, and if one realizes its limitations, “Indian” may do as well as another.

Types of Western Hemisphere societies

      The Europeans were sedentary, living in nations and districts with distinct borders, relying on a permanent intensive agriculture to sustain many people in a variety of pursuits who lived in both urban and rural communities. One large section of the indigenous American population, in fact the most numerous, based in Mesoamerica (central and southern Mexico and Guatemala) and the central Andes, was also sedentary. Indeed, these peoples and the Europeans tended to have more in common with each other than either had with other peoples indigenous to the Americas. Another type of indigenous peoples may be called semisedentary. They lacked the permanent-site agriculture and the fixed borders of the sedentary peoples and were apparently far less numerous, but they had shifting agriculture and sizable, if frequently moving, settlements. They were found above all in relatively temperate forested areas. The third category that can be established is that of the nonsedentary peoples, who had little or no agriculture and moved annually in small bands over a large territory, hunting and gathering. They were located primarily in areas that under the then-existing technologies were not propitious for agriculture, especially plains and dense tropical forests.

Sedentary peoples

      The sedentary peoples shared with the Europeans not only an agricultural base and dense, quite concentrated populations but also territorial states, hereditary rulers, state religions with priesthoods, specialized craft groups, social classes including a nobility distinct from commoners, and regularized taxes or tributes. Among some sedentary groups, large political structures—confederations or empires—had come into existence, collecting tribute and engaging in trade over long distances. The most famous of these are the Inca empire in the Andean region and what is often called the Aztec empire in Mexico (although the word Aztec was little known at the time). These empires were not nations but had at their centre one small ethnic state (or a few) that exercised dominance over a large number of similar states. The subject states retained their ethnic identity, their own rulerships, and their general way of life despite owing tribute to the imperial power. It was these subject entities that were to survive the conquest and serve as the base of the European presence. They had different names in different places, and indeed their structures varied, but they were everywhere enough like European small principalities, counties, or provinces to be able to function within a European framework.

      Among the sedentary indigenous peoples, as in the Iberian system, the household held and worked land and paid taxes. In both, women were in some ways subordinate to men. But in both cultures they could hold and bequeath personal and real property and carry out various kinds of economic transactions, retaining many rights within marriage. In the matter of marriage alliances, crucial to the organization of both kinds of societies, the woman and her property and rank were as important as the man and his.

Semisedentary peoples

      Among the semisedentary peoples, much of the above structure was missing. Without well-defined permanent local political units, strong rulers, or tax mechanisms, they did not offer the Europeans the same kind of potential foothold. They lacked social classes, depending on gender and age for their primary social distinctions. Even their household and family structures were different. Settlements or villages shifted over time both in location and in membership; the largest strongly defined unit was a household often containing scores of people related by blood and marriage, headed by the eldest male, and the best-defined duties in the society were internal to the household.

      Among the sedentary peoples, men did most of the heavier agricultural work, with help only at times of peak workload from women, who were principally involved in processing and distributing the product, much as in Europe. Among the semisedentary peoples, men mainly hunted, only clearing the fields for the women, who did the bulk of the agricultural work. Warfare was highly developed among both the sedentary and the semisedentary peoples, but the semisedentary were more mobile, were better able to protect themselves in forests and other hazardous environments, and had more effective weapons. Their foods were less attractive to Europeans, and in any case they had less surplus and were fewer in number. They offered Europeans less incentive to invade and more effective resistance when they did.

Nonsedentary peoples

      With the fully nonsedentary peoples, these factors were multiplied yet again. No agricultural stores at all were available to an invader, nor was there anyone who could readily be compelled to do agricultural work after conquest. The people were extremely few and spread over an enormous territory, able to move long distances at short notice. Their military potential was much greater than that even of the semisedentary peoples. With so little incentive for the Europeans to subdue them, so few points of contact between their societies, and such great ability and will on the part of the nonsedentary peoples to resist conquest, the main patterns between the two groups became avoidance and long-continuing conflict.

The Iberians

      In most ways the Spaniards and Portuguese shared the characteristics of other European peoples. They did, however, have some special features as inhabitants of the Mediterranean region and the southwestern part of Europe.

Cities

      In the late 15th century most of Iberia was consolidated into three kingdoms—Portugal, Castile, and Aragon—of which the last two were united through royal marriage. But society (social structure) itself was still quite provincial. The most important entity for purposes of organization and affiliation was the city and the large territory attached to it. More people were engaged in agricultural and pastoral pursuits than anything else, yet society was urban-centred. Each province focused on a city where not only most governmental, ecclesiastical, professional, commercial, and craft personnel congregated but where even the families who controlled the largest rural estates resided. The town council, or cabildo, united representatives of the most prominent families of the whole province, which was thus not divided along urban and rural lines. Rather, a strong solidarity prevailed, with the less successful flowing to the edges, the more successful back to the centre. The cities that the Iberians established in the Americas had the same characteristics, becoming the means of organizing huge territories around a European settlement.

family

      Some characteristics of the Iberian family differed from those found in the northern European family, and these were to have profound effects on relations between Iberians and indigenous people in the Americas. In the Iberian tradition, families were multilinear and existed at different levels. A marriage did not subordinate the wife's family to the extent common in the north of Europe. Women kept their maiden names after marriage, and the dowry given with them remained their own property. Some of the children of a given pair might take the name of one parent, some the name of the other, the choice often being determined by who ranked highest socially. Rather than counting only from father to son to grandson, the Iberians kept track of a network of connections, as many made through the female line as the male.

      Formal marriage was undertaken only when the partners, and especially the male, considered themselves fully established. Men often married quite late, whereas women, for whom the possibilities of advance were severely limited, tended to marry earlier. Many couples never married at all, so that their children were in the strict legal sense illegitimate (illegitimacy). While they were waiting, late-marrying men would have relationships with women of lower rank, and children were born of these informal unions. The result was that, despite the ostensible disapproval of the church, Iberian society was full of informal partners and illegitimate children.

      A complex set of practices had grown up for the treatment of the women and children involved in informal unions. When the man finally decided to marry, he would often provide for his informal partner, giving her something as a dowry so that she could herself get married to someone of lower rank. The father might recognize the children of these unions, giving them his name and some sort of protection. They were not at the level of his legitimate children, but they were useful as trusted aides or stewards, and he might arrange marriages between the female children and his subordinates. In the Western Hemisphere, the lower-ranking women with whom Iberians had informal unions were often indigenous or African, and the children were racially mixed, but the Iberian patterns of treatment of those involved in the informal unions remained much the same, allowing for a vast amount of social and cultural contact and mixture.

Ethnic (ethnic group) diversity and its results

      Christians (Christianity) speaking closely related Romance languages made up the majority of the inhabitants of the Iberian Peninsula, but they had long coexisted with a larger element of starkly distinct peoples than most of the other nations of Europe. Not only were the Basques in the northeast of different stock, but Iberia had been largely conquered in the early Middle Ages by Muslim Arabic speakers coming from northern Africa across the Strait of Gibraltar. In a long process of reconquest, called the Reconquista, the Iberians had gained back all of the peninsula by the late 15th century, but the Moors (Moor), as they called them, were still the majority of the population in several areas along the southern coast, and as servants, slaves, and craftspeople they were to be found in many parts of the peninsula. A substantial number of Jews (Jew) had also long made Iberia their home. For many decades the Portuguese had been exploring along the coast of Africa, bringing back many Africans as slaves. By the late 15th century Africans were present in considerable numbers in Portugal and also in the south of Spain.

      The Iberian Christians' relations with the other peoples, above all the Moors, were to be the precedent for their treatment of the inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere. In the Reconquest (Reconquista) the Christians had pushed their rivals back through military force; those who carried out the conquests often went to settle among the Moors and were rewarded by the government with grants of land and other benefits. But the newly subjugated Muslims retained much of their organization and civilization for long periods, only gradually being Christianized and absorbed. As for the Jews, on the one hand they were resented and sometimes persecuted by Christian Iberians while on the other hand those who converted to Christianity often rose high in professional and political life and married well within Christian Iberian society.

      The Africans had become a well-known group especially in the southern part of the peninsula, with accepted roles as house servants, craftspeople, and field workers. Possession of African slaves was part of general economic life and of social ambitions. Also, manumission was possible, and communities of freed Africans, many of them racially mixed, existed on the edges of society.

      So much diversity represented a formidable challenge to the movement toward the creation of unified Christian nation-states that was coming to a head in the late 15th century. Those of the Jews and Moors who had refused to convert were in time forcibly expelled, and the Inquisition became active in the attempt to enforce the orthodoxy of those who had accepted conversion. Negative stereotypes concerning the other ethnicities were rife in Iberian culture, but over the centuries Iberia had seen diversity, close contact with different peoples, and their gradual absorption.

The overseas (European exploration) tradition

      All Iberia's coastal peoples had maritime experience. Yet farther inland the occupation of mariner was despised; expansion was deemed a matter of conquering and occupying contiguous territory rather than of far-flung commerce. It was the Italians, above all the Genoese (Genoa), who brought the lore of overseas activity to the Iberians. From the eastern Mediterranean they carried the sugar industry, the use of foreign slaves in it, and the trinket trade with distant peoples first to Spain and Portugal and then on out into the Atlantic, where they were involved together with the Portuguese on the West African coast and the islands lying off it. By the time of contact with the Americas, the Spaniards had been affected by these developments to the extent that Sevilla (Seville) and some other ports were heavily engaged in overseas commerce, often under Genoese direction, but they still mainly adhered to the tradition of conquest and settlement, reinforced by their final defeat of the Spanish Moors in 1492. The Portuguese, on the other hand, partly because of Italian influence and partly because of their own geographic situation, had gone over thoroughly to the commercial-maritime tradition, emphasizing exploration, commerce, tropical crops, and coastal trading posts rather than full-scale occupation.

      It is no accident, then, that Christopher Columbus was a Genoese who had long been in Portugal and had visited the Atlantic islands. His projects were entirely within the Italian tradition.

Early Latin America

Spanish America

      The Spaniards were not only the first of the Europeans to reach the Americas in early modern times, but they also quickly located and occupied the areas of greatest indigenous population and mineral resources. They immigrated in force and created a far-flung, permanent network of new settlements (colonialism, Western).

The Caribbean phase

      The islands of the Caribbean would soon become a backwater, but during the first years of Spanish occupation they were the arena of the development of many practices and structures that would long be central to Spanish-American life.

      When Columbus (Columbus, Christopher) returned to Spain from his voyage of 1492, having hit upon the island of Hispaniola (now divided between the Dominican Republic and Haiti) as his base, his concept of what should be done thereafter was in the Italian-Portuguese maritime tradition. He wanted to explore further for trading partners, and he considered all who came along with him to be employees of an enterprise headed by himself. The Spaniards, however, immediately started moving in the direction of their own traditions. The expedition that returned to Hispaniola in 1493 was far more elaborate than it needed to have been for Columbus' purposes, containing a large number and variety of people, animals, and equipment for a large-scale, permanent occupation of the island. A conflict of purpose between the Spaniards on the one hand and Columbus with his Italian relatives and associates on the other soon ensued. By 1499 the royal government was intervening directly, naming Spaniards to the governorship and sending further large parties of settlers. Spanish ways soon gained the upper hand.

       Santo Domingo, founded on the southeastern coast of Hispaniola in 1496, became a real city, with a rash of ephemeral secondary Spanish cities spread over the island. These were oriented to gold-mining sites, which were soon at the base of the Spanish economy. Indigenous demographic loss in this hot, humid area was quick and catastrophic, and placer mines (primarily in streams, where unconsolidated deposits of heavy, valuable minerals settled) also soon began to run out. In the second decade of the 16th century the Spaniards pushed on to the other large islands, where the cycle began to repeat itself, although more quickly; around the same time, expeditions to the mainland began, partly to seek for new assets and partly to try to replace the lost population on the islands.

The city

      Santo Domingo became a type of entity that would reappear in every major area of Spanish occupation. The central city formed a stable headquarters for the Spaniards in the midst of a chaos of population loss and economic shifts in the countryside. The majority of all the Spaniards in the country lived there, at least when they could. Everyone of importance was there, with only underlings doing essential tasks located in the country. Governmental offices, churches, large private dwellings, and shops soon materialized around the city's central square, together with all the people required for them. The urban core was well laid out and well built up. On the city's edge everything was different. Here were the ranchos, impermanent structures inhabited mainly by Indians temporarily in town for work purposes. The Spanish-American city remained like this for centuries—Spanish in the centre, Indian on the edges, growing indefinitely without changing at the core, the site of an enormous process of cultural change.

Indians (American Indian) and Spaniards

      In the Caribbean phase several mechanisms developed, combining indigenous and Spanish elements, that long formed the main structural ties between Indians and Spaniards on the mainland as well. The primary form through which Spaniards attempted to take advantage of the functioning of the indigenous world was what came to be known as the encomienda, a governmental grant of an indigenous sociopolitical unit to an individual Spaniard for him to use in various ways. On the Spanish side, the institution grew out of the Reconquest tradition. Pressure among the Spaniards on the scene led to the arrangement; Columbus, while governor, had opposed it, and Spanish royal authorities tried to restrict it as much as they could. On the indigenous side, the encomienda rested on an already existing unit and the powers of its ruler. The size and benefits of the encomienda thus depended on the local indigenous situation: there could be only as many encomiendas as there were indigenous units; the encomendero (holder of the grant) could at least initially receive only what the ruler had received before him. The larger islands were inhabited by the Arawak, a sedentary if modestly developed people with kingdoms, rulers, nobles, and obligatory labour mechanisms. Their ruler was called a cacique, and the Spaniards adopted the word and carried it with them wherever they went in the Americas. The cacique received labour but not tribute in kind, and the encomendero, in practice, followed suit.

      The encomendero used the indigenous labour in various ways: to construct houses in the Spanish city where he lived, to provide servants, to produce agricultural products on properties he acquired, and above all to work in the growing gold-mining industry. The encomienda set up most of the main forms of Spanish-Indian contact. Although based on traditional mechanisms, it involved major movements of people and new types of activity. Through these dislocations and the exposure of the Indians to new diseases, the encomienda was instrumental in the quick virtual disappearance of the indigenous population on the large islands.

      The encomienda was primarily a transaction between the encomendero, the cacique, and his people, but it could not stop there. Auxiliaries with European skills were needed to run mining operations and supervise the growing of European crops and livestock. The encomendero would hire some Spaniards in supervisory capacities, augmented by African slaves when possible, but the limits of his resources were soon reached. He needed permanent indigenous employees who could learn needed skills and act as a cadre. The indigenous world already knew the naboría, a person directly and permanently dependent upon the ruler or a noble. This role was appropriated by the Spaniards, who commandeered substantial numbers of Indians for their permanent employ, calling them naborías. On the mainland the permanent indigenous worker was to become an ever-growing element of the equation, the locus of the greatest cultural change, and a channel between the Spanish and indigenous worlds.

      In the Reconquest tradition, the Spaniards believed that non-Christians taken in battle could properly be enslaved (slavery). Nevertheless, the bulk of the sedentary population in the Caribbean and on the mainland was not enslaved. Only as the population declined seriously did slave-raiding around the edges of the Caribbean become a major factor, the Spaniards attempting in vain to replace the losses. All over Spanish America, Indian slavery was to be a secondary factor, brought into play mainly with less-than-sedentary peoples and under economic pressures—that is, the lack of other assets. The slaves were always, as in this case, employed far from their place and culture of origin.

A new Spanish subculture

      Cacique was not the only word and concept incorporated into local Spanish culture in the Caribbean and spread from there wherever the Spaniards went. Some of the new cultural goods were the result of Spanish action, like the encomienda or the ranchos; others were straight out of the indigenous world, including naboría, maíz (corn; maize), canoa (canoe), coa (digging stick), and barbacoa (grill, palisade, anything with pointed sticks, the origin of the English word barbecue). Still others came out of the Portuguese Atlantic tradition, like rescate (literally rescue or redemption), a word for informal trading with indigenous people often involving force and taking place in a setting where conquest had not yet taken place. This whole new overlay on Hispanic culture maintained itself partly because it was adjusted to the new situation but above all because each set of new arrivals from Spain readily adopted it from the old hands already there.

Conquest in the central (Central America) mainland areas

      The Spanish occupation of the larger Caribbean islands did not entail spectacular episodes of military conflict. Yet force was involved, and the Spaniards developed many of the techniques they would use on the mainland. One of the most important was the device of seizing the cacique in a parley, then using his authority as the entering wedge. The Spaniards also learned that the indigenous people were not a solid unit but would often cooperate with the intruders in order to gain advantage against a local enemy.

      Also during the Caribbean phase an expeditionary form evolved that was to carry the Spaniards to the far reaches of the hemisphere. Spanish expansion occurred under royal auspices, but expeditions were conceived, financed, manned, and organized locally. The leaders, who invested most, were senior people with local wealth and a following; the ordinary members were men without encomiendas, often recently arrived. The primary leader of an important expedition was often the second-ranking man in the base area, just behind the governor, ambitious to be governor himself but blocked by the incumbent.

      There was no permanent organization and no sense of rank. The word “army” was hardly used, and the word “soldier” not at all; still, the possession of steel helmets, steel swords and lances, and horses gave the Spaniards an overwhelming technical advantage over any indigenous force they were likely to meet. On flat, open ground, two or three hundred Spaniards often defeated indigenous armies of many thousands, suffering few casualties themselves. The conquering groups showed a surprising diversity, coming from many different regions of Spain (plus some foreign countries) and representing a broad cross section of Spanish pursuits. It was they who founded and settled in the new cities, and the later stream of immigration initially consisted primarily of their relatives and compatriots. Conquest and settlement were a single process.

      Having in about one generation largely exhausted the demographic and mineral potential of the Greater Antilles, the Spaniards began a serious push toward the mainland in two approximately contemporary streams, one from Cuba to central Mexico and surrounding regions and the other from Hispaniola to the Isthmus of Panama region and on to Peru and associated areas. The Peruvian thrust started first, in Tierra Firme (the area of Panama and present northwestern Colombia) in the years 1509–13. The results were appreciable, but the Panamanian occupation was thrown somewhat in the shadow for a time by the spectacular conquest of central Mexico in 1519–21.

Conquest of Mexico

 The leader of the Mexican venture, Hernán (Hernando) Cortés (Cortés, Hernán, marqués del Valle de Oaxaca), had some university education and was unusually articulate, but he conformed to the general type of the leader, being senior, wealthy, and powerful in Cuba, and the expedition he organized was also of the usual type. Passing by the Maya of the Yucatán Peninsula, the Spaniards landed in force on the central coast, almost immediately founding Veracruz, which despite small shifts in location has been the country's main port ever since. The Aztec empire, or Triple Alliance, of the city-states of Tenochtitlán, Texcoco, and Tacuba, centring on the Mexica (Aztec) of Tenochtitlán, dominated central Mexico. The coastal peoples among whom the Spaniards landed, however, had only recently been incorporated in the Aztec tribute system, and they offered the Spaniards no open resistance.

      Moving inland, the invaders encountered the second power of the region, the Tlaxcalans. Tlaxcala briefly engaged the Spaniards in battle but, suffering heavy losses, soon decided to ally with them against their traditional enemy, the Aztec. As the Spaniards moved on toward Tenochtitlán, many of the local subordinate states (altepetl) also came to terms. Even in Tenochtitlán itself fighting did not ensue immediately; the Spaniards as usual seized the cacique (that is, the king of Tenochtitlán, often called the Aztec emperor, Montezuma (Montezuma II) or Moteucçoma) and began to exercise authority through him.

      The expected secondary reaction was not long in coming, and fighting broke out in the capital. At this point the most unusual part of the process began, for Tenochtitlán was on an island in the midst of a lake, shot through with canals and extensively built up. Here the Spaniards lost much of their usual advantage. They were forced from Tenochtitlán with severe casualties. Although they retained their superiority in the open country, they had to retire to Tlaxcala, accumulate reinforcements, and then come back to Tenochtitlán to carry out a unique full-scale siege, including the use of European-style vessels with cannon on the lake. After four months the Spaniards captured the Aztec capital and began turning it into their own headquarters as Mexico City.

      Other parts of central Mexico came under Spanish control more easily, and several Spanish cities were established in the region. Soon successor conquests were under way, to Guatemala, Yucatán, and the north. Those to the north led to little in the short run because that area was inhabited by less-sedentary peoples. Cortés acted as governor for a time and was given great rewards, but rivalries among the Spaniards soon made it possible for the royal government to replace him, first with an audiencia, or high court, and then also with a viceroy, direct representative of the Spanish king.

Conquest of Peru

 The Spanish thrust toward Peru through Panama was diverted for some years by the attractions of nearby Nicaragua. No one knew what lay along the southern coast, which because of contrary winds was very difficult to navigate; the coastal climate was hostile, and little wealth was discovered among the people dwelling there. Attempts in this direction were led by Francisco Pizarro (Pizarro, Francisco), who despite being illegitimate and illiterate had all the other familiar characteristics of the leader; not only was he the illegitimate son of a prominent family but he also was one of the first captains on the American mainland, by the 1520s a wealthy encomendero and town council member of Panama. At length Pizarro's group came into contact with central Andean coastal people connected with the Inca and saw evidence of great wealth and development. Acquiring from the crown the governorship of the new region, which now began to be called Peru, Pizarro, in 1530, led an expedition that proceeded into Inca territory. In 1532, at the north-central site of Cajamarca, the Inca emperor Atahuallpa was captured in the usual fashion, a parley and surprise attack. In 1533, after much treasure had been collected, the Spaniards had Atahuallpa executed.

      The process of conquest and occupation was much as in Mexico, though Pizarro was not thinking of Mexican precedents. Again, once the Spaniards were in the fully sedentary lands of the Inca, the local people hardly attacked them, allowing them to proceed unhindered into the very presence of the imperial ruler. In addition to a localism similar to that of Mexico, the situation was defined by a large-scale Inca civil war that was just ending as the Spaniards arrived. A faction based in Quito, headed by Atahuallpa, had defeated a faction based in Cuzco, the traditional Inca capital, but the victory had not been entirely consummated, and the parties were still very bitter. After the events at Cajamarca, the Spaniards faced a certain amount of fighting as they advanced to Cuzco, especially from adherents of Atahuallpa, but his enemies, who seem to have been the majority on the ground, tended to acquiesce for the time being.

      The Spaniards founded a major Spanish city in Cuzco, but they stopped short of making it their capital as their compatriots had Tenochtitlán in Mexico. Deterred by the rigours and inaccessibility of the southern Peruvian highlands, after a bit of experimentation they established the new settlement of Lima, on the central coast, as capital of Peru. The move was of vast significance. In Mexico the bulk of the Spanish population concentrated in the area of highest indigenous population density, favouring contact, cultural change, and merging. In Peru, the highland centre of indigenous population was separate from the centre of Spanish population on the coast, which, in addition, quickly lost most of its indigenous inhabitants to disease. In consequence, the two peoples and cultures underwent an overall slower and less thorough process of amalgamation.

      As in Mexico, conquering expeditions soon went out from central Peru, in all directions: to Quito and on north to Colombia, to Chile and Argentina to the south, and even to the Amazon. Peru proper seemed to be securely conquered, but a countrywide uprising took place in 1536, centring in Cuzco, where the Spaniards were kept surrounded for more than one year, until an expedition returning from Chile lifted the siege. After that, the conquest was definitive, although the successor to the Inca ruler and a group of followers took refuge in a remote region, where they held out for more than a generation.

      Peru's history continued to be less placid than that of Mexico. Peru was much harder to reach from Spain, and travel within the country was extremely difficult. In the conquest period and long after, Peru was far richer in precious metals than Mexico, since the Spaniards profited from the silver mining already developed by the Inca. Thus there was more to fight over, and struggles arose between the Pizarro brothers (Francisco had three) and a faction led by Diego de Almagro (Almagro, Diego de), Pizarro's junior partner. Spaniards flooded into the country, eager for encomiendas and ready to rebel in order to get them. Four large-scale civil wars among the Spaniards rocked the country in the time between the late 1530s and early 1550s.

      Like Cortés and like most leaders of successful expeditions, Pizarro became governor of the country he had conquered and actually held that position longer than Cortés. In 1541, however, he was assassinated, brought low by the second of the Almagrist rebellions. A royally appointed governor from outside took over, followed in 1544 by a viceroy and audiencia based in Lima; the first viceroy was in turn killed in a civil conflict, but his successors became more firmly established.

Conquest society in the central mainland areas

      In the generation or two subsequent to the military phase of the conquest, Spanish immigrants poured by the thousands into Mexico and Peru. Although still a small minority compared with the indigenous population, they constituted the great majority of all Europeans in the hemisphere, so that these two regions could now be doubly called central areas. They combined the largest European and indigenous populations with the liveliest economies, for they proved to be the sites of the richest deposits of precious metals then known. The immigrants continued to come from all parts of Spain, constituting an even broader cross section than had the conquerors, for women were now a standard part of the stream.

The central-area encomienda

      Already crucial in the Caribbean, the encomienda now developed even further. The Mexican and Andean indigenous units on which it was based were much larger, with stronger authorities who could collect tribute in kind as well as labour. Moreover, the products could circulate in an economy with a great deal more liquid wealth, and there were now many more non-encomenderos, who soon formed the great majority of all Spaniards. The encomenderos greatly enlarged their staffs and followings, with various levels of stewards and many more African slaves, whom they could now afford. The ecclesiastics who now began serious work with the indigenous people of the countryside operated within the framework of the encomienda and received their remuneration from it. The encomenderos went not only into mining and local agrarian activity on a larger scale than before but also into a large variety of ancillary enterprises. Their establishments in the city centre were often palatial, including shops rented to merchants and artisans, of whom they were the best customers. They married Spanish women, ideally relatives of other encomenderos or of high local officials, if only to have legitimate heirs to inherit the encomienda. They became an interlocking group dominating local Hispanic society and virtually monopolizing the municipal councils of the Spanish cities. The process whereby Hispanic society penetrated into the hinterland was begun by their usually humble rural employees, who combined tax collecting, labour supervision, farming, and livestock growing.

Artisans

      The Spanish crafts flourished in the encomenderos' cities, practiced by artisans who had a far humbler social profile than the encomenderos but were like them in being tied to the locality. They, too, frequently married Spanish women and acquired urban and rural property. To increase their productivity, they bought African slaves, whom they trained in their own trades; the Africans in turn helped train the larger number of Indian apprentices to be found in many shops. In this way the artisans were important in the gradual creation of an ever-growing African, indigenous, and mixed group in the cities, able to speak Spanish and practice the Spanish trades.

Spanish women

      Spanish women were an important element in the sedentary urban society growing up in the central areas. The women were above all relatives of Spanish men already present, brought from Spain explicitly to marry some local associate. As wives of encomenderos and artisans, they managed households that included many Spanish guests and employees and even larger numbers of Africans and Indians, whom they attempted to mold to their purposes. They also brought up both their own fully Spanish children and the racially mixed children they often took or were given to raise. As widows and sometimes spinsters, they actively participated in economic life, though women's independent activity tended to be channeled into certain conventional directions, from indirect investment and owning urban real estate at the higher levels to running bakeries and taverns at the lower. Women were at first a small minority of the Spanish population, but their relative numbers steadily increased, reaching effective parity with men by the second or third generation after conquest.

Africans (Africa)

      Africans also were important to the society. As stated, encomenderos and artisans acquired African slaves (slavery), and any Spaniard of means would try to own at least one or two. Thus Africans were soon a significant group numerically; on the Peruvian coast, at least, it is thought that after several decades they equaled the Spaniards in numbers. Spaniards needed auxiliaries serving as intermediaries between themselves and the much larger indigenous population. Africans, who shared the Spaniards' Old World immunities and much else, survived and adapted well; the main limitation on acquiring them was the great expense involved.

      The gender ratio strongly favoured males, but females were present too, usually in household service, food trades, and petty commerce. The women were frequently mistresses of their owners, to whom they bore mulatto children, with the result that mother and children were sometimes freed. Other African slaves bought their freedom, and a mainly urban class of free blacks began to emerge. Their roles were similar to those of the slaves, except for being exercised more independently.

      In this society, the slave, or at least the African slave, was not at the bottom of society but ranked in Spanish terms higher than the general Indian population. Africans were more closely associated with the Spaniards than Indians, culturally more like them, given more skilled and responsible tasks, and in cross-ethnic hierarchies were normally in charge of indigenous people.

Indians (Central American and northern Andean Indian) among Spaniards

      Spanish cities, from the very beginning, were full of Indians working for Spaniards in a great number of capacities, sometimes temporarily, sometimes for long periods, but usually at a low level. One of the most important features of life in the first postconquest decades was the prevalence of Indian servant-mistresses of Spaniards, the result of the fact that Spanish women were still much less numerous than men, not to speak of the pattern of men waiting for full success before marrying. These indigenous women retained many aspects of their traditional culture, but they had to learn good Spanish and master skills of Spanish home and family life. They bore the Spaniards mestizo children, who were to become a very important feature of postconquest society.

Commerce

      Merchants were present in force and vital to the existence of the overall complex. But as members of a far-flung network that required high geographic mobility, they were at first less a part of local society. Once the wealth of the central areas became apparent, Sevilla-based firms began to dominate the import-export trade—the exchange of American precious metals for European cloth, iron, manufactures, and other goods. The representatives at American ports and capitals were junior partners in transatlantic firms and in time expected to move on; hence they seldom married or bought property locally. The aim was to get silver back to Sevilla in order to pay debts and reinvest in merchandise. Second-rank merchants, however, without direct ties to Sevilla, were more likely to develop local roots.

      Commerce in local goods, often but not always of indigenous origin, was carried on by members of a well-defined social type, sometimes called tratantes, with a profile sharply distinct from that of the long-distance merchants. Often illiterate, and furthermore without capital, they were recruited from among the most marginal members of local Hispanic society. They, too, were relatively unstable; they were prone to move to another area or into other kinds of activity because their status was so precarious.

mining

      The mining sector drove the economy of the Spanish world and was an indispensable component of it, yet in several ways it stood apart. It employed only a relatively small proportion of the total Spanish population. Mining complexes were often remote from the main centres of indigenous settlement and hence also from the network of Spanish cities. Turnover was quick, whether in terms of sites, mining enterprises, or individuals.

       gold mining was often virtually an expeditionary activity; a gang of Indians, joined perhaps by some blacks and led by one or two Spanish miners, might spend only days or weeks at a given river site. An encomendero, not himself physically involved, would likely supply the finances and take most of the profit. In many regions gold mining was seasonal, with miners having neither special training nor a full commitment to the industry.

      In most regions placer gold was soon exhausted, though Mexico relied on it for a generation, and it eventually became the principal export of New Granada (present-day Colombia). Silver (silver processing) mining was the successor, and it became the main export asset of the central areas until the time of independence. Here too the encomenderos were the greatest investors and mine owners in the beginning, but their dominance was short-lived. Silver mining was the type of technically demanding, capital-intensive enterprise that called for close attention and much expertise on the part of owners. Very soon true silver mining experts began not only to operate the mines but to become the owners as well.

      Spanish law granted the crown residual ownership of mineral deposits, giving it the right to levy substantial taxes on the industry. There was always a governmental presence at mining sites, and the silver tax was the crown's principal source of revenue. Silver mining camps began to resemble ordinary Spanish municipalities, with councils (dominated by local mining entrepreneurs) and strong contingents of merchants, craftspeople, and professionals.

      By 1550 strong differences had developed between the Mexican (Mexico) and the Peruvian (Peru) silver mining industries. In the Andes the great deposits, of which those of Potosí Mountain (in present Bolivia) were overwhelmingly predominant, were within the territory of sedentary indigenous population; moreover, the Andeans had a strong tradition of long-distance labour movements. Thus indigenous labour obligations, channeled first through the encomienda and later through other arrangements, could supply a large stream of temporary workers. In addition, there were a number of permanent indigenous workers, some of whom possessed skills inherited from the preconquest period, and, in an industry as technical as mining, this group was constantly growing. Even so, the Peruvian mines used large numbers of temporary labourers under governmental obligation, and their presence greatly slowed down cultural change among the indigenous mine workers.

      In Mexico, most of the largest silver mining sites were discovered well to the north of the zone of sedentary population. Traditional labour obligations could not be used, and the bulk of the labour force consisted from the beginning of sedentary Indians from the centre acting as free agents, naborías, or permanent workers. The Mexican mines also used far fewer people, so that the Hispanic element predominated more than in Peru, and the north of Mexico was soon on its way to having a Hispanized, mobile population very different from that in the central part of the country.

Institutional, legal, and intellectual developments

      From early in the Caribbean phase the crown had established the Casa de Contratación (Contratación, Casa de), or board of trade, in Sevilla, apparently originally intended to operate the entire overseas enterprise on an Italian model. In fact, it soon became a customs and emigration office, involved also in the organization of Atlantic convoys. Direction of the governmental aspect of overseas life went to a royal council constituted much like others, the Council of the Indies (Indies, Council of the) (as the Spaniards continued to call America), which issued decrees, heard appeals, and above all made appointments to high offices. Distances were such that almost everything governmental depended on the officials actually in America.

      During the conquest and immediately thereafter, royal government was nominal in the sense that the governor was invariably merely the leader of the conquering expedition. But in the central areas, with the rivalries and wars among the conquerors and continued strong Spanish immigration, the royal government was soon able to install its own institutional network, with the support of many local Spaniards. As stated earlier, before 1550 both Mexico and Peru had a viceroy and an audiencia, based in the respective capitals, and some secondary audiencias followed; there were substantial treasury offices as well, for the crown's most urgent interest in the new areas was getting silver revenue. A host of lawyers and notaries assembled in the capitals around these nuclei and their branches in the secondary Spanish cities. The viceroys brought with them retinues including an element of high nobility. Marriage alliances and business deals soon brought the officials into connection with the more important encomenderos.

      Church organizations, which in the Spanish scheme of things were part of the overall governmental framework (the crown appointed bishops and many other high officials of the church), also came into the central areas in force on the heels of the conquest. Few clerics of any kind were with the actual conquering expeditions, but soon parties of friars arrived. They were followed by bishops and cathedral chapters, established first in the capitals and then in secondary cities; the culmination of the process was the seating of archbishops in Lima and Mexico City. Both the friars and the priests began to penetrate the countryside, operating through the encomiendas, with the ideal (long unrealized) of having one cleric for each encomienda. Like the governmental officials, ecclesiastics were closely connected with the civil society; some were appointed in the first place because of family connections, and many tried to marry female relatives to encomenderos.

      These institutions were an important part of the general scheme, but they depended on local Hispanic civil society and reflected its relative strength or weakness. Governmental and ecclesiastical hierarchies were as urban-oriented as all other aspects of Spanish society; they were based in the cities, above all the largest cities, where one could find not only the largest concentrations of personnel but all those of high rank. The religious orders were a partial exception, rotating their members frequently; nevertheless, the most famous figures spent the bulk of their lives in larger centres. As for the government, it hardly existed outside the cities; the local magistrates who gradually came to be appointed in the Indian areas were mainly laymen, often unsuccessful candidates for encomiendas.

      In the aftermath of the conquests, as they became integrated into the local situation, some ecclesiastics began to criticize Spanish institutions, especially the encomienda. However, the various representatives of the church were not entirely unified. The secular clergy said little; among the orders, the pragmatic Franciscans (Franciscan) wanted a higher moral tone and better treatment of the Indians but were prepared to work through the encomienda; the more doctrinaire Dominicans (Dominican), of whom Bartolomé de las Casas was the most famous and most persistent, spoke for the total abolition of the encomienda, with the clergy to be in charge of the Indians. At the same time, the Spanish royal government was seeking to find ways to increase its authority and in alliance with the Dominicans passed antiencomienda legislation. Resistance among the settlers and conquerors was fierce (the greatest of the Peruvian civil wars was in direct reaction to the strongest legislation, the New Laws of 1542). But in combination with other factors (of which indigenous population loss and the presence in the central areas of many non-encomenderos were the most essential), in the course of the 16th century the encomienda lost its labour monopoly and had its tribute in kind curtailed, while many encomiendas without legal successors reverted to direct crown administration.

      The conquerors and early settlers produced a large number of histories describing and praising their exploits. The ecclesiastics, as they came in, began to write similar documents about their own activities, but they also went much further. Some, with the Franciscans most prominent, showed a strong interest in the study of indigenous history, language, and culture; others, especially the Dominicans, wrote in a more polemical spirit; and sometimes the two currents converged. The arts of literacy were much prized by the upper levels of the Spanish population, and universities, mainly for professional training, were soon established in the viceregal capitals.

Trunk lines

      Not only were the central areas different from the fringes in early Latin America, but important distinctions existed within the central areas themselves. In some ways the centre was more a line than a region—that is, a line from Atlantic port to capital to mines, along which European people and products flowed in and silver flowed out. For Mexico, the line went from Veracruz to Mexico City and on to Zacatecas and other mines of the north. In the more complex Peruvian scheme, the line went from the Isthmus of Panama to Lima and on to Potosí. It was along these routes that the Spanish and African populations concentrated, that social, economic, and governmental institutions were first created, then gelled and thickened, and that cultural and social change proceeded most quickly.

Postconquest indigenous society

      Although the majority of the indigenous population continued to live in their traditional units across the countryside, their lives were nonetheless profoundly affected by the conquest and its aftermath. The most obvious development was drastic demographic loss; in a process marked by periodic large epidemics, the population declined through the 16th century and on into the 17th century to a small fraction (impossible to determine with precision) of its precontact size. Only in hot, low-lying areas, such as the Peruvian and Mexican coastal regions, however, were losses as disastrous as those of the Caribbean islands. The peoples of the temperate highlands, however much they may have diminished in numbers, survived in the sense of retaining their local units, their language, much of their cultural heritage, and the essence of their social organization.

      The Nahuas (Nahua) of central Mexico are the people whose postconquest experience is best understood because of the voluminous records they produced in their own language. These records reveal that the Nahuas were not overly concerned with the Spaniards or the conquest, which seemed to them at first much like earlier conquests; they remained preoccupied to a large extent with their internal rivalries. The local state, the altepetl, with its rotating constituent parts, remained viable as a functioning autonomous unit and as bearer of all major Spanish structural innovations, not only the encomienda but also the parish and the indigenous municipality. The Nahuas accepted Christianity and built large churches for themselves, but those churches had the same function as preconquest temples, acting as the symbolic centre of the altepetl, and the saints installed in them had the same function as preconquest ethnic gods. The status and duties of the commoners remained distinct from those of the nobles, who manned the local Hispanic-style government of the altepetl as they had filled offices in preconquest times.

      The household and land regime remained much the same in its organization despite reductions and losses. Household complexes, for example, continued to be divided into separate dwellings for the constituent nuclear families. The Spanish concept “family” had no equivalent in Nahuatl, and none was ever borrowed. The greatest internal social change was a result of the end of warfare, which had been endemic in preconquest times. Performance in war had provided degrees of social differentiation, avenues of mobility, and a large supply of slaves. Formal slavery among Indians soon disappeared, while internal social mobility tended to take the form of commoners claiming to be nobles or denying specific rights to specific lords. However, the categories themselves were not challenged: the strong distinction between commoner and noble was not soon erased. An entirely new type of mobility had come into existence—movement of Indians away from the whole realm of indigenous society in the direction of the Spanish world to become naborías or city dwellers.

      The peoples from central Mexico to Guatemala had forms of recordkeeping on paper in preconquest times, and after the arrival of the Spaniards a remarkable cooperation between Spanish ecclesiastics and indigenous aides led to the adaptation of the Latin alphabet to indigenous languages and subsequently to regular record production. In the case of Nahuatl, the main language of central Mexico, the records have allowed the tracing of some basic lines of cultural and linguistic evolution in three stages. During the first generation, although cataclysmic change was occurring, Nahua concepts changed very little, and their language could hardly be said to have changed at all, using its own resources to describe anything new. In a second stage, beginning about 1540 or 1545 and lasting for nearly 100 years, Nahuatl borrowed many hundreds of Spanish words, each representing a cultural loan as well. But all were grammatically nouns; other innovations in the language were minimal. This was a time of change in a familiar corporate framework, centring on areas of close convergence between the two cultures. A third stage began about the middle of the 17th century, when Spaniards and Nahuas had come into closer contact, and many Nahuas were bilingual. Now there were no limitations on the kinds of things introduced into the language, and change increasingly took place at the level of the individual, with mediation no longer necessary.

      The Nahuas had structures perhaps more similar to those of the Spaniards than any other indigenous group, and nowhere else was there such massive interaction of Spanish and indigenous populations, but broadly similar processes were at work across the central areas. Among the Maya of Yucatán, the direction and nature of the evolution was closely similar but much slower, corresponding to the relatively small Spanish presence there. The Yucatec (Yucatec language) Maya language stayed in something comparable to the second stage of Nahuatl for the entire time up to independence.

      In the Andes too the indigenous social configuration was sufficiently close to the Spanish that it could serve as the basis for institutions such as the encomienda and parish. But Andean sociopolitical units were less contiguous territorially than those of central Mexico or Spain, and the population engaged in more seasonal migration. Thus the local ethnic states of the Andes, comparable to the altepetl of the Nahuas (though far less well understood) as the framework of social continuity, may have come under greater challenge of their essential character and identity. The Spaniards tended to reassign noncontiguous parts of one entity to other entities geographically closer, thereby mutilating the original entity. As far back as can be traced, the postconquest Andeans were inclined to migrate permanently from their home entity to another, whether to avoid taxes and labour duties or for other reasons. Such movement occurred in Mexico too, but there the new arrivals tended to melt into the existing entity, whereas in the Andes they remained a large separate group without local land rights or tribute duties, known in Spanish as forasteros. Another challenge to indigenous society came in the later 16th century in the form of attempts by the Spanish government to reorganize sociopolitical units, nucleating the population in so-called reducciones, with consequent social upheaval. Still another apparent disruptive force was the Spanish use of obligatory rotary labour of large groups for relatively long periods at great distances. Yet given the mobility of the Andean peoples from preconquest times, strong continuities may have been involved.

      The Andeans had sophisticated recordkeeping systems in preconquest times but did not put records on paper with ink, and after the conquest they did not engage in alphabetic writing on the same scale as the indigenous people of Mesoamerica. Some indigenous-language records are now beginning to come to light, however, and so far cultural-linguistic evolution appears far more similar to that of central Mexico in nature, staging, and timing than one would have expected.

The central areas in the mature period

      In the 1570s and '80s the central areas went through a process of codification and institutionalization marking the beginning of a long time of slow transformation, which can be called the mature period. Among the new institutions were those formalizing functions that had long been evolving, including the consulados, or merchant guilds, of Mexico City and Lima and tribunals of the Inquisition in the same places (plus Cartagena on the Colombian coast). Entirely new was the Jesuit order, which entered in force at the beginning of this time, quickly becoming strong in urban areas. During these decades nunneries inhabited by daughters of substantial Spanish families came to be a normal feature in any thriving city.

      Intellectual production began to include not only narrow chronicles but also broad surveys of the entire Spanish-American scene, whether religious, legal, or general in focus. For a time most of the writers (Latin American literature) were acquainted with both hemispheres, but by the later 17th century locally born Spanish figures were becoming prominent, such as the famous poet, dramatist, and essayist Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, a Jeronymite nun of Mexico. The late 16th and early 17th centuries saw much significant writing by indigenous authors, affected by both Spanish and indigenous traditions. A large corpus appeared in the Nahuatl language of central Mexico. In Peru the indigenous historian and social commentator (don) Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala produced a vast work in Spanish.

      An elaborate ecclesiastical art and architecture flourished in the main centres, much of it with a special regional style of its own. Religious devotion became more localized, with the appearance of locally born saints and near-saints, notably St. Rose of Lima (Santa Rosa de Lima), as well as miraculous shrines, of which the most famous came to be that of the Virgin of Guadalupe near Mexico City.

      The Hispanic sector continued to grow, still centred in the same cities (city) founded in the conquest period. These cities maintained their dominance because they attracted to them anyone from the countryside who was fully successful in any endeavour. They were usually filled to overflowing, and consequently they ejected large numbers of lower-ranking Hispanics into the surrounding countryside. As a result, new nuclei of Spanish society began to form outside the cities. The process of urban formation repeated itself; a new entity came into being, Spanish at the centre, Indian at the edges, very much a replica of the original city, except that none of the Hispanics rose above a certain rank, and the whole settlement remained dependent on its parent. In time, under the right conditions, tertiary Hispanic-Indian satellites would arise around the secondary centres in turn, until the entire area was honeycombed, and the original pattern of Spanish city and Indian countryside was obscured.

      Racial and cultural mixture complicated and blurred society greatly after the conquest period, but many social criteria were still the same under the surface. The intermediary functions were still the province of those ranking lowest in Hispanic society, but that stratum now contained not only the least senior members (new immigrants from Spain and other European countries) and Africans but also large numbers of mestizos as well as mulattoes and increasingly even Indians who had mastered Spanish language and culture. To organize the diversity, the Spaniards resorted to an ethnic hierarchy, ranking each mixed type according to its physical and cultural closeness to a Spanish ideal. As mixture proceeded across the generations, the types proliferated until finally, at the time of independence, the system collapsed under its own weight. The new categorizations were all at the intermediary level; despite them, all these people, often simply called castas, assimilated to each other and intermingled, occupying the lower edge of Hispanic society. The more successful and better connected among them were constantly being recognized as Spaniards, as a result of which the Spanish category grew far beyond simple biological increase and included many people with some recognizably non-European physical traits.

      Silver mining in Peru and Mexico continued along the same lines as before, reaching new heights of production in the early 17th century. After that a series of problems reversed the trend for a time. The absolute value of transatlantic trade seems to have fallen during the same period. Scholarly controversies about the existence, nature, and extent of a general economic depression during the 17th century have not been entirely resolved, but it is certain that the expansion of the Hispanic sector of society did not halt.

      The most profitable mercantile operations still involved the trade of silver for European products, but some structural changes were occurring. Most of the transatlantic firms of the conquest period had broken up by now. The merchants in the large Spanish-American centres were still mainly born in Spain, but, rather than being members of Spanish firms, they were likely to be agents working on a commission basis or to be operating independently, buying up goods from Spain that arrived in the annual fleets. The change of company structure brought with it a localization of the merchant corps, who now stayed permanently in America, married locally, bought property, and even acted as governmental officials, especially in the treasury and the mint.

      This time saw the rise of forms of economic activity not present or not well developed in the conquest period, of which haciendas (hacienda) (landed estates) and obrajes (textile shops) are the most prominent. The social organization of such enterprises, however, was familiar from earlier encomienda operations, consisting of a city-dwelling owner, often somewhat removed from daily operations; one or more majordomos; foremen; skilled permanent workers (functional descendants of the naborías); and less-skilled temporary workers. The owner was usually Spanish, the middle levels poorer Spaniards or castas, and the temporary workers generally still Indians. A powerful trend, corresponding to the growth of city markets and ethnic-cultural changes, was an increase in the proportion of personnel in the middle levels and a decrease in those at the lowest, especially an increase in permanent workers at the expense of temporary ones (though the latter were still very numerous).

      All these developments ultimately had an immense effect on society (social change) in the indigenous entities of the countryside. In time, many rural Indians were absorbed within Hispanic society, while leading members of local indigenous society would ally and even intermarry with the humble Hispanics who were now beginning to dominate the local economy. Ties to specific local Spaniards and Spanish organizations gained ever greater importance in the lives of the indigenous people, compared with their own corporate society; one result was large-scale fragmentation of indigenous entities. In central Mexico, many altepetl broke into their constituent parts, and in the Andes even many of these constituent parts (ayllus) went out of existence or changed their principles of organization.

The Spanish fringe

      From the notion of “centre” as used above it follows that the remaining area of Spanish occupation was, from the Spanish point of view at least, peripheral. Most of the Hispanic territories in the Indies were occupied by groups coming precisely from the central areas. Conquering groups had always consisted largely of people of lesser position in the base area, and, as it grew clearer that the central areas were unequaled in their assets, the marginality of the personnel going elsewhere became even more pronounced. In addition to being new and uprooted, those who went to places like Chile, Tucumán (northwestern Argentina), or New Granada (Colombia) were likely to be estancieros and tratantes in the centre—not well-born, well-educated, or well-connected. Among them were a larger than average share of non-Spanish Europeans and free blacks. Since these movements were posterior to the initial conquests, the first Hispanics arriving often included some mulattoes and mestizos born in the centre.

      Even so, the first Spanish groups in the peripheral areas were comparable to the first conquerors of the central areas in being of varied origins and commanding a variety of necessary skills. A greater difference showed itself later. The central-area conquerors, having struck it rich, sent out appeals to Spain that attracted huge numbers of people, especially male and female relatives, as well as fellow townspeople and others. Fringe-area conquerors had not struck it rich. They were less able to pay for the passage of relatives and less able to attract people in general. As a result, subsequent immigration to the periphery was a much thinner stream than to the centre and was sometimes nearly nonexistent for long periods of time, as in Paraguay, and many activities that were profitable in the centre were not viable. Hispanic society on the fringe was characterized then by its relatively small size, slow growth, and lack of characteristic signs of the centre indicating vigorous development—the presence of Spanish women, practicing Spanish artisans, and transatlantic merchants. The institutional overlay was a mere shadow of the complex network of the centre. The silver-mining sector was entirely absent, though some areas maintained gold production as a second-best (Chile for a substantial period and New Granada indefinitely and on quite a large scale).

      From the above it is clear that society on the fringe was less differentiated than in the centre. Also, the encomenderos never rose very far above the rest. Here, the indigenous people hardly knew tribute, and their labour could not be turned into large revenue; moreover, there were far fewer of them. More Spanish intervention was needed, and yet there were not many Spaniards available. Encomenderos on the fringe usually lacked a large staff of majordomos and estancieros. Since the Indians of these regions were organized in much smaller units than those of the centre, many more encomiendas had to be granted among a much smaller number of Spaniards, so that the proportion of encomenderos was greater. Encomenderos and others had to fulfill several functions simultaneously.

      When any of these societies began to prosper, however, sharper categorization reappeared, along with a general approximation of central-area patterns. Areas that in one way or another were equipped to supply regions on the trunk line (Guatemala, Venezuela, Chile, and northwestern Argentina) moved most quickly in that direction.

      On the fringes, even in regions where it proved possible to establish some form of the encomienda, the relationship between Hispanic and indigenous societies was not the same as in the centre. In extreme cases, as in Paraguay, one can hardly speak of two separate worlds at all; there, in order to take advantage of the largest effective structure the indigenous people possessed—the extended household—the Spaniards actually entered into those households as heads. This led to a permanent indigenous influence on Spanish Paraguayan family structure, customs, diet, and language in a way and on a scale without parallel in the centre. Something of the same effect is observable even in situations where indigenous society was somewhat more like that of the centre, as in the central valley of Chile. The Spaniards dealt with the Indians directly, in small groups or as individuals, so that the distinction between encomienda Indians and naborías, so clear in the centre, hardly existed after a time.

      Another effect of the nature of the more diffuse indigenous society was that in fringe areas the city, which in the centre was the stable bulwark of Hispanic society, was often notably unstable, shifting from one site to another because no location was predetermined by indigenous settlement. Similarly, rural church activity in the central areas was built squarely on existing territorial and sociopolitical units, using indigenous organization and customs. On the fringe the church for Indians, which here can be called a mission, was founded on a site more arbitrarily chosen, to which indigenous people were attracted, changing their settlement pattern and way of life. The late-arriving Jesuits, who had missed out in the ecclesiastical occupation of the hinterland in the central areas, took a large part in this movement, with especially prominent theatres of activity in the north of Mexico and in Paraguay. The fringe also saw of necessity the building of forts and the creation of standing military forces, paid, if poorly, by the royal government.

      Interpenetration of the two societies occurred mainly when the Indians were semisedentary; where they were truly nonsedentary, another pattern emerged. Here the relationship between Spaniards and Indians was of long-standing hostility, with a minimum of social intercourse. Indigenous society remained quite radically separate from Hispanic as long as it survived, whereas the local Spanish societies, though often little developed, were more purely European than in any other kind of situation; the only indigenous people there were usually uprooted sedentary Indians from neighbouring regions. The far north of Mexico and the far south of Chile are two such areas.

      In general, one notes a slow tempo on the fringe, with the result that eventually many forms on the periphery seem archaic. The fringe areas tended to maintain some form of the encomienda far into the 18th century, when it was forgotten in the centre; likewise Indian slavery, as well as parish activity among Indians by members of the religious orders, persisted indefinitely. The use of titles was conservative, and many of the social complexities evolving in the centre were slow to reach the periphery.

Brazil

      The Treaty of Tordesillas (Tordesillas, Treaty of) (1494) between Spain and Portugal, dividing the non-European world between them, gave the Portuguese a legal claim to a large part of the area to be called Brazil. The Portuguese came upon the Brazilian coast in 1500 on the way to India and would doubtless have acted much as they did with or without the treaty. For decades Brazil was doubly a fringe area. In the Portuguese scheme, it was far behind longer-established and more profitable overseas ventures in Africa and India. In the context of the Western Hemisphere, it was an area lacking known large deposits of precious metals and possessing a semisedentary Tupian population similar and related to the Guaraní the Spaniards were to find in Paraguay; thus it had much in common with the Spanish-American periphery.

The early period

      The Portuguese at first thought of Brazil as an area analogous to Africa—that is, an area on the route to India where they would stop for trade (international trade) or barter in indigenous products and slaves but not establish permanent settlements beyond an occasional trading post. The most commercially viable resource of Brazil in the first decades proved to be the item that gave the country its name, brazilwood, a tropical hardwood useful as a textile dye. As with Africa, the Portuguese government let out contracts for the trade to private individuals.

      The brazilwood industry did not bring about the founding of cities or other marks of full development, but its bulk was considerable for a time, and it was not a pure trade in natural products but involved some intervention on the part of the Portuguese. Though indigenous men of the region were accustomed to cutting down forest trees to clear fields, they did not have a tradition of commerce in trees, nor were they able to cut them on a large scale. The Portuguese therefore had to provide European axes and saws as well as product specifications. A Portuguese factor, or trading agent, would acquire the logs and have them ready when the ships came. Trading posts were often on islands, as in Africa, and a little later the first formal Portuguese settlements were also founded on islands. The only Portuguese who could be said to be actually settled in Brazil were some outcasts living among the Indians, who sometimes helped acquire useful Indian alliances.

      About 1530 the Portuguese began to feel pressures to intensify their involvement with Brazil. Interlopers, especially the French, had begun to appear; the India trade was in a slump; and the great successes in Spanish America represented both an incentive and a threat. In response to such stimuli, the Portuguese sent an expedition to drive out the French and assert their authority. A number of settlers accompanied the expedition, which established the first formal Portuguese settlement— São Vicente—in 1532 on an island near present São Paulo.

      The Portuguese had thus far acted entirely within their maritime-commercial tradition, and they continued for some time to do so, adopting measures quite different from those of the Spaniards. Whereas the Spaniards expanded from one area to the next in relay fashion, the Portuguese crown, in the mid-1530s, divided the entire Brazilian coast into strips of donatary captaincies, of which there were eventually 15. It granted them to donatários (donatário), prominent people presumed to have the personal resources to carry out the occupation and exploitation of their regions. The office was hereditary, with extensive judicial and administrative powers. The Portuguese had previously used this type of concession for their Atlantic island possessions. The encomienda, the master institution of 16th-century Spanish America, was not employed. From the first, though, leading Portuguese acquired large sesmarias, or land grants.

      In the event, several of the captaincies were never occupied at all, and others survived only for a short time. However, four of them led to permanent settlements, and two of these, São Vicente in the south and Pernambuco in the north, proved distinctly viable and profitable.

      As on much of the Spanish fringe, the first Portuguese settlements in Brazil had to be fortified against Indian attacks. Provisioning was difficult, and for a time the Portuguese got much of their food through trade with the indigenous people, becoming accustomed to manioc (cassava) as their staple rather than wheat, which grew poorly in much of the region. Two types of agricultural (agriculture, origins of) establishments emerged: roças, which were food farms or truck gardens near towns, and fazendas (fazenda), or export enterprises. The last were mainly sugar plantations, which were not yet very prosperous, even though conditions for sugar growing and transport were ideal in many places, because of lack of capital to build mills and buy African slave (slavery) labour. The Portuguese at first tried to extract labour from the indigenous people in exchange for European products, but the effort failed, in part because the men of these semisedentary societies were not accustomed to agricultural labour. As had happened in Spanish America, the Brazilian settlers soon turned to Indian slavery for workers; slaves were acquired through raiding or through purchase from other Indians. A minority of more expensive African slaves formed a labour elite, much as in Spanish America.

      In 1548, still in response to much the same pressures and incentives as in 1530, the Portuguese decided to set up direct royal government in Brazil. The crown named a governor-general who took an expedition of a thousand people to Brazil, establishing a capital for the entire country in Bahia on the northeastern coast. In 1551 a bishopric was created. Thus it was not until 50 years after contact that Brazil achieved the level of institutionalization characteristic of the Spanish-American central areas almost from the beginning. The pace of development was much more comparable to that on the Spanish-American fringe.

      At about this same time the Jesuits (Jesuit) began to arrive, soon becoming the strongest arm of the church, as opposed to in Spanish America, where they arrived long after the other orders. They were prominent in the attempt to deal with the indigenous population, founding villages (aldeias) on new sites much in the manner of the missions on the Spanish-American fringe. Thus the main forms of European-Indian contact in Brazil—war, trade, slavery, and missions—were the same as on the periphery of Spanish America.

      The Portuguese population in 16th-century Brazil remained sparse. Moreover, by all indications, including the Portuguese practice of exiling convicts to Brazil, one can imagine that it was as acutely marginal socially as were the settlers of Spanish-American fringe areas.

The sugar age

      Starting in the last decades of the 16th century, the Brazilian sugar industry began an upswing that led to its being in the 17th century the world's largest producer of sugar for the ever-growing European market. The main structural changes had occurred by 1600, though the strongest growth came thereafter.

      The more the industry prospered, the more it attracted Portuguese immigration, and the more it could afford African (Africa) slaves as workers. Both movements resulted in the diminution of the indigenous role; by the third decade of the 17th century, through death and flight to the interior, Indians had become a negligible factor on the northeastern coast, where sugar growing concentrated. The Portuguese coming into the area were not only more numerous but represented a much broader cross section of society, including enough women for prominent men to marry. The northeastern cities were beginning to look more like their Spanish-American counterparts. In a word, the northeast was becoming a new central area, with some noticeable differences from those of Spanish America: it was built on bulk export rather than precious metals, with an Afro-European base rather than Indo-European, oriented to the sea rather than to an indigenous hinterland.

      Sugar production was almost as industrial an enterprise as silver mining. The dominant feature was the engenho, the mill. So expensive were the mill, technicians' salaries, and the force of African slaves to work there that mill owners normally depended on cane growers called lavradores to produce cane for the mill. Under various kinds of leasing arrangements, the lavradores used their own African slave crews to cultivate the land, grow the cane, and transport it to the mill. Some of the cane growers were from mill-owning families, while others were more humble, and some even were racially mixed.

      The sugar industry required a large number of Portuguese. Although Africans came to constitute the majority of the local population, the Portuguese sector was also large. Instead of a sprinkling of masters among great masses of slaves, the predominant pattern was the use of slaves in relatively small units, each in contact with some Portuguese. The mill owners had rural residences, but, as with the Spaniards, their main seats were in the nearest city, where their group tended to dominate the senado da câmara, the equivalent of the Spanish cabildo. Portuguese with less capital went into growing tobacco for export or roças for provisioning the cities and mills, and they employed relatively fewer slaves. In the backland (sertão), ranches grew up to supply the coast with meat and work animals. Society was varied and complex.

      The rural-urban continuum was strong, and the Africans took part in it as well as the Portuguese, so that the most skilled and acculturated of them tended to end up in the cities, where there came to be an African population, increasingly racially mixed and in part free, much as in Spanish America. With so many more Africans present than in the Spanish central areas, groups based on African ethnicity could retain their language and cohesiveness longer. Christian lay organizations with an African ethnic base were very strong, and many African cultural elements were preserved, especially in the areas of music, dance, and popular religion. The same sort of strength allowed for the flourishing of independent communities of runaway slaves to an extent not known in Spanish America, though the phenomenon occurred there too in some forested areas.

      An elaborate scaled status (social status) system recognizing racial and cultural mixture and legal status, comparable to the Spanish-American ethnic hierarchy, grew up in the Brazilian northeast, but it was different in being overwhelmingly bipolar—European and African—with the indigenous factor hardly counting. It is not by chance that in Mexico and Peru the top category remained Spaniard, while in Brazil it came to be white as well as Portuguese. If in the Spanish central areas the Africans were intermediaries, here they had a more complex function, replacing the Indians at the bottom of the functional ladder as well as filling many intermediate niches.

      The northeast now assumed many of the other characteristics of a central area. The mercantile interest grew strong, localizing the form of men of business (homens de negócios) who both invested in merchandise and owned sugar mills. They intermarried with the planters and served on the town councils. Not only did a governor-general, later a viceroy, reside in Bahia, but there was (most of the time) a high court of appeal, or relação, like the Spanish-American audiencia, with the associated network of lawyers and notaries. Monasteries and convents became part of the picture, and authors writing on local topics appeared, some of the most prominent of them Jesuits.

      Institutionalization stopped short of what was seen in the Spanish-American central areas, however. Transatlantic contact remained more essential to local society than in Spanish America. Universities and printing presses were not established; students went to Portugal for advanced education, and books were printed there. Transatlantic careers spanning not only Portugal and Brazil but also including Africa were common. So much a part of the Atlantic world was the northeast of Brazil that Europe continued to make itself felt strongly. It was perhaps a somewhat secondary phenomenon that the king of Spain was also the king of Portugal from 1580 to 1640, but the impact of the Netherlands was more directly felt, for the Dutch seized Bahia in 1624, holding it to 1625, and controlled the important captaincy of Pernambuco from 1630 to 1654.

The south

      Only the northeast of Brazil was thoroughly transformed by the sugar industry. The remainder long stayed much as it had been before, a sparsely inhabited fringe with a weak economy, more indigenous and European in composition than African. São Paulo, the dominant centre of the south, had a small Portuguese population, and much if not most of it was racially mixed. Not unlike the Paraguayan Spaniards, the Paulistas (citizens of São Paulo) lived in large households and estates among numbers of Indian slaves, freedmen, and dependents, strongly affected by indigenous language, customs, diet, and family structure.

      The products of the estates being in little demand elsewhere, much attention went into the area's most negotiable commodity, indigenous slaves. Desired at first to work on coastal plantations, Indian slaves lost marketability as the sugar industry was able to make the transition to Africans. But when the Dutch seized a part of the northeast and disrupted the African slave supply in the first half of the 17th century, the Paulistas' Indian slaves were more salable until the African supply lines were once again secured after mid-century. Thereafter the Paulistas turned more to exploring the interior, establishing new settlements there and searching for precious metals.

      The Paulistas are known for an expeditionary form, the bandeira (“banner”), which, though by origin related to the conquering and exploring expeditions seen elsewhere, evolved almost beyond recognition and became a key element of Paulista culture. As time went on, it was necessary to go farther and farther for slaving, eventually to the areas of the Paraguayan Spaniards and even beyond. The bandeirantes, as the participants were called, might spend many months or even years in the backlands. Although led by Portuguese or people of mixed heritage passing for Portuguese, the highly mobile columns were mainly indigenous, being made up of direct dependents or slaves of the leaders or members of allied Indian groups. Though possessing some European weapons and cultural elements, they were highly adapted to the surroundings, using indigenous food, language, transportation, and much else. It was they above all who were responsible for making Brazil more than a coastal strip.

Spanish America in the age of the Bourbons (Bourbon, House of)

 A series of important changes occurring in Spanish America in the 18th century is often associated with dynastic changes in Spain—the replacement of the Habsburgs, who had ruled Spain since the early 16th century, by a branch of the French Bourbons in 1700. Little altered in the Spanish territories until more than 50 years later, however, especially during the reign of Charles III (1759–88). Internal evolution and worldwide developments were doubtless more important in bringing about the new phenomena than the policy of a particular dynasty or ruler.

Economy and society

      Demographic growth picked up sharply after about the mid-18th century in all areas about which information is available and in all sectors of the population. At the same time, economic activity increased in bulk, and prices rose steadily instead of fluctuating as they had been doing for centuries. Silver production, which was still at the base of the export economy of the old central areas, increased sharply, especially in Mexico, and so did the scale of operations and the input of capital, with strong participation by merchant-financiers. At the same time, local textile production had grown in size and economic importance, as demand rose in its market—humble Hispanized people in the city and countryside.

      The large merchants had continued the process of localization to the point where only their birth was foreign; large firms tended to pass from a Spanish immigrant owner to his immigrant nephew. In every other way—marriage, investment, and residence pattern—the merchants were part of the local milieu, and, since export-import commerce was so important to the economy, they had risen to the top on the local scene; the wealthiest of them owned strings of haciendas in addition to their commercial and mining interests, and they acquired titles of high nobility.

      Racial and cultural fusion had advanced so far that the categorization embodied in the ethnic hierarchy could no longer capture it. Labels proliferated to designate complex mixtures, but the new terms sat lightly on those so labeled and often had no legal status. In everyday life, people who were able to function within a Hispanic context were often not labeled at all; many others changed almost at will from one category to another. One reaction to the excessive categorization was simplification, with only three categories—Spaniards, castas, and Indians—and often only two—Indians and others. The people of mixed descent were now so fully acculturated and so deeply embedded in local Hispanic society that they were qualified for and began to compete for nearly all positions except the very highest. There was, naturally, a reaction on the part of those most highly placed. With mulattoes entering the universities in numbers, ordinances began to declare that they were not eligible. With the children of wealthy Spaniards, humbler and racially mixed Spaniards, and castas all intermarrying widely, government and the church began to resist, declaring marriages between those differently labeled to be illegal and reinforcing the authority of parents in disallowing matches.

      Such reactions did little to change the basic reality: the intermediate groups had grown and were continuing to grow to the extent that they could no longer be confined to their traditional intermediary functions. There were too many of them for all to become majordomos and artisans, and, in any case, many people called Indians by now could speak Spanish and handle tasks very well themselves for which intermediaries had previously been required. Since the people in the middle were no longer at a premium, their remuneration often decreased. If some pressed on into the higher strata, others were reduced to positions traditionally belonging to Indians, such as permanent labourer. In many areas the mixed groups were pouring into indigenous settlements at such a rate as to disrupt them and change their character.

Transformation of the east coast

      Well into the 18th century, the perception that Mexico and Peru formed the centre and all the rest the periphery was still valid. By the last decades of the century, however, things were moving quickly in a different direction, favouring the Atlantic seaboard. European demand for tropical crops and even for temperate products, especially hides, increased substantially. At the same time, ships grew larger and faster. As a result, transatlantic shipment of bulk products became more viable, and trade routes shifted.

Argentina

      The Río de La Plata region had been very much on the edges of the Latin American world since the conquest. The first founding of Buenos Aires in the early 16th century had failed, the survivors having taken refuge in the lands of the semisedentary Guaraní of Paraguay. The most developed area was the northwest interior, closest to the Potosí mining region, which supplied the mines with various products. Paraguay remained in relative isolation and poverty, participating in the money economy by sending its yerba maté (a tealike beverage) toward Peru. Buenos Aires was eventually refounded but remained a tiny, struggling port. The plains were inhabited by wild cattle (descendants of domestic animals introduced into the region earlier), nonsedentary Indians, and some highly localized mestizos later to be called gauchos.

      Starting in the 1770s, improved transatlantic navigation, combined with liberalization of the imperial trading system, transformed the region. Buenos Aires began to be able to compete with the older route through Panama and Peru in importing European goods for the mining region and exporting silver. The immigration of merchants and others increased. Taking advantage of the opportunity, the crown created the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata (Río de la Plata, Viceroyalty of the) based in Buenos Aires (1776), including the Potosí mining region, which was taken from Peru. Buenos Aires became a capital with all the institutions associated with Lima or Mexico City. The city's population, including a substantial number of Africans because of its location on a slave route and its new wealth, grew explosively, and it began to exercise dominance over the interior, reversing the older scheme.

      Yet Buenos Aires was not quite like Lima or Mexico City; it showed its newness, and traces of peripherality remained. The merchants of Buenos Aires had the same Spanish origins as their counterparts in Mexico City, but they were more closely tied to Spain, much like central-area merchants in the conquest period. They were more dominant locally, for there were no long-established families to compete with, and they came close to monopolizing the capital's municipal council. But they were far less wealthy than the largest Mexico City merchants, established no noble titles, and owned few or no rural estates. Indeed, there were no estates to buy: haciendas existed in the older northwestern region, but on the plains or pampas around Buenos Aires estate development had hardly begun. The hide export industry that now began to become prominent rested at first mainly on hunting wild animals; the merchants who exported hides were still secondary to those importing merchandise and exporting silver. Only in the last years before independence did merchants and others finally begin to build up estates and raise cattle in the more customary manner.

Venezuela

      With its Caribbean coast, Venezuela had long been in a relatively favourable position in regard to potential availability of markets. By the 17th century the Caracas region was exporting cacao to Mexico, where most of the market for that product was then located, enabling it to begin buying African slaves for labour. As Europe joined the market and absorbed larger quantities of cacao by the late 18th century, Caracas became an urban centre comparable in size and institutionalization to Buenos Aires (though without a viceroy), and it had a better-developed hinterland of secondary settlements. The population along the coast was mainly European, African, and mixtures thereof. The situation, then, bore some similarity to that in Brazil.

The Caribbean islands

      The Spaniards from the first had concentrated on the Greater Antilles, leaving the smaller islands virtually unoccupied. As developments passed the Spanish Caribbean by, even portions of the larger islands were left under-occupied. Thus, in the course of the 17th century, the French and English (British Empire), aided by buccaneers of their respective nationalities, were able to take over the small islands, Jamaica, and the western end of Hispaniola to grow tropical crops, above all sugar, for themselves. The societies that grew up there were not exactly Latin American in the usual sense; though in a way comparable to the society of northeastern Brazil, they were different in that the African slave population vastly outnumbered the Europeans, who were not only very few but also not well rooted, retaining intimate connections with the home countries. By the late 18th century the non-Spanish Caribbean islands had replaced Brazil as the world's greatest sugar producers.

      The Spanish Caribbean islands (primarily Cuba and Puerto Rico) did not participate in the sugar boom, which was predicated on the notion of self-supply by the northern European nations. The population was more balanced between European and African than in the French and English possessions. In the second half of the 18th century the Cuban economy grew rapidly on the basis of tobacco export and provisioning of fleets and Spanish Caribbean ports. Only after the slave revolt in French Haiti in 1791, with great loss of French production, did Cuba begin to move in the direction of large-scale sugar export.

The Bourbon reforms

      The Enlightenment, emanating to a large extent from France, penetrated both Spain (aided by the French origin of the Bourbons) and Spanish America in the 18th century. By the late part of the century individuals and organized societies in many of the American territories were producing journals and books in the manner of the work of the French Encyclopédistes, promoting reason, universality, science, modernity, and efficiency. Most Spanish-American writers, while staying in close touch with European currents, were concerned with the development, in practical terms, of their own regions.

      Enlightenment philosophy bore importantly on government, which was called on to be more rationally unified, efficient, and free of church influence. Such ideas affected policy makers for the Spanish crown, and a series of activist royal measures of the 18th century were carried out in that spirit. Yet the timing and the nature of these moves had at least as much to do with changing conditions as with ideology. Most reforms came in a bundle in the late 18th century, the creation in 1739 of the Viceroyalty of New Granada (New Granada, Viceroyalty of) based in Santa Fé (Bogotá) being an exception.

      A major Bourbon reform, taking place mainly in the 1780s, was the creation of large districts called intendancies (the word and model were French). Each was headed by an official with extensive powers called an intendant (intendente), who was directly responsible to the crown in Spain. The measure was meaningful because royal government in the provinces, outside the seats of the viceroy (the province ruler) and the captains general, had hardly existed. It was as though a host of provincial cities received their own viceroy. One result, and indeed the one most intended, was an increase in revenue collection; another, not intended, was decentralization and bickering. The intendancy seats were not arbitrarily created or chosen but were mainly large cities that had once been encomendero centres and were still bishoprics, or long-lasting, large-scale mining centres. The change was realistic in that it recognized the immense growth and consolidation of provincial Hispanic centres that had occurred in the centuries since the first establishment of the viceroyalties, and for that reason it took hold. Less successful was the attempt to introduce similar officials at a lower level in the Indian countryside.

      Military affairs were a second target of reform. Spanish America had long been defended by a patchwork of viceregal guards, port garrisons, half-fictional militias, and some forts and paid soldiers on frontiers with hostile Indians, but it had not had a formal military organization. In the late 18th century it acquired one, partly because of an increased foreign threat (Havana was occupied by the British in 1762–63), partly because the Bourbons imagined the army to be the most responsive branch available to them, and partly because professionalization of the military was an international trend of the time. A relatively small number of regular units formed the backbone for a larger, more rigorously organized militia. At first the regulars were brought in from Spain, but before long the lower ranks were mainly locals, and locals found entry even into the officer ranks, though the top commanders were usually Spaniards born. The military was primarily Hispanic, with Indians taking part only under exceptional circumstances, and it reflected local society, with officers drawn from prominent families and many persons of mixed descent and Africans among the enlisted men. Organized in local districts, the units' loyalties were above all local as well.

      Government (church and state) in Bourbon times was not antireligious, but it was sufficiently affected by the spirit of the times to be quite anticlerical. The most decisive of the measures taken was the expulsion of the Jesuit order from Spanish America and Spain in 1767. Preceded by similar actions in Portugal and France, the move was part of an international wave, but it also made excellent sense in purely Spanish-American terms. Although the Jesuits were the wealthiest of the orders, they had arrived last, had fierce rivals in other branches of the church, and counted few locals among their members. Thus their expulsion was greeted with (usually hidden) approval by many. The crown in general tried to further the secular clergy over the religious orders (imagined to be more independent-minded), but the policy had little effect except in areas where the secular clergy, which grew with the expansion of civil society, was already on the rise. Almost on the eve of independence, the crown attempted to confiscate church property, but the measure proved hard to enforce.

      The late Bourbons favoured more active encouragement of the economy and even intervention in it. They provided tax reductions and technical aid for the silver mining industry; they expanded state monopolies beyond the mercury needed for mining to some other commodities, of which tobacco was the most successful. Their largest reform, however, went in the opposite direction, consisting in the declaration of free trade within the Spanish empire, so that any port could trade with any other at will.

      In earlier times the bulk of transatlantic trade had been directed at Mexico and Peru, and annual convoys sponsored by the Spanish government were an efficient way not only to organize the traffic but also to protect it from pirates, who were the main threat. By the 18th century the northern European powers had naval superiority and could easily have destroyed any convoy. Moreover, in Spanish America new central areas had arisen, with a consequent diversification of destinations, and in Spain the north had revived at the expense of the south, where Sevilla and Cádiz had monopolized Indies navigation. Under these changed circumstances, the best arrangement was to allow individual ships to travel between any Spanish port and any American port. The fleet system gradually fell apart in the 18th century. Imperial free trade was introduced between 1765 and 1789, first affecting Cuba and spreading to all Spanish possessions. The measure coincided with a marked increase in commercial volume; to what extent free trade caused the increase, as opposed to demographic growth in the Indies and industrial growth in Europe, is not clear. Nor are the effects entirely clear. The deluge of goods made it harder for the largest American merchants to be as dominant as previously, and for the first time local textile producers had real competition for the lower end of the market. Even so, the large firms of Mexico City were not destroyed, and the Puebla textile industry continued to grow.

Brazil after 1700

      In the late 17th century the explorations of the Paulistas finally led to the discovery of major gold deposits in a large district inland from Rio de Janeiro that became known as Minas Gerais. As the news spread, outsiders poured into the area. A time of turbulence, with the frontier Paulistas trying to assert their rights, ended after a few decades with the victory of the newcomers and the entry of royal authority. The south-centre, both the coast and the near interior, now took on the essential characteristics of the northeast—of a land living on European exports and inhabited by a population mainly Portuguese, African, and mulatto, with a large sector of slaves, along with many recently freed persons. The mining district flourished during the time of the boom, generating a network of settlements where none had been before and a local culture that included the now-renowned architectural style of its small churches.

      More importantly for Brazil as a whole, Rio de Janeiro began to become an important urban centre in the usual mold, and the institutional component thickened, just as it had earlier on the basis of mineral wealth in the old Spanish-American central areas. By 1763 Rio had become the capital of Brazil, replacing Salvador in the northeast. Although the northeastern sugar industry continued to export more by value than the gold region, the latter had newer wealth and perhaps a higher profitability, and distant regions began to orient themselves to it in important ways. Stock-raising regions both in the northern interior and on the southern plains sent their animals to the mines, thereby both growing and helping unify the country.

      The chronology of Brazil does not mesh closely with that of Spanish America in the late period. The gold boom was a type of development that had occurred much earlier in the Spanish territories; moreover, it did not last into the second half of the 18th century, when the most marked economic growth was occurring elsewhere, but began to decline by mid-century. Brazil had already experienced the bulk export revolution in the 17th century with sugar, and in the later 18th century exports were actually declining much of the time. Some growth, however, occurred late in the century in response to the decline of the French sugar industry in the Caribbean after the slave revolt in Haiti and some experimentation with new crops that were beginning to be of interest in Europe. Thus, though the Portuguese were as much affected by the Enlightenment as the Spaniards and had their time of active reform under the marquês de Pombal (Pombal, Sebastião de Carvalho, marquês de), prime minister and in effect ruler of Portugal in the period 1750–77, the context was hardly comparable. Outstanding among the actions taken under his ministry was a wave of expulsions of the Jesuits, in 1759. During his long rule Pombal instituted numerous fiscal and administrative reforms and even attempted social legislation. He gave much attention to the far north of Brazil, attempting to develop the region, and a time of considerable local development and change did in fact coincide with his activity.

Preindependence phenomena

      The position of the locally born Spaniards, often called Creoles (Creole) or criollos (though they were slow to call themselves that), had been growing stronger all across the postconquest centuries. From an early time they owned most of the rural estates and dominated most of the cabildos. By the 17th century they were a large majority among the secular clergy and prominent in the orders, and as time went on they received more and more of the bishoprics. In the course of the 17th century they achieved appointments as audiencia judges in various centres, and by the second half of the 18th century they were dominating, sometimes virtually monopolizing, the membership of audiencias all over Spanish America. As the military came into existence, they found prominent places in it. Large mining producers might be either born locally or Spanish-born. Large merchants remained predominantly born in Spain, but they married into local families, whose interests they often served. Each major local Spanish family had members placed strategically across the whole system, creating a strong informal network. Only the viceroys and usually the archbishops were normally recruited from the outside, and even they had local entourages.

      As the Bourbon government in Spain became more active late in the 18th century, it wanted a larger place for its own Spanish-born associates and began to view the extent of local American dominance with alarm. The audiencias were gradually filled predominantly with Spanish-born judges; nearly all the intendants were outsiders and so were the highest military officers. Yet the basic situation hardly changed, for the Spanish-born appointees had to function in a local milieu, into which they were rapidly absorbed. As independence approached, the local Spaniards or Creoles had influence and experience at all levels of society, economy, and government, but they had been under challenge for a generation or more and were correspondingly resentful.

      Consciousness of separateness of various kinds had been growing for a long time. In Mexico, starting as early as the mid-17th century, the illustrious indigenous past and the cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe had become a basis for national pride, promoted above all by Creole priests and scholars. Other areas had approximate equivalents, if not as well-defined. Awareness of ethnic distinctions within the Spanish category increased in the 18th century along with the proliferation of ethnic terminology in general. The Creoles were still mainly called Spaniards, but the new arrivals from Spain, now a small minority, were distinguished from the rest as peninsular or European Spaniards, and in Mexico they received the insulting nickname gachupín.

      The middle groups, whether humble Spaniards or people in the racially mixed categories, had much reason for discontent. The expansion of the middle left a large segment of the population without employment corresponding to its expectations and capacities. Corporately organized indigenous groups, however, though not in an admirable state economically or in many other respects, were generally little concerned about conditions at a countrywide level. It is not that they were apathetic; all through the intervening centuries they had stood up for themselves, through litigation and sometimes through disturbances and revolts, but they had done so as individual communities. On the nonsedentary fringe, wars and rebellions continued, but this was not different from earlier times. The most volatile element were Spanish-speaking Indians in and around Hispanic communities, who had mobility and broad awareness and whose profile no longer corresponded to the implications and duties of the label “Indian.”

      Two large manifestations of the late 18th century can be seen as foreshadowing independence, though it is possible that they did as much to retard it. In 1780–81 the Andean highlands experienced the Tupac Amaru II revolt, which wrested control of much of the region from the ordinary authorities for many months until it was forcibly put down. Although references were made to the Inca heritage and the rebellion was indeed based in the indigenous countryside, its leaders were largely provincial mestizos (as was in fact Tupac Amaru himself), and some were even Creoles from the middle levels of local society. The Comunero Rebellion in Colombia began in 1780 in the provincial town of Socorro, a tobacco and textile producing centre. From there it spread widely before disbanding a year later largely as a result of negotiations.

      Both movements were in immediate response to Bourbon fiscal measures, and both proclaimed ultimate loyalty to the Spanish crown. In Peru especially, there was a strong reaction afterward against both dissent and the indigenous population. The impetus for independence in Spanish South America would eventually come from the newly thriving Atlantic seaboard regions—the former fringes, Venezuela and Argentina—which had mobile Hispanized populations and lacked large groups of sedentary Indians. In Mexico too, things would start in the very similar near north of the country.

      In Brazil, the local Portuguese population had a position quite comparable to that of the Spanish-American Creoles, but it was not so far advanced, and the situation had not become polarized. Transatlantic mobility still made itself felt, with many leading Brazilian Portuguese having been educated in Portugal. Locally born Portuguese had long participated in the Brazilian high court system, but they had never been a majority as in Spanish America. Two well-known rebellious incidents occurring in the 1780s and '90s, in Minas Gerais and Bahia, did not have full support even locally.

      Latin America approached independence after a thoroughgoing ethnic and cultural transformation across a period of over three centuries. That process did not destroy the indigenous component, which was still very much alive corporately and culturally in the old central areas and some other regions and had also affected and entered into the mixed Iberian societies that had come to dominance. Even where it almost disappeared, the indigenous factor was important, for its weakness or absence was what allowed certain regions to become more European and African. Most of the independent countries that arose in the early 19th century went back to indigenous culture areas that had been re-formed into functional units under Iberian management in the 16th century.

James Lockhart

The independence of Latin America

      After three centuries of colonial rule, independence came rather suddenly to most of Spanish and Portuguese America. Between 1808 and 1826 all of Latin America except the Spanish colonies of Cuba and Puerto Rico slipped out of the hands of the Iberian powers who had ruled the region since the conquest. The rapidity and timing of that dramatic change were the result of a combination of long-building tensions in colonial rule and a series of external events.

      The reforms imposed by the Spanish Bourbons in the 18th century provoked great instability in the relations between the rulers and their colonial subjects in the Americas. Many Creoles (Creole) (those of Spanish parentage but who were born in America) felt Bourbon policy to be an unfair attack on their wealth, political power, and social status. Others did not suffer during the second half of the 18th century; indeed, the gradual loosening of trade restrictions actually benefited some Creoles in Venezuela and certain areas that had moved from the periphery to the centre during the late colonial era. However, those profits merely whetted those Creoles' appetites for greater free trade than the Bourbons were willing to grant. More generally, Creoles reacted angrily against the crown's preference for peninsulars in administrative positions and its declining support of the caste system and the Creoles' privileged status within it. After hundreds of years of proven service to Spain, the American-born elites felt that the Bourbons were now treating them like a recently conquered nation.

      In cities throughout the region, Creole frustrations increasingly found expression in ideas derived from the Enlightenment. Imperial prohibitions proved unable to stop the flow of potentially subversive English, French, and North American works into the colonies of Latin America. Creole participants in conspiracies against Portugal and Spain at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century showed familiarity with such European Enlightenment thinkers as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Montesquieu, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The Enlightenment clearly informed the aims of dissident Creoles and inspired some of the later, great leaders of the independence movements across Latin America.

      Still, these ideas were not, strictly speaking, causes of independence. Creoles selectively adapted rather than simply embraced the thought that had informed revolutions in North America and France. Leaders in Latin America tended to shy away from the more socially radical European doctrines. Moreover, the influence of those ideologies was sharply restricted; with few exceptions only small circles of educated, urban elites had access to Enlightenment thought. At most, foreign ideas helped foster a more questioning attitude toward traditional institutions and authority.

      European diplomatic and military events provided the final catalyst that turned Creole discontent into full-fledged movements for Latin American independence. When the Spanish crown entered into an alliance with France in 1795, it set off a series of developments that opened up economic and political distance between the Iberian countries and their American colonies. By siding with France, Spain pitted itself against England, the dominant sea power of the period, which used its naval forces to reduce and eventually cut communications between Spain and the Americas. Unable to preserve any sort of monopoly on trade (international trade), the Spanish crown was forced to loosen the restrictions on its colonies' commerce. Spanish Americans now found themselves able to trade legally with other colonies, as well as with any neutral countries such as the United States. Spain's wartime liberalization of colonial trade sharpened Creoles' desires for greater economic self-determination.

      Occurrences in Europe in the early 19th century created a deep political divide between Spain and its American colonies. In 1807 the Spanish king, Charles IV, granted passage through Spanish territory to Napoleon (Napoleon I)'s forces on their way to invade Portugal. The immediate effect of that concession was to send the Portuguese ruler, Prince Regent John (John VI), fleeing in British ships to Brazil. Arriving in Rio de Janeiro with some 15,000 officials, nobles, and other members of his court, John transformed the Brazilian colony into the administrative centre of his empire. When Napoleon turned on his Spanish allies in 1808, events took a disastrous turn for Spain and its dominion in the Americas. Shortly after Charles had abdicated in favour of his son Ferdinand (Ferdinand VII), Napoleon had them both imprisoned. With these figures of legitimate authority in his power, the French ruler tried to shatter Spanish independence. In the process he set off a political crisis that swept across both Spain and its possessions. The Spanish political tradition centred on the figure of the monarch, yet, with Charles and Ferdinand removed from the scene, the hub of all political authority was missing.

      In 1810 a Cortes (Parliament) emerged in Cádiz to represent both Spain and Spanish America. Two years later it produced a new, liberal constitution that proclaimed Spain's American possessions to be full members of the kingdom and not mere colonies. Yet the Creoles who participated in the new Cortes were denied equal representation. Moreover, the Cortes would not concede permanent free trade to the Americans and obstinately refused to grant any degree of meaningful autonomy to the overseas dominions. Having had a taste of freedom during their political and economic isolation from the mother country, Spanish Americans did not easily consent to a reduction of their power and autonomy.

      Two other European developments further dashed the hopes of Creoles, pushing them more decisively toward independence. The year 1814 saw the restoration of Ferdinand to the throne and with it the energetic attempt to reestablish Spanish imperial power in the Americas. Rejecting compromise and reform, Ferdinand resorted to military force to bring wayward Spanish-American regions back into the empire as colonies. The effort only served to harden the position of Creole rebels. In 1820 troops waiting in Cádiz to be sent as part of the crown's military campaigns revolted, forcing Ferdinand to agree to a series of liberal measures. That concession divided and weakened loyalist opposition to independence in the Americas. Many supporters of the crown now had doubts about the monarchy for which they were fighting.

The wars of independence, 1808–26

      The final victory of Latin American patriots over Spain and the fading loyalist factions began in 1808 with the political crisis in Spain. With the Spanish king and his son Ferdinand taken hostage by Napoleon, Creoles and peninsulars began to jockey for power across Spanish America. During 1808–10 juntas (junta) emerged to rule in the name of Ferdinand VII. In Mexico City and Montevideo caretaker governments were the work of loyal peninsular Spaniards eager to head off Creole threats. In Santiago, Caracas, Bogotá, and other cities, by contrast, it was Creoles who controlled the provisional juntas. Not all of these governments lasted very long; loyalist troops quickly put down Creole-dominated juntas in La Paz and Quito. By 1810, however, the trend was clear. Without denouncing Ferdinand, Creoles throughout most of the region were moving toward the establishment of their own autonomous governments. Transforming these early initiatives into a break with Spanish control required tremendous sacrifice. Over the next decade and a half, Spanish Americans had to defend with arms their movement toward independence.

Spanish America

The southern movement in South America

 The movements that liberated Spanish South America arose from opposite ends of the continent. From the north came the movement led most famously by Simón Bolívar, a dynamic figure known as the Liberator. From the south proceeded another powerful force, this one directed by the more circumspect José de San Martín. After difficult conquests of their home regions, the two movements spread the cause of independence through other territories, finally meeting on the central Pacific coast. From there, troops under northern generals finally stamped out the last vestiges of loyalist resistance in Peru and Bolivia by 1826.

      The struggles that produced independence in the south began even before Napoleon's invasion of Portugal and Spain. In 1806 a British (British Empire) expeditionary force captured Buenos Aires. When the Spanish colonial officials proved ineffective against the invasion, a volunteer militia of Creoles and peninsulars organized resistance and pushed the British out. In May 1810 prominent Creoles in Buenos Aires, having vied with peninsulars for power in the intervening years, forced the last Spanish viceroy there to consent to a cabildo abierto, an extraordinary open meeting of the municipal council and local notables. Although shielding itself with a pretense of loyalty to Ferdinand, the junta produced by that session marked the end of Spanish rule in Buenos Aires and its hinterland. After its revolution of May 1810, the region was the only one to resist reconquest by loyalist troops throughout the period of the independence wars.

      Independence in the former Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, however, encountered grave difficulties in the years after 1810. Central authority proved unstable in the capital city of Buenos Aires. An early radical liberal government dominated by Mariano Moreno gave way to a series of triumvirates and supreme directors. More troubling still were the bitter rivalries emerging between Buenos Aires and other provinces. From the start Buenos Aires' intention of bringing all the former viceregal territories under its control set off waves of discord in the outlying provinces. At stake was not only political autonomy per se but also economic interest; the Creole merchants of Buenos Aires, who initially sought the liberalization of colonial restraints on commerce in the region, subsequently tried to maintain their economic dominance over the interior. A constituent assembly meeting in 1813 adopted a flag, anthem, and other symbols of national identity, but the apparent unity disintegrated soon afterward. This was evident in the assembly that finally proclaimed independence in 1816; that body received no delegates from several provinces, even though it was held outside Buenos Aires, in the interior city of Tucumán (in full, San Miguel de Tucumán).

      Distinct interests and long-standing resentment of the viceregal capital led different regions in the south to pursue separate destinies. Across the Río de la Plata from Buenos Aires, Montevideo and its surroundings became the separate Estado Oriental (“Eastern State,” later Uruguay). Caught between the loyalism of Spanish officers and the imperialist intentions of Buenos Aires and Portuguese Brazil, the regional leader José Gervasio Artigas (Artigas, José Gervasio) formed an army of thousands of gauchos. By 1815 Artigas and this force dominated Uruguay and had allied with other provinces to oppose Buenos Aires.

      Buenos Aires achieved similarly mixed results in other neighbouring regions, losing control of many while spreading independence from Spain. Paraguay resisted Buenos Aires' military and set out on a path of relative isolation from the outside world. Other expeditions took the cause to Upper Peru, the region that would become Bolivia. After initial victories there, the forces from Buenos Aires retreated, leaving the battle in the hands of local Creole, mestizo, and Indian guerrillas. By the time Bolívar's armies finally completed the liberation of Upper Peru (then renamed in the Liberator's honour), the region had long since separated itself from Buenos Aires.

      The main thrust of the southern independence forces met much greater success on the Pacific coast. In 1817 San Martín (San Martín, José de), a Latin American-born former officer in the Spanish military, directed 5,000 men in a dramatic crossing of the Andes and struck at a point in Chile where loyalist forces had not expected an invasion. In alliance with Chilean patriots under the command of Bernardo O'Higgins (O'Higgins, Bernardo), San Martín's army restored independence to a region whose highly factionalized junta had been defeated by royalists in 1814. With Chile as his base, San Martín then faced the task of freeing the Spanish stronghold of Peru. After establishing naval dominance in the region, the southern movement made its way northward. Its task, however, was formidable. Having benefited from colonial monopolies and fearful of the kind of social violence that the late 18th-century revolt had threatened, many Peruvian Creoles were not anxious to break with Spain. Consequently, the forces under San Martín managed only a shaky hold on Lima and the coast. Final destruction of loyalist resistance in the highlands required the entrance of northern armies.

The north and the culmination of independence

      Independence movements in the northern regions of Spanish South America had an inauspicious beginning in 1806. The small group of foreign volunteers that the Venezuelan revolutionary Francisco de Miranda (Miranda, Francisco de) brought to his homeland failed to incite the populace to rise against Spanish rule. Creoles in the region wanted an expansion of the free trade that was benefiting their plantation economy. At the same time, however, they feared that the removal of Spanish control might bring about a revolution that would destroy their own power.

      Creole elites in Venezuela had good reason to fear such a possibility, for a massive revolution had recently exploded in the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue. Beginning in 1791, a massive slave (slavery) revolt sparked a general insurrection against the plantation system and French colonial power. The rebellion developed into both a civil war, pitting blacks and mulattos against whites, and an international conflict, as England and Spain supported the white plantation owners and rebels, respectively. By the first years of the 19th century, the rebels had shattered what had been a model colony and forged the independent nation of Haiti. Partly inspired by those Caribbean events, slaves in Venezuela carried out their own uprisings in the 1790s. Just as it served as a beacon of hope for the enslaved, Haiti was a warning of everything that might go wrong for elites in the cacao-growing areas of Venezuela and throughout slave societies in the Americas.

      Creole anxieties contributed to the persistence of strong loyalist factions in the Viceroyalty of New Granada (New Granada, Viceroyalty of), but they did not prevent the rise of an independence struggle there. Creoles organized revolutionary governments that proclaimed some social and economic reforms in 1810, and in Venezuela they openly declared a break with Spain the following year. Forces loyal to Spain fought the Venezuelan patriots from the start, leading to a pattern in which patriot rebels held the capital city and its surroundings but could not dominate large areas of the countryside. Some saw the earthquake that wreaked particular destruction in patriot-held areas in 1812 as a sign of divine displeasure with the revolution. That year certainly was the onset of a difficult period for the independence cause. Loyalist forces crushed the rebels' military, driving Bolívar (Bolívar, Simón) and others to seek refuge in New Granada proper (the heart of the viceroyalty).

      Bolívar soon returned to Venezuela with a new army in 1813 and waged a campaign with a ferocity that is captured perfectly by the army's motto, “Guerra a muerte” (“War to the death”). With loyalists displaying the same passion and violence, as well as obtaining significant support from the common people of mixed ethnicity, the revolutionists achieved only short-lived victories. The army led by loyalist José Tomás Boves demonstrated the key military role that the llaneros (cowboys) came to play in the region's struggle. Turning the tide against independence, these highly mobile, ferocious fighters made up a formidable military force that pushed Bolívar out of his home country once more.

      By 1815 the independence movements in Venezuela and almost all across Spanish South America seemed moribund. A large military expedition sent by Ferdinand VII in that year reconquered Venezuela and most of New Granada. Yet another invasion led by Bolívar in 1816 failed miserably.

      The following year a larger and revitalized independence movement emerged, winning the struggle in the north and taking it into the Andean highlands. The mercurial Bolívar, the scion of an old aristocratic Creole family in Caracas, galvanized this initiative. Hero and symbol of South American independence, Bolívar did not produce victory by himself, of course; still, he was of fundamental importance to the movement as an ideologue, military leader, and political catalyst. In his most famous writing, the “Jamaica Letter” (composed during one of his periods of exile, in 1815), Bolívar affirmed his undying faith in the cause of independence, even in the face of the patriots' repeated defeats. While laying out sharp criticisms of Spanish colonialism, the document also looked toward the future. For Bolívar, the only path for the former colonies was the establishment of autonomous, centralized republican government.

      Although liberal in some respects, in the Jamaica Letter and elsewhere, he expressed strong doubts about the capacity of his fellow Latin Americans for self-government, revealing his socially conservative and politically authoritarian side. “Do not adopt the best system of government,” he wrote, “but the one most likely to succeed.” Thus, the type of republic that he eventually espoused was very much an oligarchic one, with socioeconomic and literacy qualifications for suffrage and with power centred in the hands of a strong executive. And though he favoured the granting of civil liberties to all male citizens and the abolition of slavery, Bolívar also worried that the death of so many peninsular soldiers during the wars would condemn Latin America to a system of “pardocracy,” or rule by pardos (people of mixed ethnicity), an outcome he deemed threatening. He believed that a virtuous governing system would not be possible if the nation was divided by ethnicity.

      The Liberator emerged as a strong military and political force in the struggles that began in 1817. At this point he expanded the focus of the movement, shifting his attention to New Granada and courting supporters among the casta majority. A group of llaneros of mixed ethnicity led by José Antonio Páez (Páez, José Antonio) proved crucial to the patriots' military victories in 1818–19. A major step in that success came in the subduing of the loyalist defenders of Bogotá in 1819. After leading his army up the face of the eastern Andes, Bolívar dealt a crushing defeat to his enemies in the Battle of Boyacá (Boyacá, Battle of).

 Consolidating victory in the north proved difficult. A congress that Bolívar had convened in Angostura (Ciudad Bolívar) in 1819 named the Liberator president of Gran Colombia, a union of what are today Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, and Ecuador. In reality, sharp divisions permeated the region even before Angostura; these ultimately dashed Bolívar's hopes of uniting the former Spanish colonies into a single new nation. The Bogotá area, for example, had previously refused to join in a confederation with the rest of revolutionary New Granada. Furthermore, loyalist supporters still held much of Venezuela, parts of the Colombian Andes, and all of Ecuador. Still, the tide had turned in favour of independence, and further energetic military campaigns liberated New Granada and Venezuela by 1821. A constituent congress held that year in Cúcuta chose Bolívar president of a now much more centralized Gran Colombia.

      Leaving his trusted right-hand man, Francisco de Paula Santander (Santander, Francisco de Paula), in Bogotá to rule the new government, Bolívar then pushed on into Ecuador and the central Andes. There the southern and northern armies came together in a pincer movement to quash the remaining loyalist strength. In 1822 San Martín (San Martín, José de) and Bolívar came face-to-face in a celebrated but somewhat mysterious encounter in Guayaquil (Guayaquil Conference), Ecuador. Accounts of their meeting vary widely, but apparently San Martín made the realistic evaluation that only Bolívar and his supporters could complete the liberation of the Andes. From that point on, the northerners took charge of the struggle in Peru and Bolivia. After standing by while Spanish forces threatened to recapture the lands that San Martín's armies had emancipated, Bolívar responded to the calls of Peruvian Creoles and guided his soldiers to victory in Lima. While he organized the government there, his lieutenants set out to win the highlands of Peru and Upper Peru. One of them, the Venezuelan Antonio José de Sucre (Sucre, Antonio José de), directed the patriots' triumph at Ayacucho (Ayacucho, Battle of) in 1824, which turned out to be the last major battle of the war. Within two years independence fighters mopped up the last of loyalist resistance, and South America was free of Spanish control.

Mexico and Central America

      The independence of Mexico, like that of Peru, the other major central area of Spain's American empire, came late. As was the case in Lima, Mexican cities had a powerful segment of Creoles and peninsular Spaniards whom the old imperial system had served well. Mexican Creoles, like those in Peru, had the spectre of a major social uprising to persuade them to cling to Spain and stability for a while longer. For many of the powerful in Mexican society, a break with Spain promised mainly a loss of traditional status and power and possibly social revolution.

      What was unique to the Mexican case was that the popular rebellion that exploded in 1810 was actually the first major call for independence in the region. Between 1808 and 1810, peninsulars had acted aggressively to preserve Spain's power in the region. Rejecting the notion of a congress that would address the question of governance in the absence of the Spanish king, leading peninsulars in Mexico City deposed the viceroy and persecuted Creoles. They then welcomed weaker viceroys whom they knew they could dominate. Peninsulars' efforts could not, however, prevent the emergence of an independence struggle. In 1810 the Bajío region produced a unique movement led by a radical priest, Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla (Hidalgo y Costilla, Miguel). When officials discovered the conspiracy that Hidalgo and other Creoles had been planning in Querétaro, the priest appealed directly to the indigenous and mestizo populace. A rich agricultural and mining zone, the Bajío had recently undergone difficult economic times that hit those rural and urban workers particularly hard. Thus many of them responded eagerly to Hidalgo's famous Grito de Dolores (“Cry of Dolores”). Although framed as an appeal for resistance to the peninsulars, the Grito was in effect a call for independence.

      The enthusiasm that Hidalgo stirred among Indians and mestizos shocked and frightened both Creole and peninsular elites. Under the banner of the Virgin of Guadalupe (Guadalupe, Our Lady of), the movement's ranks swelled rapidly. Hidalgo's untrained army grew to have some 80,000 members as it conquered towns and larger cities and ultimately threatened Mexico City itself. During their campaign the members of this force attacked the persons and property of peninsular and Creole elites. The movement for independence was becoming a race and class war.

      Perhaps fearing the atrocities his troops might commit there, Hidalgo prevented the movement from entering Mexico City. Shortly afterward troops of the viceregal government caught up with the rebels. After a dramatic military defeat, Hidalgo was captured in early 1811 and executed.

      The death of its first leader did not mean the end of Mexico's first independence campaign. Soon another priest, the mestizo José María Morelos y Pavón (Morelos, José María), took over the reins of the movement. Under Morelos the rebellion gained clearer objectives of independence and social and economic reform as well as greater organization and a wider social base. With the defeat and death of Morelos in 1815, the potential national scope of the movement came to an effective end. Although smaller forces under leaders like Vicente Guerrero (Guerrero, Vicente) and Guadalupe Victoria (Victoria, Guadalupe) (Manuel Félix Fernández) continued to harass the powerful through guerrilla warfare in several regions, the popular movement for independence in Mexico was no longer a grave threat to elite power.

      Final independence, in fact, was not the result of the efforts of Hidalgo, Morelos, or the forces that had made up their independence drive. It came instead as a conservative initiative led by military officers, merchants, and the Roman Catholic Church. The liberals who carried out the 1820 revolt in Spain intended to eliminate the special privileges of the church and the military. Anxious over that threat to the strength of two of the pillars of the Mexican government and newly confident in their ability to keep popular forces in check, Creoles turned against Spanish rule in 1820–21.

      Two figures from the early rebellion played central roles in liberating Mexico. One, Guerrero, had been an insurgent chief; the other, Agustín de Iturbide (Iturbide, Agustín de), had been an officer in the campaign against the popular independence movement. The two came together behind an agreement known as the Iguala Plan. Centred on provisions of independence, respect for the church, and equality between Mexicans and peninsulars, the plan gained the support of many Creoles, Spaniards, and former rebels. As royal troops defected to Iturbide's cause, the new Spanish administrator was soon forced to accept the inevitability of Mexican independence. A year later, in 1822, Iturbide engineered his own coronation as Agustín I, Emperor of Mexico.

      The following year, a revolt that included the former insurgent Guadalupe Victoria (who, like Guerrero, had abandoned the cause of a popular independence) cut short Iturbide's tenure as monarch. The consequences of that overthrow extended from Mexico through Central America. In Mexico the rebellion ushered in a republic and introduced Antonio López de Santa Anna (Santa Anna, Antonio López de), who occupied a central place in the nation's politics for several decades. The provinces of the Kingdom of Guatemala—which included what are today the Mexican state of Chiapas and the nations of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica—had adhered to Iturbide's Mexico by 1822. With the exception of Chiapas, these Central American provinces split off from Mexico in the wake of Iturbide's fall. They formed a federation, the United Provinces of Central America, which held together only until 1838, when regionalism led to the creation of separate countries in the region.

Brazil

      Brazil gained its independence with little of the violence that marked similar transitions in Spanish America. Conspiracies against Portuguese rule during 1788–98 showed that some groups in Brazil had already been contemplating the idea of independence in the late 18th century. Moreover, the Pombaline reforms of the second half of the 18th century, Portugal's attempt to overhaul the administration of its overseas possessions, were an inconvenience to many in the colony. Still, the impulse toward independence was less powerful in Brazil than in Spanish America. Portugal, with more limited financial, human, and military resources than Spain, had never ruled its American subjects with as heavy a hand as its Iberian neighbour. Portugal neither enforced commercial monopolies as strictly nor excluded the American-born from high administrative positions as widely as did Spain. Many Brazilian-born and Portuguese elites had received the same education, especially at the University of Coimbra in Portugal. Their economic interests also tended to overlap. The reliance of the Brazilian upper classes on African slavery, finally, favoured their continued ties to Portugal. Plantation owners depended on the African slave trade, which Portugal controlled, to provide workers for the colony's main economic activities. The size of the resulting slave population—approximately half the total Brazilian population in 1800—also meant that Creoles shied away from political initiatives that might mean a loss of control over their social inferiors.

      The key step in the relatively bloodless end of colonial rule in Brazil was the transfer of the Portuguese court from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro in 1808. The arrival of the court transformed Brazil in ways that made its return to colony status impossible. The unprecedented concentration of economic and administrative power in Rio de Janeiro brought a new integration to Brazil. The emergence of that capital as a large and increasingly sophisticated urban centre also expanded markets for Brazilian manufactures and other goods. Even more important to the development of manufacturing in Brazil was one of the first acts undertaken there by the Portuguese ruler, Prince Regent John (John VI): the removal of old restrictions on manufacturing. Another of his enactments, the opening of Brazilian ports to direct trade with friendly countries, was less helpful to local manufacturers, but it further contributed to Brazil's emergence as a metropolis.

      Brazil headed into a political crisis when groups in Portugal tried to reverse the metropolitanization of their former colony. With the end of the Napoleonic Wars came calls for John to return to Lisbon. At first he demurred and in 1815 even raised Brazil to the status of kingdom, legally equal to Portugal within the empire that he ruled. The situation was a difficult one for John (after 1816 King John VI). If he moved back to Lisbon, he might lose Brazil, but if he remained in Rio, he might well lose Portugal. Finally, after liberal revolts in Lisbon and Oporto in 1820, the Portuguese demands became too strong for him to resist. In a move that ultimately facilitated Brazil's break with Portugal, John sailed for Lisbon in 1821 but left his son Dom Pedro (Pedro I) behind as prince regent. It was Dom Pedro who, at the urging of local elites, oversaw the final emergence of an independent Brazil.

      Matters were pushed toward that end by Portuguese reaction against the rising power of their former colony. Although the government constituted by the liberals after 1820 allowed Brazilian representation in a Cortes, it was clear that Portugal now wanted to reduce Brazil to its previous colonial condition, endangering all the concessions and powers the Brazilian elite had won. By late 1821 the situation was becoming unbearable. The Cortes now demanded that Dom Pedro return to Portugal. As his father had advised him to do, the prince instead declared his intention to stay in Brazil in a speech known as the “Fico” (“I am staying”). When Pedro proclaimed its independence on Sept. 7, 1822, and subsequently became its first emperor, Brazil's progression from Portuguese colony to autonomous country was complete. There was some armed resistance from Portuguese garrisons in Brazil, but the struggle was brief.

      Independence still did not come without a price. Over the next 25 years Brazil suffered a series of regional revolts, some lasting as long as a decade and costing tens of thousands of lives. Dom Pedro I was forced from his throne in 1831, to be succeeded by his son, Dom Pedro II. The break with Portugal did not itself, however, produce the kind of disruption and devastation that plagued much of the former Spanish America. With its territory and economy largely intact, its government headed by a prince of the traditional royal family, and its society little changed, Brazil enjoyed continuities that made it extraordinarily stable in comparison with most of the other new states in the region.

Building new nations, 1826–50

      While Brazil maintained its territorial integrity after independence, the former Spanish America split into more than a dozen separate countries, following the administrative divisions of the colonial system. The difficulty for the inhabitants of these units was not, however, as simple as the demarcation of geographic boundaries. Rather, the recently emancipated countries of Latin America faced the much more daunting challenge of defining and consolidating new nations. With the structures of the old system removed, the inhabitants of each country set out on programs to create a postcolonial political, economic, and social order. The obstacles confronting them were myriad and imposing. As Bolívar himself exclaimed in a final cry of despair, “America is ungovernable for us…; he who serves a revolution ploughs the sea.” Indeed, it was only toward 1850, at the end of a 25-year period sometimes known as “the long wait,” that the outlines of that new order began to take their definitive form across the region.

Political models and the search for authority

      One of the most pressing and also most enduring problems that leaders of Latin American nations faced in the decades after independence was establishing the legitimacy of their new governments (government). In this regard the break with the colonial system proved traumatic. In Iberian political traditions, power and authority resided to a great extent in the figure of the monarch (monarchy). Only the monarch had the ability to dominate the church, the military, and other powerful corporate groups in Iberian and colonial Latin American societies. Representative government and the concept of popular sovereignty, as a corollary, had a weak presence in Iberian political culture. With the Spanish king removed—and with him the ultimate source of political legitimacy—Creole elites had to find new foundations on which to construct systems of governance that their compatriots would accept and respect.

      Although in practice they were unable to abandon the legacies of three centuries of Iberian colonial rule, leaders in Latin America turned generally to other political traditions for solutions to the problem of legitimacy. Adapting models from northern Europe and the United States, they set up republics across the region. Doing so not only helped justify their separation from Spain but also enabled Latin American elites to try to follow the example of countries they most admired, particularly Great Britain, the United States, and France. Many in the upper classes of Latin American societies identified political institutions as sources of the economic progress those countries were enjoying. At the same time, efforts to implement those political systems in Latin America brought to the region's new countries Enlightenment conceptions of politics based on rationality and a vision of politics as an interaction of individuals who enjoyed specific, definable rights and duties.

Constitutions (constitution)

      Particularly in the first, heady years of independence, elites throughout Latin America exhibited the influence of the Enlightenment in their propensity for producing constitutions. Those documents demonstrated not only attempts to impose rational plans on new nations but also the changing attitudes of elites toward their societies.

      The earliest constitutions appeared in Venezuela, Chile, and New Granada in the years 1811–12. The authors of those founding documents rather optimistically intended to create representative government in independent Latin America and to declare inalienable natural rights of liberty, security, property, and equality. To implement those ideas, these constitutions set up a division of power in which the executive was comparatively weak.

      From the mid-1810s to mid-century the overwhelming tendency was to move away from those early schemes. With different regions and elite factions battling against each other, the first liberal constitutional governments had failed. Now leaders in the region sought to erect stronger and more highly centralized states, again carefully laying out their programs in constitutions. This shift was not a rejection of foreign models. On the contrary, this change followed the evolution of European political thought; Latin American elites were now basing their ideas on different foreign theories, turning away from those of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and toward those of more conservative thinkers like Montesquieu and Jeremy Bentham. At the same time, the movement toward stronger executives and more centralized states reflected specific circumstances of these emerging new nations. At first, elites wanted a more powerful state to complete the victory over Spain and then to gain recognition from a Europe by this time dominated by antirepublican attitudes. As political order proved difficult to achieve, many Latin American leaders also looked to a more centralized state as an instrument against political and civil unrest.

      Hopes for a new and stronger government only rarely centred on the idea of monarchy. Leaders in Argentina and Chile discussed the possibility of introducing a constitutional monarchy with a European king at its head. Mexico had emperors, first with Iturbide and then in 1864–67 with the Austrian emperor Francis Joseph's brother Maximilian, and Brazil enjoyed relative stability in a constitutional monarchy that lasted from independence until 1889. Still, such initiatives were temporary and exceptional. Latin Americans encountered a great deal of difficulty in finding suitable European princes to rule their countries. Local figures, furthermore, lacked the necessary authority to be accepted as monarchs. Thus, for practical as well as ideological reasons, republics were the rule during the 19th century. As leaders sought greater centralization, they adopted new forms of republicanism. Some, particularly military leaders such as Bolívar and the generals who had served under him, followed the model of a Napoleonic state. Bolívar's recommendation of a powerful president-for-life and a hereditary or life senate, resembling the structures of constitutional monarchy with republican ornamentation, was never followed. The predominant model was that of the regime that Spanish liberals had set up in 1812. Not all new constitutions after 1815 jettisoned federalism; Mexico in 1824, for instance, embraced that ideal. Overall, Latin America moved toward stronger, more-centralized republican governments by the mid-19th century.

Disorder and caudillismo

      Written constitutions were not, however, sufficient to enforce order in the new countries of the region. Particularly in the 1825–50 period, Latin America experienced a high degree of political instability. National governments changed hands rapidly in most areas, which only prolonged the weakness and ineffectiveness of the emerging political systems. In Mexico, to take but one example, the years 1825–55 saw 48 turnovers in the national executive. Neither those in power nor those seeking office evinced consistent respect for the often idealistic provisions of constitutions. In some cases the very authors of constitutions broke the rules laid out in them to gain or preserve control over governments. Like any other member of their society, they knew better than to expect their fellow political actors to stay within the strictures of the law. Extralegal maneuvers and the use of force became common elements of politics.

      Much of the conflict that characterized these years consisted of simple disputes over power. Still, by the end of the 1830s and into the 1840s, politics in many areas coalesced around two ideological poles, usually known as liberal (liberalism) and conservative (conservatism). These groupings were not mass-based political parties in the 20th-century sense but rather factions of the elite; believing the majority of society to be ill-prepared for democracy, both liberals and conservatives intended to construct governments for the people but not by the people. Nonetheless, at times groups of artisans or peasant villagers took sides in the factional battles, hoping thus to press their own interests.

      The precise definition of the sides in those fights is very difficult, owing to variations between countries and time periods. Urban merchants, rural landowners, and other economic interest groups overlapped so frequently—often within a single family—that it is impossible to generalize about the different origins of political factions. Moreover, the positions taken by one group could be surprising; in Venezuela in the 1840s, for instance, it was conservatives who supported free trade with the exterior, a stance that elsewhere was one of the classic tenets of liberalism. In general, however, one can say that liberals pressed harder for free trade and the rationalization and modernization of their societies—which essentially meant the adoption of European and North American liberal understandings of society as a collection of autonomous individuals. Conservatives, on the other hand, proved more favourable to old institutions, particularly the Roman Catholic Church, and to traditional visions of society as grounded in corporate groups. Indeed, in many contexts the question of whether or not to curtail the power of the church was the key point of divergence between otherwise similar liberal and conservative factions.

      To an extent, the role that violence or the threat of violence played in politics reflected a militarization brought about by the long period of the wars of independence. Only in Peru and even more so in Mexico did this phenomenon involve the continued influence of a regular, professional military class. Elsewhere the professional military failed to form a coherent interest group, and in many countries civilian politicians managed to control or even reduce the size of their national armies. It was rather in the power of militias and individual military leaders that the militarization of society was most visible. Throughout the region such forces grew to influence or even head national governments.

      The military men who rose to positions of dominance were examples of the caudillo, a figure that epitomized this unstable period. Often coming to power through the use of violence, these leaders imposed themselves through the force of their own personalities, their control over armed followers, and their strategic alliances with elite groups. Some caudillos rose to power from humble beginnings, while others came from wealthy, landowning sectors and used their dependent workers as the core of their support. The stereotype of the caudillo as charismatic enough to win the enduring loyalty of his men and skilled enough to ride or fight better than any of them did not, of course, apply to all, but these were domineering and macho leaders. Whatever their social origins, caudillos in the postcolonial period became key political actors, working in alliance with, and at times under the control of, the economically powerful and civilian political leaders of the new nations of Latin America.

      In a few cases caudillos contributed to political order. In Chile in the 1830s, for instance, the caudillo Diego Portales (Portales, Diego) was a key figure in the establishment of a comparatively stable government. Allying with conservative elements, Portales helped found a political order that survived his death in 1837. It was an order based, as he put it, on “the weight of the night,” meaning the ignorance and passivity of the popular majority—something he made little effort to change. Juan Manuel de Rosas (Rosas, Juan Manuel de), a caudillo who is said to have been able to outrope and outride his gaucho supporters, imposed a brutal political regime in Argentina from 1829 to 1852. Seeing his homeland split into partisan factions, Rosas sought to ensure a kind of peace by achieving the ultimate victory of one side. His iron-fisted administration, which made use of propaganda and a secret police force, pursued the interests of Rosas and his fellow Buenos Aires ranchers; still, caudillos from other provinces repeatedly tried to oust this violent leader. Indeed, the very foundation of their power in personal relations and in violence meant that the legitimacy of caudillos' rule was always in doubt. Few were able to set up networks of alliances that could withstand the challenges of new leaders who emerged with their own armed supporters and wealthy allies. The system of caudillismo was a volatile one. Although the general type continued to exist throughout the 19th century, it was the postindependence period that represented the golden age of the caudillos.

Economic (economic development) obstacles

      Complicating the construction of stable, constitutional governments in the decades after independence were the economic circumstances that prevailed in the period. Creoles who had expected the dismantling of colonial restraints on Latin American economies to produce a wave of new wealth found their hopes dashed in the 1820s. In many ways the region's economies were poorer and less integrated in the first decades after independence than they had been in the late colonial period. Political disorder was both a cause and result of this situation. Unable to rely on old taxes for revenue and faced with military and bureaucratic expenses greater than those of the colonial regime, new governments commonly found themselves in tight financial straits. Their resulting weakness contributed to political instability, which at the same time impeded the reorganization of economic systems.

      The wars of independence contributed to the disappointing postwar economic picture. In some areas, such as Venezuela, damage from the wars was extensive. Even where the destruction of human life and economic resources was less widespread, disruptions in financial arrangements and systems of labour relations provoked a decline in important economic sectors. Mining suffered particularly in many countries. The richest mineral producer, Mexico, needed roughly half a century to regain its preindependence levels of production.

      As they emerged from their battles for emancipation, the new nations encountered other difficulties. The mere fact of political independence did not eliminate long-standing problems of transportation, but it did break down some traditional commercial networks. The entrance of foreign merchants and imported goods, although on a much more limited scale than would later be the case, led to competition with, and in some areas the displacement of, local traders and producers. Apart from loans that left most countries in debt, the region received little capital from foreign sources. The departure of, or discrimination against, peninsular Spaniards reduced what had been a major source of skilled labour and administrative know-how, as well as capital for investment. Relatively few exports, such as coffee, sugar, and cattle products, found world markets favourable enough to stimulate the expansion of their production in Latin America. Colonial patterns had been destroyed, but the economies of the region had not yet found a consistent new orientation.

social change

Mobility (social mobility) and hierarchy

      The Creole elites who had headed the independence cause throughout Latin America had no intention of losing their social, economic, and political power in the construction of new nations. Managing to solidify and even expand their influence after the removal of colonial administration, these elites emerged as the great beneficiaries of independence.

      The situation of other social groups and institutions was more mixed. Leaders across the region quickly eliminated the system of separate ethnic castes. Persons of mixed race were, in theory, to have the same legal rights as members of the white upper classes. Indeed, the period of independence saw the ascension of individual mestizos and castas to positions of prominence. Service in the wars was particularly useful in this regard. Men such as the mulattoes Manuel Piar in Venezuela and José Padilla in New Granada rose to the rank of general and admiral, respectively, in Bolívar's forces. In practice, however, the old hierarchies did not fall so easily and continued on informally. Those nonwhites who managed to achieve the status of elites were clearly exceptions to the general rule. The destruction of the caste system allowed for only limited loosening of racial and class hierarchies. Indeed, both Piar and Padilla were executed under rather questionable circumstances.

      The position of Indians (American Indian) changed rather slowly in the postindependence era, despite some early and energetic initiatives. Spain had ended Indian tribute in 1810, and in the years after that several Latin American nations saw fit to repeat that measure with abolitions of their own. More generally, leaders frequently spoke of breaking down the barriers between the indigenous and more Hispanized sectors of their societies. Still, in the aftermath of independence, governments tended to reverse their positions toward Amerindian populations. The countries of the Andes, for example, reinstated Indian tribute, albeit under different names. Bolivian governments derived as much as 80 percent of their revenues from that source through mid-century. Full-scale attacks on indigenous communities' lands came later in the century.

      Strong measures against African slavery similarly appeared in many areas by the late 1820s. Lawmakers declared the children of slaves to be free, banned the slave trade, or even ended slavery itself. Once again, however, there was a pattern of backsliding, so that, where slave labour played a significant economic role, the final abolition (abolitionism) of the institution of slavery came about in most countries only about 1850. The growth of sugar production in Cuba and coffee production in Brazil, furthermore, meant that those two slave societies continued to flourish. Both areas continued to receive large numbers of new enslaved workers from Africa until after mid-century (1865 in Cuba, 1851 in Brazil) and only abolished slavery in the 1880s (1886 in Cuba, 1888 in Brazil).

Social institutions

      Both as part of their ideological commitment to liberal individualism and as a means of increasing the power of their new states, leaders in the postindependence years tried to establish their control over the formidable colonial institutions of the Roman Catholic Church and the military. Success came more easily in the case of the military. Only in Mexico and to a lesser extent in Peru did professional armies form fairly coherent interest groups pressing for the maintenance of their traditional privileges. After mid-century, however, those special privileges were lost even in these countries. The church, on the other hand, though losing a great deal of power, held on to a position of influence in much of the region. Armies of independence and some subsequent governments took over church properties and resources to meet their financial needs. In Buenos Aires and Montevideo, liberals were also able to trim the privileges of the church; elsewhere, however, attempts to do so either appeared later or, as in Mexico and Guatemala, provoked serious conflicts.

The new order, 1850–1910

Political and economic transitions, 1850–70

      The first decades of the second half of the 19th century represented the beginnings of a fundamental shift in the still-young nations of Latin America. At the heart of this transition was a growing orientation of the economies of the region to world markets. As Europe and North America experienced a second wave of industrialization, they began to reevaluate the economic potential of Latin America; the region looked to them increasingly like a vital source of raw materials for the expanding economies of the North Atlantic. To take advantage of the possibilities that this conjuncture opened, elites in Latin America directed their countries ever more toward export economies. That change also entailed a series of social and political developments that, especially from the 1870s on, constituted a new order in Latin America. The 1850s and '60s were merely a transitional period, however, as political conflicts and civil wars broke out in Mexico, Venezuela, and elsewhere, postponing the consolidation of the general shift.

The liberal oligarchic age, 1870–1910

      The order that took shape in the last decades of the 19th century is often called neocolonial, as a way of suggesting that the internal and external structures characterizing the region maintained overall similarities to those of the period of Iberian colonial rule. To a great extent this is a useful description. As in the colonial period, the region was tremendously vulnerable to outside events and foreign nations. Although many Latin American elites profited from the new order, they ceded a degree of control over their countries to the industrializing economies of the North Atlantic. For much of the 19th century Britain was the predominant power in the region, followed by the United States, France, and Germany. By the end of the 1870–1910 period the United States managed to supplant Britain. As in colonial times, Latin America continued to be largely an exporter of raw materials and an importer of manufactures. Furthermore, despite some legal changes, social relations had not undergone revolutionary change. Broad hierarchies of race and class continued to define social relations. In the countryside in particular the figure of the patrón (boss or patron) maintained dominance over both physical resources and persons of lower status. The role of such men as patriarchs in their households demonstrates further that the relative positions of men and women had not become noticeably more equal; although not accepted by all, definitions of women as weaker than men and fit primarily for domesticity were still the norm.

      The patterns of 1870–1910 were not, however, mere copies or repetitions of colonial trends. Along with the similarities to earlier conditions came profound economic, social, and political changes. In this regard the term “neocolonial” does not capture the complexity and dynamism of this period in Latin American history.

Export economies

      Through the mid-19th century many interests in Latin America had doubts about the wisdom of opening their economies (economic development) to the world. In countries like Peru and Colombia, artisans and other producers, as well as some merchants, persuaded their governments to set up barriers against the entrance of foreign competition. By the 1860s and '70s, however, such protectionism was swept away by a wave of free-trade (free trade) liberalism. Domestic production of textiles and other goods proved incapable of doing more than merely surviving. When the great impulses toward direct links to Europe and the United States emerged, elites across Latin America turned their backs on the artisans and weavers in their countries and enthusiastically welcomed in manufactures from England, the United States, and other nations. The doctrines of liberalism—from free trade internationally to open markets domestically—became hegemonic.

      Besides the upsurge in international (international trade) demand for Latin American primary goods, the factors fueling the rise of export economies included foreign investment and technological innovations brought from the industrializing countries. A wide range of products were affected by the increase in demand, from consumer goods such as sugar, coffee, wheat, and beef to industrial products like rubber and minerals. Old products such as silver recovered and surpassed earlier levels of production, while other new products appeared. One spectacularly successful new export from mid-century to the 1870s was guano, or seabird dung, which was mined on the islands off the Peruvian coast and sold to Europe as a fertilizer. When new chemical fertilizers shut down foreign markets for guano, nitrates and copper from the arid regions of northern Chile entered the scene as profitable new mining products for export.

      The lack of capital that had plagued Latin America in the immediate postindependence period was resolved now by injections of foreign capital on a scale previously unknown. Investments from Europe provided much of the financial support for infrastructural improvements. British and other foreign firms constructed railways, streetcar systems, and electric networks, often getting guarantees of profits on their investments and other favourable concessions from local authorities. At the same time, some ominous signs appeared; often borrowing against projected export earnings, the Peruvian and other governments ran up large foreign debts in the late 19th century.

      Along with financial capital came technology (technology, history of), in such forms as barbed-wire fencing, refrigeration, steam engines, and mining equipment. With access to credit, both foreign and domestic producers were now able to adopt such technologies, thereby increasing the size and efficiency of their production for export markets. The Cuban sugar economy, for example, underwent major changes linked to the creation of highly capitalized central mills that used new processing machinery to increase refining capacity and benefited from new transportation technology to ease the sale to export markets. Indeed, perhaps the single most important technological advance was the railroad; in this bold age of construction, railroads thrust out across much of Latin America, speeding transportation between productive zones and urban centres and ports. The spread of rail lines brought year-round transportation to regions that had lacked it. Moreover, by reducing freight costs, railways fostered the production of bulk commodities like beef and coffee. Together with the introduction of steamship lines in the Magdalena, Orinoco, La Plata–Paraná, and other river systems, the railroad thus opened up the possibilities for exports of primary goods. Communications also improved with the introduction of telegraph lines, which by the 1870s linked parts of Latin America directly with Europe. Both the new investments and technology transfers served to facilitate production and export of the primary goods that industrializing economies sought. Latin America underwent a thorough integration into the world economy.

      Even as it opened up areas of lucrative production, this new orientation of Latin American economies imposed certain limits. The concentration on exports of primary goods and the competition of imported manufactures with domestic products served as powerful disincentives to economic diversification. Some areas, like Cuba with sugar and Central America with coffee, fell into patterns of monoculture, in which an entire national economy was dependent on the health of one particular crop. Even where more than one product was central to a country, the reliance on these exports made Latin American economies vulnerable to shifts in demand and prices on the world market, as well as to local conditions influencing production.

      Although the new order favoured a focus on raw materials production, some areas experienced the beginnings of industrialization. Particularly in capitals that served as commercial as well as administrative centres, such as Buenos Aires, the late 19th and early 20th centuries witnessed the rise of tertiary sectors as well. The increased volume of production and trade spawned a wide range of services that created jobs in manual labour in docks and processing plants and white-collar work in both the government and private firms. Manufacturing sprang up in countries like Chile and Brazil, often starting with the production of cheap textiles and other relatively simple goods that could compete with low-end imports. Some of the financing for such ventures came from abroad. A significant and often underestimated portion of the capital that the new systems of banking and finance provided for early manufacturing efforts, however, consisted of local capital. Groups that had grown wealthy and powerful in the export economy began to diversify into manufacturing in areas like São Paulo. Still, the transition from exporters of primary goods to producers of manufactures was a difficult one in which the region participated unevenly. Most notably in Central America and in the Caribbean, the local elites' activities were largely restricted to the production of primary export goods, and economies retained more of a neocolonial orientation.

Capitalism and social transitions (capitalism)

      The social ramifications of the rise of export economies were vast. The acceleration of the export economies and related commerce fostered a tendency toward urbanization. The period was one of general population growth in much of Latin America, most spectacularly in the temperate, staple-producing zones of South America. Within the overall increase, the rise of cities was particularly noteworthy. More than simple size was involved; cities like Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, and Mexico City became sophisticated, cosmopolitan urban centres. Urban reforms, many inspired by the sweeping transformation of the French capital under Napoleon III and his city planner, Georges-Eugène Haussmann, allowed cities to vie with each other for the title of “Paris of South America.” At the same time, incipient industrialization brought conflicts between urban workers and capitalists. Workers had for decades been organizing themselves into mutual aid societies and other nonideological associations. At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, new groups began to emerge. At times with the special participation of recent European immigrants, workers established trade unions (organized labour), pressing their interests with strikes and other activities. In this early phase, ideologies of anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism had particular influence in many areas. By the early 20th century, moreover, the growth of government and service sectors had created urban middle classes that were ready to enter politics.

      In the countryside, social relations underwent greater change over a short period than at any time since the conquest. Increasing ties to the capitalist world economy did not always lead to wage labour but rather fed the diversification of work relations. In fact, one tendency of the period was the strengthening—or even extension—of certain nonwage forms of labour. In parts of Peru, Mexico, Central America, and other areas, debt peonage was often used in export agriculture. In this system, employers or labour agents advanced a sum to workers, who would then have to labour on a ranch or plantation to pay off their debt. Because of manipulations by the owners, the workers often found that their indebtedness only grew the longer they toiled, so that debt peonage became a form of de facto slavery. The nature of this system is controversial, however, as it was possible that the debt simply represented an advance payment as an incentive, which the worker was seldom forced to repay if he left the job. So-called vagrancy laws, by which authorities could force unattached gauchos or peasants to work on large rural estates, were also enacted in countries such as Argentina and Guatemala. In the Central Valley of Chile, existing tenancy arrangements suffered modifications that cut back the rights and privileges of poor rural workers. Brazil and Argentina, on the other hand, experienced the emergence of unique systems of farming by European immigrants, which brought modern wage systems to important areas of their economies. Indeed, in those countries, immigration of Italians, Spaniards, and other Europeans transformed the ethnic composition and habits of whole regions. Argentina alone received almost 2.5 million people in this period.

      Throughout Latin America the position of rural workers came under attack from the large plantations, ranches, and estates that were expanding to take advantage of potential profits from the export economies. In south-central Brazil coffee plantations spread westward, pushing back small foodstuff production; in Argentina the ranching frontier pressed southward, displacing indigenous groups. Peasants and indigenous communities had resisted encroachment by neighbouring estates throughout the early national period and continued to do so into the 20th century. Nevertheless, the balance of power was shifting in favour of the large landowners. Early liberal moves to break up communal landholding paled beside the more energetic initiatives of the later 19th century. Although indigenous communities survived in the Andes, Mexico, and Central America, they commonly lost land, access to water and other resources, and some of the limited autonomy they had enjoyed.

      The Roman Catholic Church also was the target of ever more aggressive liberal attacks after mid-century. In much of Latin America the church had been the preeminent source of capital and a major property owner. As in the case of indigenous communities, the justification for those assaults was based in liberal ideology; politicians argued that property had to be placed into the hands of individuals because they would be more likely to develop it efficiently and thus contribute to economic progress. In Mexico, governments began large-scale appropriations of church holdings. This inspired the Cristero Rebellion (1926–29), in which communities rose up in violent defense of the church without the support of the bishops.

Oligarchies (oligarchy) in power

      Along with the export economies came political transitions. The increased revenues that burgeoning commerce provided allowed elites to consolidate more orderly political systems in some countries. Political unrest continued, however, in others; Colombia, for instance, experienced a series of civil wars toward the end of the 19th century.

      Across the region, groups tied to the export economies came to dominate politics in this era. In 1871 Guatemalan liberals linked to the rising coffee sector ousted the conservative regime that had controlled the country since 1838. The years 1876–1911 in Mexico, meanwhile, marked the iron-fisted rule of Porfirio Díaz (Díaz, Porfirio), who began his career as a liberal fighting under a banner of election for one term only and ended up as a dictator (dictatorship) who customarily manipulated his country's political structures to ensure that he and his allies would remain in power. That regime, known as the Porfiriato, was a particularly clear example of the late 19th-century regimes' ties to the new economic order. The Díaz government, like other progressive dictatorships in Latin America, worked to promote railroad construction, to force reluctant peasants and indigenous groups to work on rural estates, to repress popular organizing, and in other ways to benefit the dominant elites. Through such initiatives the governments of the day diverged from pure liberal tenets according to which the market alone determines the shape and nature of economic change. In many countries ruling groups began to adopt the ideas of Positivism, an ideology stressing a scientific analysis of human history and efforts to accelerate progress. In Brazil the decentralized old republic, dominated by rural elites, replaced constitutional monarchy in 1889 and took as its motto the positivist slogan “Ordem e progresso” (“Order and progress”). That phrase summed up what the ruling groups in Brazil and across Latin America sought in the mature age of export-oriented transformation—the maintenance of the hierarchies that they dominated and the achievement of prosperity and a “civilization” that represented an approximation of North Atlantic models. Thus both oligarchic republics and liberal dictatorships evolved as part of the new order of the 1870–1910 period.

Roger A. Kittleson David Bushnell

New order emerging, 1910–45

      The advances in economic growth and political stabilization that were evident in most of Latin America by the early 20th century came up against an array of challenges as the century wore on. The forward momentum was not necessarily lost—although Mexico experienced negative economic growth along with great political turmoil during the first decade of the Mexican Revolution beginning in 1910—but some partial changes of direction occurred, and new problems kept emerging. The challenges were of both internal and external origin, ranging from steady population increase for the region as a whole to the consequences of Latin America's ever-closer incorporation into the world economy. The external factors are generally easier to identify, if only because of the suddenness of their impact.

Economic (economic development) and social developments

World war and world trade

      Few Latin Americans felt strong emotional identification with either of the contending alliances in World War I (1914–18), except for the immigrant communities in southern South America and the ranks of generally Francophile liberal intellectuals. Of the major countries, only Brazil followed the example of the United States in declaring war on Germany, while Mexico and Argentina, which respectively saw the United States as a bullying neighbour and a hemispheric rival, vied for a leadership role in behalf of Latin American neutrality. Yet all countries were affected by the wartime disruption of trade (international trade) and capital flows, particularly those that had in recent years most successfully penetrated European markets with their own exports and become important consumers of European goods and financial services. Argentina was an obvious example. The outbreak of war brought a sharp decline in its trade as the Allied powers diverted shipping elsewhere and Germany became inaccessible. Although exports soon recovered, mainly in the form of meat to feed Allied troops, imported manufactures were scarce because overseas factories were devoted to war production, and scarcity drove up prices.

      Wartime disruptions were only temporary, and they gave way to a frenzied boom in the immediate postwar period as Latin American exporters cashed in on pent-up demand in the former warring powers. An extreme case was the “dance of the millions” in Cuba, where the price of sugar reached a peak of 23 cents per pound in 1920, only to fall back to 3.5 cents within the space of a few months, as European production of beet sugar returned to normal. Similar postwar booms and busts occurred elsewhere, even if less sharply, and demonstrated some of the hazards of Latin America's increasing dependence on the world economy. Those hazards were underscored again by the costly program Brazil felt compelled to undertake to support the price of coffee (coffee production), buying up surplus production and keeping it off the market. First tried in 1906 and briefly repeated during the war, this “valorization” policy was reinstated during the 1920s in the face of persistent weakness of the world coffee price. Yet one reason for the latter was the expansion of cultivation in other Latin American countries, above all Colombia, which by the end of World War I had emerged as the second leading producer—encouraged by, among other things, the Brazilian price support efforts.

      Conditions in the world market were in the last analysis unfavourable for Latin America's terms of trade, since demand for most of the primary commodities that the region specialized in was not keeping pace with the growth of production. Nevertheless, the decade of the 1920s was generally a period of economic growth and renewed optimism. All countries continued to pursue an outward-directed growth strategy insofar as they pursued a conscious strategy at all, placing few impediments in the way of import-export trade. Foreign investment also resumed on a massive scale and now came chiefly from the United States, whose stake rose to $5.4 billion in 1929 as against $1.6 billion in 1914. New capital flowed both into productive activities, like the Venezuelan petroleum industry (controlled by U.S., British, and Dutch interests and by the late 1920s the world's leading exporter though not producer), and into loans made by Wall Street bankers to Latin American governments.

The emerging force of nationalism

      The growing importance of foreign capital inevitably provoked a nationalist backlash, which reinforced the cultural nationalism already strong among groups of intellectuals and the anti-imperialist sentiment provoked by U.S. intervention around the Caribbean and in Mexico. Cultural nationalism was associated above all with conservatives who cherished the Iberian heritage as a shield against corrupting Anglo-Saxon influences, while the leading anti-imperialist spokesmen tended to be leftist. Incipient left-wing parties and labour unions were also in the forefront of economic nationalism, because, among other reasons, foreign-owned firms provided a more popular target than local enterprises. British nitrate investors in Chile thus faced serious labour unrest, as did the Boston-based United Fruit Company, hit by a violent strike in late 1928 in the Colombian banana zone. Petroleum investors in Mexico faced serious labour unrest in addition to a simmering conflict with the government itself over the control of subsoil resources, which the new constitution of 1917 had declared exclusive property of the nation.

      A further escalation of economic nationalism came with the world economic depression (Great Depression) of 1929 and after, though more as a defensive reaction than as a conscious policy. For Latin America, the depression put an abrupt end to the inflow of foreign capital and at the same time brought a drastic decline in the price of the region's exports, which in turn reduced the capacity to import and the governments' revenues from customs duties. At one point, a pound of Cuban sugar was selling for less than the U.S. tariff on the sugar. In response to the crisis, Latin American countries raised their own tariffs and imposed other restrictions on foreign trade. Even if the immediate purpose was conservation of scarce foreign exchange rather than the theoretical goal of increasing economic independence, the result was a decided impetus to domestic manufacturing, whose beneficiaries later appealed to nationalist sentiments to preserve the gains made. In Colombia, textile production increased during the 1930s at a faster rate than in England during the Industrial Revolution, despite the fact that the government continued to see protection of the coffee industry as its primary economic mission. But manufacturing made important gains in almost all the larger Latin American nations, which already before the depression had begun the development of an industrial base. It remains to be said, however, that, except for Mexico with its well-established iron and steel industry, manufacturing still consisted almost wholly of consumer goods production.

      On another front, to save available jobs for native inhabitants, numerous countries adopted measures during the depression that required a given percentage of a company's employees to be citizens. In Brazil, for similar reasons, tight restrictions were imposed on the flow of immigrants. Even without restrictions, however, and despite the fact that some countries recovered quickly from the effects of the depression, Latin America in the 1930s was simply not as attractive to immigrants as before.

Population and social change

      In some countries the life of most inhabitants seemed little changed in 1945, at the end of World War II, from what it had been in 1910. This was the case in Paraguay, still overwhelmingly rural and isolated, and Honduras, except for its coastal banana enclave. Even in Brazil, the sertão, or semiarid backcountry, was barely affected by changes in the coastal cities or in the fast-growing industrial complex of São Paulo. But in Latin America as a whole more people were becoming linked to the national and world economies, introduced to rudimentary public education, and exposed to emerging mass media.

      Even in Argentina, Brazil, and Cuba, where the number of immigrants had been significant up to the depression—in Cuba's case, from the neighbouring West Indies and, above all, from Spain—population growth was mainly from natural increase. It was still not explosive, for, while birth rates in most countries remained high, death rates had not yet been sharply reduced by advances in public health. But it was steady, the total Latin American population rising from roughly 60 million in 1900 to 155 million at mid-century. The urban proportion had reached about 40 percent, though with great differences among countries. The Argentine population was approximately half urban by the eve of World War I, fewer hands being required to produce the nation's wealth in the countryside than to process it in the cities and provide other essential urban services. In the Andean countries and Central America, however, urban dwellers were a decided minority even at the end of World War II. Moreover, the usual pattern was that of a single primate city vastly overshadowing lesser urban centres. In Uruguay in the early 1940s, Montevideo alone had 800,000 inhabitants, or over one-third of the nation's total, while its closest rival contained about 50,000. Yet even that was as many as lived in Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras.

      Latin America's population is less easy to classify in terms of social composition. Rural workers still made up the largest single group, but those loosely referred to as “peasants” could be anything from minifundistas, or independent owners of small private parcels, to seasonal hired hands of large plantations; with different degrees of autonomy and different linkages to national and world markets, they were far from a cohesive social sector. What such rural workers most clearly had in common was grossly inadequate access to health and education services and a low material standard of living. A socioeconomic and cultural gulf separated them from traditional large landowners as well as from the owners or managers of commercial agribusinesses.

      In the cities (city) an industrial working class was more and more in evidence, at least in the larger countries, where the size of the internal market made industrialization feasible even with low average purchasing power. However, factory workers did not necessarily form the most important urban sector, to some extent because the growth of cities had been more rapid than that of the manufacturing industry. São Paulo in Brazil and Monterrey in Mexico won fame chiefly as centres of industry, but more typical was the case of Montevideo, a commercial and administrative centre first and foremost that attracted the lion's share of the country's industry because of its preexisting leadership in population and services rather than the other way around. Moreover, port, transportation, and service workers—or miners, as in the Chilean nitrate fields—rather than factory workers usually led the way in union organization and strike actions. One reason was the high proportion of women workers in early factories, who, though even more exploited than male workers, were perceived by radical activists as less-promising recruits than stevedores or locomotive firemen.

      In urban settings the most important social development in the short run was the steady expansion of middling white-collar and professional groups. The extent to which these can be termed a “middle class” is open to question, for, while “middle” by the economic indicators of property and income, they were often ambivalent about their place in society—uncertain whether to embrace the work and savings ethic conventionally associated with the middle class of the Western world (or, later, of East Asia) or to try to emulate traditional elites. The middle sectors were, in any case, the chief beneficiaries of the expansion of educational facilities, which they strongly supported and used as means of upward mobility. Urban workers, for their part, had access to primary education but rarely secondary; at least they were now mainly literate, whereas most rural Latin Americans still were not.

      Lack of formal education had long reinforced the relative isolation of the peasantry from political currents at their nations' centres, not to mention from new fads and notions from abroad. Yet, starting in the 1920s, the rapid spread of the new medium of radio throughout Latin America exposed even illiterate people to an emerging mass culture. Additions to transportation infrastructure also contributed to greater integration of isolated population clusters. The most essential rail lines had already taken shape by 1910, but the coming of automotive transport led to a major upgrading and extension of highways, and the airplane introduced an entirely new mode of transportation. One of the oldest airlines in the world is Colombia's Avianca, whose founding (under a different name) in 1919 was of particular importance for a country where railroad and highway building had lagged because of difficult topography. Air travel similarly played a key role in knitting together far-flung sections of Brazil previously connected by coastal steamer. Transport improvements of all kinds favoured the creation not only of national markets but of shared national cultures, in the latter respect reinforcing the effects of popular education and radio.

Challenges to the political order

 The economic and social changes taking place in Latin America inevitably triggered demands for political change as well; political change in turn affected the course of socioeconomic development. As the 20th century opened, the most prevalent regime types were military dictatorship—exemplified by that of Porfirio Díaz in Mexico and after 1908 Juan Vicente Gómez in Venezuela—and civilian oligarchy—as in Chile, Argentina, Brazil, or Colombia. Even in Díaz's Mexico the constitution was not entirely meaningless, while civilian governments commonly used some combination of electoral manipulation and restricted suffrage to keep control in the hands of a small minority of political leaders allied with landed and commercial elites. Neither dictatorial nor oligarchic regimes gave due representation to the majority of inhabitants.

The Mexican Revolution

      The immediate challenge to existing regimes in country after country usually came from disaffected members of the traditional ruling groups and from the expanding middle sectors resentful of their exclusion from a fair share of power and privilege. This was evident at the outset of Latin America's bloodiest 20th-century civil conflict, the Mexican Revolution of 1910, when a dissident member of the large landowning class, Francisco Madero (Madero, Francisco), challenged Díaz for reelection, lost, and rose in rebellion, promising to bring genuine political democracy to Mexico. The dictatorship, decaying from within, collapsed, but it was many years before the country settled down, since Madero's uprising unleashed forces that neither he nor anyone else could control. Miners, urban workers, and peasants saw an opportunity to seek redress of their own grievances, while rival revolutionaries bitterly fought against each other. The end result was a system built around an all-powerful political party—the Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional; PRI), as it ultimately called itself—that skillfully co-opted labour and peasant organizations. More benefits accrued to labour leaders than to the rank and file, and implementation of the land reform proclaimed by the new constitution of 1917 was mostly halfhearted until the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas (Cárdenas, Lázaro) (1934–40). But it superficially appeared that almost everybody received something, and after Cárdenas Mexico became a model of political stability in Latin America.

Broadening of political participation

      The Mexican Revolution evoked widespread admiration elsewhere in Latin America, especially for its commitment to socioeconomic reform, but the Mexican political system had few imitators. In the Southern Cone, a common pattern was the broadening of participation within a more conventional democratic system where at least the middle sectors gained a meaningful share of power and benefits. This happened in Argentina following an electoral reform of 1912 that made universal male suffrage effective for the first time and paved the way for the Radical Civic Union party, with strong middle-class support, to take power four years later. In Chile a reformist coalition won the election of 1920, but strife between president and parliament brought a relapse into instability and short-lived military dictatorship. By the time Chile returned to stable political life in 1932, it had been equipped with a new constitution that was less susceptible to oligarchic obstructionism and an apparatus of social legislation that benefited both the middle class and urban workers, though it largely ignored the peasantry. However, Uruguay outstripped all others both in political democratization and as a pioneer welfare state, with minimum-wage legislation, an advanced social security system, and much else, even before 1930.

      Elsewhere the record was mixed. Costa Rica came close to approximating the pattern of the Southern Cone, and in Colombia the Liberal Party, after its return to power in 1930, went partway toward incorporating labour as an actor on the national scene. Ecuador in 1929 became the first Latin American nation to adopt woman suffrage, though it still required literacy to vote (and far fewer women than men could read). Within four years Brazil, Uruguay, and Cuba—of which only the first retained a similar literacy test—had followed suit. But in Peru a president who flirted too far with social and political reform at the time of World War I was ousted by military coup. In the following decade the banner of reformism in Peru was taken up by Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre (Haya de la Torre, Víctor Raúl), founder of the Aprista party and heavily influenced by the example of the Mexican Revolution. The Apristas' program combined economic nationalism with Latin American solidarity and called for incorporation of the Indians into the mainstream of national life, but the party never gained control of government until the 1980s, by which time it had lost much of its original character. In Venezuela, thanks to oil revenue and effective use of the military, Juan Vicente Gómez (Gómez, Juan Vicente) stayed firmly in control as dictator until his final illness in 1935; and in Brazil the oligarchic regime of the so-called Old Republic held on until the economic crisis of the Great Depression through careful sharing of power among political factions of the largest states.

Expanding role of the state

      The world depression—which saw governments changed by irregular means in every Latin American country except Colombia, Venezuela, Costa Rica, and Honduras—temporarily ended the progress being made toward political democracy. Even where constitutional rule was not interrupted, chief executives felt the need (as also in the United States) to take emergency measures, and the enlargement of government functions in dealing with the economy outlasted the emergency itself. At the same time, leaders everywhere were coming to the conclusion that social ills must be ameliorated, if only to ward off revolutionary threats from below. Various countries (such as Colombia in 1936 and Cuba in 1940) adopted constitutional reforms incorporating the principle already enshrined in Mexico's constitution of 1917, of expressly subordinating property rights to social need.

      Brazil had actually pioneered large-scale state intervention in the economy with its coffee “valorization” program, which was finally abandoned during the depression as too expensive; but between 1930 and 1945, under President Getúlio Vargas (Vargas, Getúlio), the national government for the first time actively sponsored social legislation, encouraged labour unions while tying them closely to the state, and began construction of a major iron and steel complex under state auspices. Vargas was an authoritarian ruler but a constructive one. Nor was he the only military or civilian strongman who moved to expand the functions of the state both to take the edge off worker discontent and, if possible, to strengthen the national economy against new emergencies. A paradoxical but instructive example was Cuba's notoriously corrupt Fulgencio Batista (Batista, Fulgencio), who in 1933 staged a military coup to overthrow a government of the reformist Authentic Party, then preserved most of its social and labour reforms and added some more. After sponsoring the liberal Cuban constitution of 1940, he managed to become a democratically elected president.

socialism, communism, fascism

      Latin America in the first half of the 20th century was feeling the impact of outside events not only on its economy but also politically, by the spread of imported ideologies and through the examples both of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal in the United States and of emerging totalitarianisms of the left and right in Europe. The European anarcho-syndicalism that had provided a model for many of Latin America's earliest radical cadres declined sharply in importance after World War I. Henceforth, the left consisted of socialist parties of generally moderate bent, inspired in large part by European social democracy; breakaway socialists who admired the Russian Revolution of 1917 and proceeded to found communist parties in their own countries; and, not least, such strictly Latin American expressions as the Mexican agrarian reform movement. Socialist parties were strongest in the Southern Cone, the Chilean briefly gaining a share of national power as a member of a Popular Front government elected in 1938. The communists were also strong in Chile but first entered a national administration in Cuba, after Batista had been elected president with their support in 1940. Once the Soviet Union entered World War II in 1941, communist parties in several other countries, including Brazil and Nicaragua, formed alliances with local strongmen, but they nowhere became a true mass party, and an exaggerated fear of Bolshevism on the part of Latin American elites meant that the communist parties were subject to widespread repression except during the war itself.

      Some other political organizations were frankly influenced by European fascism, but in most countries their membership was numerically insignificant. The chief exception was Brazil, whose green-shirted Integralistas (Ação Integralista Brasileira) emerged as the largest single national party in the mid-1930s until involvement in a foolhardy coup attempt led to their suppression. Hence the influence of fascism was more often exercised through homegrown authoritarians who were attracted to certain aspects of it but carefully avoided any open embrace. Vargas was one such leader, who, after suppressing the Integralistas, put the finishing touches on his own dictatorial regime, officially dubbed Estado Novo or “New State.”

Good Neighbor Policy and World War II

      One reason Latin American nations avoided an overly close association with fascism was a desire not to offend the dominant power of the hemisphere, the United States. During the 1920s it had already begun a retreat from the policy of active intervention in Latin America. This policy, adopted in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War and the United States' open support of Panamanian secession from Colombia, had featured the creation of formal and informal protectorates over many Caribbean and Central American states. Franklin D. Roosevelt (Roosevelt, Franklin D.) completed the shift. His domestic policies were much admired in Latin America and in some cases copied by moderate reformists, but his Good Neighbor Policy won the warm approval of almost all Latin American rulers, since it entailed formal renunciation of the right of intervention in favour of peaceful cajoling and assorted economic, military, and technical aid programs. These programs were launched on the eve of World War II to help hemispheric neighbours prepare for the emergency. They were expanded after the start of the conflict, whose economic impact on Latin America was generally comparable to that of World War I but more intense because of the earlier and deeper involvement of the United States. The war emergency naturally gave still further impetus to the development of national industries to replace scarce imports.

      The Good Neighbor approach proved far more effective in promoting U.S. hegemony than the occasional dispatch of gunboats. In 1938 Roosevelt calmly accepted Mexico's expropriation of the petroleum installations of U.S. and British companies, and he was rewarded several times over when Mexico loyally cooperated with the United States in World War II, even sending an air force squadron to serve in the Philippines. The one other Latin American country to send forces overseas was Brazil, which put an expeditionary force in Italy. In general Latin America's wartime collaboration left little to be desired. In the end all countries not only broke relations with the Axis powers but declared war, though Argentina took the latter step only at the last possible moment, in March 1945.

Latin America since the mid-20th century

The postwar world, 1945–80

      In Latin America as elsewhere, the close of World War II was accompanied by expectations, only partly fulfilled, of steady economic development and democratic consolidation. Economies grew, but at a slower rate than in most of Europe or East Asia, so that Latin America's relative share of world production and trade declined and the gap in personal income per capita separating it from the leading industrial democracies increased. Popular education also increased, as did exposure to the mass media and mass culture—which in light of the economic lag served to feed dissatisfaction. Military dictatorships and Marxist revolution were among the solutions put forward, but none were truly successful.

Economic (economic development) agenda and patterns of growth

      The economic shocks delivered by the depression and two world wars, in combination with the strength of nationalism, tilted economic policy after 1945 strongly toward internal development as against the outward orientation that had predominated since independence. The outward policy had been partially undermined by the trade controls and industrial (industrialization) promotion schemes adopted essentially as defensive measures in the aftermath of the depression and during World War II. Now, however, a reorientation of policy was explicitly called for by some of Latin America's most influential figures, such as the Argentine economist Raúl Prebisch, head of the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America. Prebisch and his followers insisted that the terms of trade and investment in the contemporary world were stacked in favour of the developed industrial nations of the “centre” as against the developing nations of the “periphery.” Their strategy therefore included emphasis on economic diversification and import substitution industrialization (ISI) for the sake of greater economic autonomy. They called for economic integration among the Latin American countries themselves, with a view to attaining economies of scale. And they recommended internal structural reforms to improve the economic performance of their countries, including land reform both to eliminate underutilized latifundios and to lessen the stark inequality of income distribution that was an obstacle to growth of the domestic market.

      In the small Caribbean and Central American republics and also some of the smaller and poorer South American nations, the prospects for ISI were sorely limited by market size and other constraints, and governments still hesitated to promote manufacturing at the expense of traditional primary commodities. But in countries accounting for a disproportionate share of Latin America's population and gross domestic product (GDP), the new approach received full play through protective tariffs, subsidies, and official preferences. Overvalued exchange rates, which hurt traditional exports, made it easier to import industrial machinery and equipment. Manufacturing costs generally remained high, and factories were overly dependent on imported inputs of all kinds (including foreign capital), but advances were not limited to consumer goods production. In all major countries the output of intermediate and capital goods rose appreciably too. For example, in Argentina the state undertook construction of a steel industry, and in numerous other ways national governments further expanded their economic role. Brazil nationalized its incipient oil industry in 1953, creating the state firm Petrobrás that eventually ranked alongside Mexico's PEMEX (outcome of the 1938 oil expropriation) and Venezuela's PETROVEN (1975) as one of Latin America's three largest economic enterprises, all state-run.

      Starting in 1960 with agreements fostering economic union, such as the Latin American Free Trade Association and Central American Common Market, and continuing with the Andean Pact of 1969, some progress was made toward regional economic integration, but the commitment to eliminate trade barriers was not as strong as in postwar Europe. Intra-Latin American trade increased, but probably not much more than would have happened without special agreements. In any case, quantitative economic growth was visible almost everywhere. It was evident even when expressed as per capita GDP—that is, factoring in a population growth that in most countries was accelerating, because death rates had finally begun to fall sharply while birth rates remained high. (In the 1960s in much of Latin America the annual rate of population increase came to exceed 3 percent.) But there were clear differences in economic performance among countries. Brazil, with a diversified economic base and much the largest internal market, and Panama, with its canal-based service economy, posted the best records, their GDP per capita doubling between 1950 and 1970; Mexico and Venezuela did almost as well, as did Costa Rica. But the Argentine economy seemed to stagnate, and few countries scored significant gains. Moreover, the conviction eventually grew in countries where ISI had been vigorously pushed that the easy gains in replacement of imports were coming to an end and that, to maintain adequate growth, it would be necessary to renew emphasis on exports as well. World market conditions were favourable for a revival of export promotion; indeed, international trade had begun a rapid expansion at the very time that inward-directed growth was gaining converts in Latin America.

      The promotion of industrial exports was slow to appear. Brazil was the most successful, selling automobiles and automotive parts mainly to other less-developed countries but at times even to the industrial world. A slightly less satisfactory alternative was the setting up of plants to assemble imported parts or semifinished materials into consumer goods that were immediately exported, thus taking advantage of Latin America's low labour costs, particularly for women workers. Such plants proliferated along Mexico's northern border (where they were known as maquiladoras (maquiladora)) but sprang up also in Central America and around the Caribbean.

      In other instances Latin Americans tried to develop new, nontraditional primary commodity exports. Colombian cut flowers were a highly successful example, promoted from the late 1960s through special incentives such as tax rebates; Colombia became the world's second leading flower exporter. It also assumed a leading role in the illicit narcotics trade. It enjoyed a brief boom of marijuana exports in the 1970s and in the following decade became the world's leading supplier of cocaine, which was processed in clandestine Colombian laboratories from leaf paste that at first came mostly from Bolivia and Peru, though eventually Colombia displaced them as producers of the raw material.

Developments in social policy

      Continued advances in public health were the principal basis for the explosion of population growth, which in turn made more difficult the provision of other social services. Nevertheless, educational coverage continued to expand, and state schools increased their share of students at the expense of private (often church-affiliated) institutions. Social security systems were introduced in countries that previously had none and expanded where they already existed. Yet such benefits chiefly went to organized urban workers and members of the middle sectors so that the net effect was often to increase, rather than lessen, social inequality.

      Moreover, structural land reform received more lip service than actual implementation. Extensive land distribution did occur in Bolivia following that country's 1952 revolution, and in Cuba large private estates were eliminated after 1959; but Mexico, which had been the leader in this area, now tended to favour capitalist agribusinesses rather than peasant communities. The poor were also hurt by the high inflation that in the 1950s and after became endemic in Brazil and the Southern Cone and was intermittently a problem elsewhere, resulting in considerable part from an inability or unwillingness to generate by taxation the fiscal resources needed for economic and social development programs.

The United States and Latin America in the Cold War era

      Whatever policies Latin American countries adopted in the postwar era, they had to take into account the probable reaction of the United States, now more than ever the dominant power in the hemisphere. It was the principal trading partner and source of loans, grants, and private investment for almost all countries, and Latin American leaders considered its favour worth having. Policy makers in Washington, on their part, were unenthusiastic about ISI and state-owned enterprises, but, as long as North American investors were not hindered in their own activities, the inward-directed policy orientation did not pose major problems. Moreover, as the Cold War developed between the United States and the Soviet Union, the great majority of Latin American governments sided willingly with the former, even though they complained of being neglected by Washington's preoccupation with the threat of communism in Europe and Asia.

      A threat developed in Central America when the Guatemalan government of Jacobo Arbenz (Arbenz (Guzmán), Jacobo) (1951–54), which frankly accepted the support of local communists, attacked the holdings of the United Fruit Company (Chiquita Brands International, Inc.) as part of an ambitious though ultimately abortive land reform. This combined political and economic challenge caused the United States to assist Guatemalan counterrevolutionaries and neighbouring Central American rulers in overthrowing Arbenz. The reversion to interventionist tactics featured use of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) rather than landing of military forces. But it foreshadowed later CIA assistance to the Chilean military in ousting their country's Marxist president, Salvador Allende, in 1973, not to mention the U.S. vendetta against the Sandinista revolutionary government that took power in Nicaragua in 1979, only to be worn down by covert action and economic harassment to the point that it peacefully accepted defeat in a free election in 1990.

Impact of the Cuban Revolution

 By most social and economic indicators, Cuba by mid-century was among Latin America's most highly developed countries. However, in the postwar period it was afflicted with lacklustre economic growth and a corrupt political dictatorship set up in 1952 by the same Batista who earlier had helped put his country on a seemingly democratic path. It was also a country whose long history of economic and other dependence on the United States had fed nationalist resentment, although control of the sugar industry and other economic sectors by U.S. interests was gradually declining. While conditions for revolutionary change were thus present, the particular direction that Cuba took owed much to the idiosyncratic genius of Fidel Castro (Castro, Fidel), who, after ousting Batista at the beginning of 1959, proceeded by stages to turn the island into the hemisphere's first communist state, in close alliance with the Soviet Union.

      The Cuban Revolution achieved major advances in health and education, though frankly sacrificing economic efficiency to social objectives. Expropriation of most private enterprise together with Castro's highly personalistic dictatorship drove many members of the middle and upper classes into exile, but a serious decline in productivity was offset for a time by Soviet subsidies. At the same time, thanks to its successful defiance of the United States—which tried and failed to overthrow it by backing a Cuban exiles' invasion in April 1961—and its evident social advances, Castro's Cuba was looked to as a model throughout Latin America, not only by established leftist parties but also by disaffected students and intellectuals of mainly middle-class origin.

      Over the following years much of Latin America saw an upsurge of rural guerrilla conflict and urban terrorism, in response to the persistence of stark social inequality and political repression. But this upsurge drew additional inspiration from the Cuban example, and in many cases Cuba provided training and material support to guerrillas. The response of Latin American establishments was twofold and eagerly supported by the United States. On one hand, governments strengthened their armed forces, with U.S. military aid preferentially geared to counterguerrilla operations. On the other hand, emphasis was placed on land reform and other measures designed to eliminate the root causes of insurgency, all generously aided by the United States through the Alliance for Progress launched by President John F. Kennedy.

      Even though much of the reactive social reformism was cosmetic or superficial, the counterrevolutionary thrust was nonetheless generally successful. A Marxist, Salvador Allende (Allende, Salvador), became president of Chile in 1970, but he did so by democratic election, not violent revolution, and he was overthrown three years later. The only country that appeared to be following the Cuban pattern was Nicaragua under the Sandinista revolutionary government, which in the end could not withstand the onslaughts of its domestic and foreign foes. Moreover, the Cuban Revolution ultimately lost much of its lustre even in the eyes of the Latin American left, once the collapse of the Soviet Union caused Cuba to lose its chief foreign ally. Although the U.S. trade embargo imposed on Cuba had been a handicap all along, shortages of all kinds became acute only as Russian aid was cut back, clearly revealing the dysfunctional nature of Castro's economic management.

Political alternatives

Movement toward democracy

      The Latin American countries that did not opt for the Cuban model followed widely varying political paths. Mexico's unique system of limited democracy built around the Institutional Revolutionary Party was shaken by a wave of riots in the summer of 1968 on the eve of the Olympic Games held in Mexico City, but political stability was never seriously in doubt. A somewhat analogous regime was devised in Colombia as a means of restoring civilian constitutional rule after a brief relapse in the mid-1950s into military dictatorship: the dominant Liberal and Conservative parties chose to bury the hatchet, creating a bipartisan coalition (called the National Front) whereby they shared power equally between themselves while formally shutting out any minor parties. Once this arrangement expired in 1974, Colombia became again a more conventional political democracy, such as Costa Rica had been since before 1950 and Venezuela became in 1958 after the overthrow of its last military dictator.

      In Latin America generally, the practice of democracy was somewhat sporadic, but, wherever regular elections took place, they involved an enlarged electorate. The last Latin American countries adopted woman suffrage in the 1950s, and literacy test requirements continued to fall (as did illiteracy itself). Women also began to occupy high political office, including the presidency in Argentina (1974–76), Bolivia (1979–80), and Chile (2006– ). Moreover, Violeta Chamorro (Chamorro, Violeta Barrios de) won the Nicaraguan vote of 1990 that put a temporary end to Sandinista rule (in 2006 the Sandinistas took power once again when former president Daniel Ortega was reelected).

The advent of populism

      The amorphous phenomenon of populism was another feature of the mid-20th-century political scene. Its consummate practitioner was Juan Perón (Perón, Juan) of Argentina, who as a member of a military regime that seized power in 1943 took a special interest in social policy. Perón wooed Argentine labour by means of wage increases and bonuses, pensions and fringe benefits, while also exploiting widespread resentment of an oligarchy that in the 1930s had reasserted its political as well as economic dominance. He promised social justice without violent class struggle and national greatness on the basis of industrial and military strength. His message, delivered in popular language, won Perón a clearcut victory when he ran for president in 1946.

      Perón was not the first Latin American leader to reward his followers with social benefits or to rail against native oligarchs and foreign imperialists, but he established a personal, charismatic link with ordinary citizens in a way that no one before him had done as successfully. “In the Argentina of Perón,” he boasted, “the only privileged ones are the children.” Yet Perón did not even pretend to be heading a revolution. As president, aided by his wife Evita until her death in 1952, he continued to cultivate mass support while signally neglecting to lay a sound basis for long-term economic growth. Perón nevertheless did not lack imitators and counterparts in other countries of Latin America.

      The leading party of postdictatorial Venezuela, Democratic Action (Acción Democrática; AD), was basically reformist in orientation but with populist overtones. Rómulo Betancourt and other AD leaders were less personalistic in style than Perón, who was finally overthown in 1955, but like him they stood for the granting of lavish benefits to the working and middle classes within a general framework of capitalism. In Venezuela oil wealth ultimately encouraged the national government to squander resources without adequate regard for the future. A similar charge was leveled against Juscelino Kubitschek (Kubitschek, Juscelino), who became president of Brazil (1956–61) through his skill at old-style machine politics. He was technically not a populist but had the same bent for extravagant promises and freewheeling expenditure. Kubitschek's best-known achievement was the building of Brasília, the architecturally striking but fabulously expensive new capital city. Its construction aggravated inflationary woes but nicely epitomized his pledge to bring “fifty years' progress in five.”

Christian Democracy

      A new feature since World War II was the appearance of a number of Christian Democratic parties, which offered a program of moderate reform inspired by Roman Catholic social teachings. Most were small splinter groups, but Christian Democrats eventually achieved power in Venezuela, El Salvador, and Chile. In Venezuela they alternated with the social democratic AD and in their policies became almost indistinguishable from it. In El Salvador in the 1980s they were enmeshed in a preexisting struggle against leftist guerrillas. In Chile, where they came to power first, under President Eduardo Frei (1964–70), they launched an ambitious land reform and partially nationalized the copper industry. They received enthusiastic support from the United States via the Alliance for Progress as presenting a promising alternative to Cuban-style revolution, but they failed to extend their mandate, going down to narrow defeat in a three-way contest won by Salvador Allende (Allende, Salvador).

Bureaucratic authoritarianism

      Allende as president combined Marxist assault on the owners of the means of production with populist lavishing of short-term benefits on his working-class followers, and on both counts he stirred violent resentment among upper- and middle-class Chileans as well as attracting the adamant hostility of the United States. In September 1973 he was ousted in favour of General Augusto Pinochet (Pinochet, Augusto), who proved the most successful exponent of a new style of military dictatorship defined by political scientists as bureaucratic authoritarianism. It was not, of course, a complete novelty. It reflected the 20th-century Latin America-wide phenomenon whereby the leadership of increasingly professionalized armies passed to sons of the middle class who had a commitment to modernizing the infrastructure of their societies. Such earlier dictatorships as that of Carlos Ibáñez del Campo (1927–31) during another Chilean relapse from constitutional rule had shown marked developmentalist tendencies. Bureaucratic authoritarianism, however, as practiced in Brazil after the coup of 1964, in Argentina by officers dedicated to keeping the Peronistas from regaining power, or in Chile under Pinochet, was a response to the perceived mismanagement of the economy by populists and other demagogues. It rested on the conviction that no democratically elected regime could afford to take the harsh measures needed to curb inflation, reassure foreign and domestic investors, and thereby quicken economic growth to the point that untrammeled democracy could be safely practiced. While military men kept order with varying degrees of harshness and human rights violations, civilian economists and technocrats would direct most other policy—whence the term “bureaucratic authoritarianism.”

      Under Pinochet, the guiding voice in Chilean economic matters was assigned to a group of economists, some of whom had been trained at the University of Chicago and who were strongly influenced by the monetarist (monetarism) school of Milton Friedman, according to which money supply and interest rates rather than governmental fiscal policy primarily determine the business cycle. Political authoritarianism stood in apparent contradiction to the generally free-market, laissez-faire policies prescribed in economic and social affairs; and, though inflation fell sharply, industrial production also dropped with the decline in the level of official protection. A similar combination of approaches arose under the military governments in Argentina in the 1960s and again from 1976 to 1983 and in Uruguay after 1973, again with mixed economic results. In Brazil from 1964 to 1985 military presidents and their technocratic advisers assigned a larger role in economic affairs to the state, while a Peruvian military regime that took power in 1968 undertook a radical program of social and economic reforms, giving way to a more typical bureaucratic-authoritarian regime only after running into serious economic difficulties. In these countries, political repression fell lightly on most of the population, but anyone suspected of engaging in—or simply encouraging—active resistance was liable to arrest, torture, and in extreme cases forced “disappearance”; this was a notable feature of the last Argentine military regime. Moreover, military rule of one sort or another did spread until by 1980 democratically elected civilian governments could be found only in Colombia, Venezuela, Costa Rica, and (by stretching the definition just a bit) Mexico.

Latin America at the end of the 20th century

      The last two decades of the 20th century witnessed a generalized economic crisis in Latin America, triggered in large part by external factors but aggravated by domestic mismanagement; in search of a way out, countries put their trust in neoliberal approaches favouring a free flow of trade and investment and reduction of the role of the state, all as recommended by the International Monetary Fund or other lending and advisory agencies. Even Castro's Cuba hesitantly embarked on the neoliberal economic path—to the extent of inviting foreign investment and enlarging the scope of permitted private enterprise by Cubans—though Castro did not show equal enthusiasm for the parallel political tendency, which was a turn to democratic procedures.

Debt crisis

      The ingredient of economic crisis that attracted widest attention was Latin America's inability to maintain full service on its foreign debt, which had grown to dangerously high levels. Both Mexico and Venezuela, as major petroleum exporters, benefited from rising international oil prices during the 1970s, but, instead of concluding that foreign credit was no longer necessary, they assumed that any amount of indebtedness would be easy to pay back. Brazil's generals drew a similar conclusion from their country's better-than-average economic growth. Even where no such circumstances were present, foreign private and institutional lenders had lost their depression-induced caution in lending to Latin America, and they had at their disposal an ever-greater flood of dollars to be placed in world financial markets. Bankers used often aggressive tactics in pressuring Latin American governments to borrow, and the region's total foreign debt increased from 1970 to 1980 by more than 1,000 percent.

      Developments in the world economy soon brought Latin America a rude awakening. Whereas commodity prices were generally favourable in the 1970s, a world recession in the following decade caused them to fall sharply. At the same time, interest rates rose in the United States and western Europe as governments sought to curb inflationary pressures and make other difficult adjustments. Latin America thus faced an increased debt bill, with fewer resources to pay it. Colombia alone managed to avoid default or compulsory rescheduling, and all countries faced severe fiscal problems. Domestic expenditures had to be cut back or financed through unsupported issues of paper money. Most of Latin America experienced slow or negative economic growth, together with inflation; indeed, hyperinflation was the rule in Argentina and Brazil and in some smaller countries. Real wages fell everywhere except Colombia and Chile.

Return to democracy

      Latin America's democracies, and quasi-democratic Mexico, were politically less vulnerable to economic hard times than the dictatorships: their governments could be and were changed by regular electoral procedures, whereas dictatorial regimes that encountered similar problems had to be removed by other means. Armed force, however, was seldom necessary, and in Argentina change came from outside, in the form of Great Britain's embarrassing defeat of the Argentine military government's 1982 attempt to reoccupy the Falkland (Malvinas) Islands (Falkland Islands War) that Britain had seized a century and a half before. That fiasco completed the discrediting of the Argentine regime and forced it to reinstate elective civilian government sooner than intended. A return to overt U.S. intervention assisted in the 1989 overthrow of General Manuel Noriega in Panama, who had run afoul of the new U.S. obsession with curbing drug trafficking. The United States also helped remove the military regime of Haiti in 1994, where the institutions of civil society were particularly weak. Elsewhere, the force of domestic opinion—aided by foreign disapproval, internecine squabbling, and sheer discouragement on the part of ruling military officers—was usually enough to bring about a transition to democracy. Cuba's Fidel Castro was the longest serving dictatorial ruler in Latin America, and today Cuba remains the only country in the region under dictatorship.

      Even democratically elected presidents were sometimes high-handed in their style of ruling, and in three major countries—Peru, Argentina, and Brazil—they pushed through constitutional amendments to allow their immediate reelection, which would otherwise have been illegal. Significantly, in each case the incumbent's success in taming inflation helped make it possible to win the additional term without recourse to force or fraud. (Peru's Alberto Fujimori later obtained still another reelection but by slightly more-questionable tactics.) At the turn of the millennium, the most troubled country, politically, was Colombia, where a democratic regime had lost control over much of the national territory to illegal drug traffickers, leftist guerrillas, and counterguerrilla paramilitaries. The most important of the guerrilla organizations was the FARC, or Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, which enjoyed scant popular support but profited greatly from the sale of protection to drug producers and dealers.

A shift to neoliberalism

      One of the last countries to return to democracy was Chile, where the Pinochet dictatorship had been more successful than most in economic management. After first imposing harsh readjustments and committing its share of mistakes, it had launched the country on a steady course of economic growth that made it a much-admired model in Latin America and continued even after the dictator finally turned over the presidency (though not control of the armed forces) to an elected Christian Democrat in 1990. The Chilean model was based, in any event, on the application of neoliberal policies—reduction of trade barriers, privatization of state companies, encouragement of foreign as well as domestic private investment, and lessening of regulation generally—that to one degree or another were ultimately adopted by all countries, including (within limits) the surviving communist dictatorship of Cuba.

      A clear example of the new approach to economic affairs was Mexico's joining Canada and the United States in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which went into effect in 1994. Intra-Latin American free-trade (free trade) arrangements moved forward too, with Mercosur (Mercado Común del Sur, “Common Market of the South”)—which was organized in 1995 by Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay—easily the most important. Country after country sought private buyers for inefficient state-owned firms, and several countries, led by Chile, moved to privatize social security systems. There were nevertheless certain limits to neoliberal reforms: in Mexico and Venezuela, for example, state oil firms were exempt from the privatization process (though not in Argentina, a second-string oil producer). Neither did bureaucracies and government expenditures shrink very rapidly, if they shrank at all.

      Results of the new economic policies were, not surprisingly, mixed. Latin America remained vulnerable to the vagaries of world markets, and the greater opening to international trade often led to a dangerous upsurge in nonessential imports. At the end of the 20th century, the region's share of world exports hovered around 6 percent, less than half what it had been in 1950. In the final decade of the century, most countries experienced a resumption of modest economic growth after the disastrous 1980s, an often dramatic fall in inflation, and a strengthening of the private sector of the economy. Social changes, however, impacted different groups within each country. In the short term at least, efforts to become more competitive in capitalist markets contributed to record levels of formal unemployment in many countries and, at the same time, widespread subcontracting of operations to home workers, chiefly women, who laboured for subsistence income. In Mexico, for instance, the reorientation of economic policy aggravated the plight of Indian peasants in the southern state of Chiapas, who unleashed a renewal of guerrilla insurgency just as the country was entering NAFTA. Yet Latin America's revitalized commitment to political democracy—which did not mean sudden elimination of all human rights abuses and other deficiencies any more than in the rest of the world—appeared to face few serious challenges.

Religious trends

      Roman Catholicism continued to be a powerful force in the second half of the 20th century. Its influence could be seen in the continuing prohibition, almost everywhere, of abortion and in the tendency to play down official support (which nevertheless existed) for birth control campaigns. Relations of the Roman Catholic Church with the state and with society at large were meanwhile affected, however, by new currents within the church itself. The movement of renewal and reform undertaken by the Second Vatican Council (Vatican Council, Second) (1962–65) favoured mainstream Catholic teaching and practice at the expense of popular “folk Catholicism” yet led to a somewhat more tolerant approach toward other denominations. In addition, coinciding as it did with the impetus given to leftist movements by the Cuban Revolution, the call for renewal inspired an influential minority of priests and nuns to seek a synthesis of religious faith and political commitment under the banner of liberation theology. Some priests actually joined guerrilla bands, while others laboured to “raise the consciousness” of their flocks concerning social injustice. This brand of activism met with general disapproval from Latin American governments, especially military regimes, some of which brutally persecuted the clergy involved. It also divided the church, and without gaining the widespread popular allegiance that “liberationist” clergy had hoped for.

      In the late 20th century the principal religious development was a rapid expansion of Protestantism, especially the Evangelical and Pentecostal churches. With a primary emphasis on individual spiritual improvement and salvation and a closeness between ministers and laity that neither traditional nor renewed Catholicism could match, the Protestants rapidly increased their numbers throughout Latin America. In countries as diverse as Brazil and Guatemala there were by the end of the century more Protestants than actively churchgoing Roman Catholics. Protestantism was not strong among traditional elites or in intellectual circles, but its adherents were beginning to attain positions of influence. One of them, General Efraín Ríos Montt, briefly served as military dictator of Guatemala (1982–83).

A changing society (social change)

      Despite the expansion (sometimes impressive, sometimes not) of the middle strata of Latin American society, by the late 20th century, progress toward reducing historically high levels of social inequality was disappointing almost everywhere save in communist Cuba. Also, the poorest countries of western Europe enjoyed greater per capita income than the wealthiest in Latin America. Yet, with regard to such social indicators as literacy and life expectancy, Costa Rica, Cuba, and the nations of the Southern Cone approximated the standards of the industrialized world, and, for Latin America as a whole, the lag was substantially less than in 1900 or 1950.

      The rate of population growth, having peaked in the third quarter of the century, fell significantly with wide variations among countries. In parts of northern Latin America, a factor contributing to this decline was emigration to the more prosperous and politically stable United States, where large metropolitan centres—such as New York City, Los Angeles, and Miami—were home to large and growing Latin American communities. By the beginning of the 21st century, the population of Latin America and the Caribbean was more than 550 million, with about four-fifths of the population residing in urban areas. Latin America also contained two of the world's largest metropolitan areas—Mexico City and São Paulo. The region's principal cities grew more slowly than intermediate centres; in Venezuela, for example, Maracaibo and Valencia were expanding faster than Caracas. In the cities, where literacy and then access to television were nearly universal, people were exposed more and more quickly to new trends and ideas emanating from the United States or western Europe; to a lesser degree the same forces, and the continuing improvement of road transportation, were also decreasing the isolation of rural Latin Americans.

      With social and economic modernization came changes, too, in gender relations. In most of Latin America women achieved full legal equality with men only gradually and usually later than winning the vote. In Argentina, for example, wives gained equal authority with husbands over minor-aged children only after the return of democracy in the 1980s. Traditions of patriarchy remained strong, and Latin American women's groups were more prone than those in the United States or western Europe to exploit the symbolic discourse of motherhood in gaining their objectives. No significant number of women in this predominantly Roman Catholic region took up the cause of women's ordination to the priesthood. As in most of the world, furthermore, equal pay for women remained elusive. Yet women did take advantage of increased educational and employment opportunities to gain more control of their lives. As many women as men were enrolled in secondary education, and the traditional alternatives for those women who chose or were obliged to work outside the home—e.g., domestic service and prostitution—had been supplemented by an array of clerical, professional, and light factory jobs. From the 1960s to the '90s the proportion of women in the general labour force increased substantially. Falling birth rates likewise indicated that women were pursuing new options. The fact that domestic servants were still relatively inexpensive made it easier for middle- and upper-class women to pursue professional careers. Servants, however, were less inclined than they once were to accept their position as permanent; realistically or not, they dreamed of something better and to that extent epitomized a more general yearning for personal and social improvement that posed a challenge for all Latin American nations.

      Ethnic minorities also sought greater opportunities and respect from society at large. Afro-Latin Americans increasingly questioned the long-accepted notion that racism did not exist in their countries and that such discrimination as existed was merely class-based; across Latin America, they formed social movements demanding their economic and political rights. In some countries, minority groups formed militant organizations. In Colombia, Afro-Latin Americans obtained rights to special legislative representation (as did Indian communities) in a new constitution in 1991. The peasant uprising in Chiapas, Mexico, was the best-known example of greater militancy among indigenous peoples. Yet even more striking was the appearance of a strong nationwide Indianist movement in Ecuador, which sought not only immediate improvements for Native Americans but also formal recognition that Ecuador was a multiethnic, multicultural nation. By the end of the 20th century, these Ecuadoran indigenous groups had already gained influence in national politics and demanded economic improvements. In 2000 a coup led by indigenous Indian leaders and military members briefly toppled the ruling government, removing the president from power. However, the coup leaders eventually agreed to let Vice President Gustavo Noboa Bejerano ascend to the presidency, which effectively ended the coup. This agreement emerged partly from military opposition of a junta-ruled government and also from the adamant refusal of the United States to accept a new government imposed by unconstitutional means. The last has not been heard from the indigenous movement in Ecuador—or elsewhere in Latin America.

David Bushnell

Additional Reading

General works

Leslie Bethell (ed.), The Cambridge History of Latin America (1984– ), is a general reference work with essays by recognized specialists on many aspects of the region's development. Edwin Williamson, The Penguin History of Latin America (1992); and Simon Collier, Harold Blakemore, and Thomas E. Skidmore (eds.), The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Latin America and the Caribbean, 2nd ed. (1992), offer introductory material. Tulio Halperín Donghi, The Contemporary History of Latin America (1993; originally published in Spanish, 1970), focuses on the region's colonial and neocolonial relations with North Atlantic nations.

Early Latin America

General

Overviews are presented in James Lockhart and Stuart B. Schwartz, Early Latin America: A History of Colonial Spanish America and Brazil (1983); and Mark Burkholder and Lyman L. Johnson, Colonial Latin America, 2nd ed. (1994), both emphasizing analysis over narrative detail and treating all of Latin America as a unit.

Spanish America

C.H. Haring, The Spanish Empire in America (1947, reprinted 1985), is an institutionalist classic. Sherburne F. Cook and Woodrow Borah, Essays in Population History, 3 vol. (1971–79), is by the field's most illustrious demographers.A number of works treat 16th-century Spanish American history. Carl Ortwin Sauer, The Early Spanish Main (1966, reissued 1992), is a thoroughly outdated treatment of early Spanish activity in the Caribbean but has yet to be replaced. William Hickling Prescott, History of the Conquest of Mexico, 3 vol. (1843), and History of the Conquest of Peru, 2 vol. (1847), both available in many later printings, contain archaic, invalid interpretations but, as literary classics, are famous almost in the manner of historical novels. Lewis Hanke, The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America (1949, reprinted 1965), concentrates on the ideological crusades of fray Bartolomé de las Casas. James Lockhart, Spanish Peru, 1532–1560: A Social History, 2nd ed. (1994), surveys Hispanic conquest society in a central area. Ida Altman, Emigrants and Society: Extremadura and America in the Sixteenth Century (1989), follows people across the Atlantic. Robert Ricard, The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico: An Essay on the Apostolate and the Evangelizing Methods of the Mendicant Orders in New Spain, 1523–1572 (1966; originally published in French, 1933), is a masterpiece of institutionalist historiography but ignores the roles of the indigenous people and the Spanish civil population. George Kubler, Mexican Architecture of the Sixteenth Century, 2 vol. (1948, reissued 1972), attempts to combine mainline history and the history of art. Philip Wayne Powell, Soldiers, Indians & Silver: The Northward Advance of New Spain, 1550–1600 (1952, reprinted 1975), shows how Spaniards operated in areas of nonsedentary Indians. Nobel David Cook, Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492–1650 (1998), thoroughly treats the postconquest decline of the Indian population.The mature period in Spanish colonial history is addressed in the following works. Studies of indigenous society include Charles Gibson, The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule: A History of the Indians of the Valley of Mexico, 1519–1880 (1964), a large work based mainly on Spanish sources; William B. Taylor, Drinking, Homicide & Rebellion in Colonial Mexican Villages (1979), showing the relative normality of indigenous behaviour in central areas after the arrival of the Spaniards; Nancy M. Farriss, Maya Society Under Colonial Rule: The Collective Enterprise of Survival (1984, reissued with corrections, 1992), a broad treatment combining historical and anthropological techniques; James Lockhart, The Nahuas After the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth Through Eighteenth Centuries (1992), based largely on sources in Nahuatl; and Karen Spalding, Huarochirí: An Andean Society Under Inca and Spanish Rule (1984), which begins to bring the level of Peruvian ethnohistory up to that of its counterpart for Mexico. Frederick P. Bowser, The African Slave in Colonial Peru, 1524–1650 (1974), thoroughly investigates the role of Africans in a Spanish American area. P.J. Bakewell, Silver Mining and Society in Colonial Mexico: Zacatecas, 1546–1700 (1971), broadly treats a major silver mining centre. Louisa Schell Hoberman, Mexico's Merchant Elite, 1590–1660 (1991), describes changes in the commercial world after the conquest period. Sabine MacCormack, Religion in the Andes: Vision and Imagination in Early Colonial Peru (1991), analyzes intellectual developments with a strong awareness of the European background. Murdo J. MacLeod, Spanish Central America: A Socioeconomic History, 1520–1720 (1973, reprinted 1984), is the cornerstone of early Guatemalan historiography. Robert J. Ferry, The Colonial Elite of Early Caracas: Formation & Crisis, 1567–1767 (1989), investigates society in a fringe area. Asunción Lavrin (ed.), Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Latin America (1989); and Lyman L. Johnson and Sonya Lipsett-Rivera (eds.), The Faces of Honor: Sex, Shame, and Violence in Colonial Latin America (1998), are anthologies.The following are among the more notable works on Spanish American history during the late period. Christon I. Archer, The Army in Bourbon Mexico, 1760–1810 (1977), is a social-institutional study. D.A. Brading, Miners and Merchants in Bourbon Mexico, 1763–1810 (1971), is a massive social and economic study of Mexico's late-colonial international economy and government, and Haciendas and Ranchos in the Mexican Bajío: León, 1700–1860 (1978), shows the rationality and market orientation of the agricultural sector. John K. Chance, Race and Class in Colonial Oaxaca (1978), studies urban demography. John E. Kicza, Colonial Entrepreneurs: Families and Business in Bourbon Mexico City (1983– ), broadly surveys urban society. Enrique Tandeter, Coercion and Market: Silver Mining in Colonial Potosí, 1692–1826 (1993; originally published in Spanish, 1992), facilitates comparison between the Mexican and Peruvian silver industries. Eric Van Young, Hacienda and Market in Eighteenth-Century Mexico: The Rural Economy of the Guadalajara Region, 1675–1820 (1981), links the growth of agrarian estates to the size and nature of urban populations. Jacques A. Barbier, Reform and Politics in Bourbon Chile, 1755–1796 (1980), views all the governmental institutions of a single region as an interlocking unit, including their socioeconomic dimension. Susan Migden Socolow, The Merchants of Buenos Aires, 1778–1810: Family and Commerce (1978), is a prosopographical study. William B. Taylor, Magistrates of the Sacred: Priests and Parishioners in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (1996), studies the role of parish priests in New Spain.

Brazil

Alexander Marchant, From Barter to Slavery: The Economic Relations of Portuguese and Indians in the Settlement of Brazil, 1500–1580 (1942, reissued 1966), though badly outdated in its ethnohistorical aspect, shows typical European economic procedures in a fringe area. C.R. Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil, 1624–1654 (1957, reprinted 1973), and The Golden Age of Brazil, 1695–1750 (1962, reissued 1995), extract a maximum of social, economic, and general information from institutional-narrative materials. Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves (Casa-Grande & Senzala): A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization, 2nd ed., rev. (1946, reissued 1986; originally published in Portuguese, 4th ed., 2 vol., 1943), concerns the society of northeastern Brazil in the time of sugar production; most scholars today can credit very little of it, but it is read because it changed the direction of Brazilian historiography. A.J.R. Russell-Wood, Fidalgos and Philanthropists: The Santa Casada Misericórdia of Bahia, 1550–1755 (1968), though nominally institutional, is tantamount to a study of northeastern urban society and partly updates Freyre. Stuart B. Schwartz, Sovereignty and Society in Colonial Brazil: The High Court of Bahia and Its Judges, 1609–1751 (1973), combines social and institutional approaches, and his Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550–1835 (1985), embraces many methods, materials, and topics. Dauril Alden, Royal Government in Colonial Brazil, with Special Reference to the Administration of the Marquis of Lavradio, Viceroy, 1769–1779 (1968), is broader than its title implies, dealing also with demographic and economic matters. Alida C. Metcalf, Family and Frontier in Colonial Brazil: Santana de Parnaíba, 1580–1822 (1992), illuminates fringe-area society.

Independence to 1910

General works

David Bushnell and Neill Macauly, The Emergence of Latin America in the Nineteenth Century, 2nd ed. (1994), focuses particularly on politics in the middle decades of the century. E. Bradford Burns, The Poverty of Progress: Latin America in the Nineteenth Century (1980), creatively argues that modernization hurt the majority of Latin Americans.

Spanish America

John Tutino, From Insurrection to Revolution in Mexico: Social Bases of Agrarian Violence, 1750–1940 (1986), reviews rural rebels' motives from the wars preceding independence to those of the Mexican Revolution. John Lynch, The Spanish American Revolutions, 1808–1826, 2nd ed. (1986), is the best account of the political and military events of the wars for independence. Kenneth J. Andrien and Lyman L. Johnson (eds.), The Political Economy of Spanish America in the Age of Revolution, 1750–1850 (1994), compiles essays on economic aspects of the transition to independence. Verena Martinez-Alier (Verena Stolcke), Marriage, Class, and Colour in Nineteenth-Century Cuba: A Study of Racial Attitudes and Sexual Values in a Slave Society, 2nd ed. (1989), links race, gender, and class factors. Rebecca J. Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, 1860–1899 (1985), portrays the abolition of slavery in Cuba as the result of social, political, and economic factors. Paul Gootenberg, Between Silver and Guano: Commercial Policy and the State in Postindependence Peru (1989), examines the complicated social contests through which integration into global economic relations emerged after independence. Jonathan C. Brown, A Socioeconomic History of Argentina, 1776–1860 (1979), challenges assumptions about Latin America's economic dependence on North Atlantic powers. Florencia E. Mallon, The Defense of Community in Peru's Central Highlands: Peasant Struggle and Capitalist Transition, 1860–1940 (1983), details the social and political aspects of a period of economic overhaul. Charles A. Hale, Mexican Liberalism in the Age of Mora, 1821–1853 (1968), provides a model of intellectual history. John Charles Chasteen, Heroes on Horseback: A Life and Times of the Last Gaucho Caudillos (1995), is an exciting, highly readable study of two caudillo brothers and their divergent legacies in Brazil and Uruguay. Robert H. Jackson (ed.), Liberals, the Church, and Indian Peasants: Corporate Lands and the Challenge of Reform in Nineteenth-Century Spanish America (1997), explores control and land-use reforms after independence.

Brazil

Emília Viotti da Costa, The Brazilian Empire: Myths and Histories (1985; originally published in Portuguese, 1977), collects well-written essays on liberalism, slavery, the end of the empire, and other major topics. C.H. Haring, Empire in Brazil: A New World Experiment with Monarchy (1958, reissued 1968), is a somewhat dated but still useful political history. Warren Dean, Rio Claro: A Brazilian Plantation System, 1820–1920 (1976), examines changing labour arrangements during the growth and demise of slavery. João José Reis, Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia (1993; originally published in Portuguese, 1986), weighs African cultural contributions and other factors in analyzing one of the century's most influential revolts. Stanley J. Stein, Vassouras: A Brazilian Coffee County, 1850–1900: The Roles of Planter and Slave in a Plantation Society (1985), studies the rise and decline of a traditional coffee zone. Linda Lewin, Politics and Parentela in Paraíba: A Case Study of Family-Based Oligarchy in Brazil (1987), analyzes in detail the patronage system that defined politics in late 19th- and early 20th-century Brazil; and Richard Graham, Patronage and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Brazil (1990), does the same, specifically for the empire period. Joseph L. Love, Rio Grande do Sul and Brazilian Regionalism, 1882–1930 (1971), presents a strong regional history of politics. Thomas H. Holloway, Immigrants on the Land: Coffee and Society in São Paulo, 1886–1934 (1980), analyzes how two million European immigrants worked and lived.

Twentieth-century Latin America

General works

Thomas E. Skidmore and Peter H. Smith, Modern Latin America, 4th ed. (1997); and Peter Calvert and Susan Calvert, Latin America in the Twentieth Century, 2nd ed. (1993), are good introductions to the period.

Political developments

Now somewhat dated in interpretation but extremely influential when it appeared is John J. Johnson, Political Change in Latin America: The Emergence of the Middle Sectors (1958, reissued 1965). Treatments of political topics that cross national boundaries include A.E. Van Niekerk, Populism and Political Development in Latin America (1974; originally published in Dutch, 1972); Edward J. Williams, Latin American Christian Democratic Parties (1967); and John A. Peeler, Latin American Democracies: Colombia, Costa Rica, Venezuela (1985), assessing variants of liberal democracy. The impact of the Cuban Revolution and associated leftist currents is explored in Jorge G. Castañeda, Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left After the Cold War (1993), by a frustrated sympathizer; and William E. Ratliff, Castroism and Communism in Latin America, 1959–1976: The Varieties of Marxist-Leninist Experience (1976), a conservative perspective. Frederick M. Nunn, The Time of the Generals: Latin American Professional Militarism in World Perspective (1992); and J. Samuel Fitch, The Armed Forces and Democracy in Latin America (1998), discuss the political role of the military. Sandra M. Deutsch, Las Derechas: The Extreme Right in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, 1890–1939 (1999), examines an important part of the political spectrum often neglected by scholars. Ronald M. Schneider, Latin American Political History: Patterns and Personalities (2007), details Latin America's struggles to establish viable participatory political systems.

Economics

Victor Bulmer-Thomas, The Economic History of Latin America Since Independence (1994), provides the best overall treatment. Labour issues are examined in Hobart A. Spalding, Jr., Organized Labor in Latin America: Historical Case Studies of Workers in Dependent Societies (1977), a helpful introduction; and Charles Bergquist, Labor in Latin America: Comparative Essays on Chile, Argentina, Venezuela, and Colombia (1986). William C. Thiesenhusen, Broken Promises: Agrarian Reform and the Latin American Campesino (1995), covers the rise and fall of agrarian reformism. The essays in Paul W. Drake (ed.), Money Doctors, Foreign Debts, and Economic Reforms in Latin America from the 1890s to the Present (1993), deal with varied aspects of economic policy. Ronn Pineo and James A. Baer, Cities of Hope: People, Protests, and Progress in Urbanizing Latin America, 1870–1930 (1998), surveys the urbanization process.

International relations

Bill Albert and Paul Henderson, South America and the First World War: The Impact of the War on Brazil, Argentina, Peru, and Chile (1988); and R.A. Humphreys, Latin America and the Second World War, 2 vol. (1981–82), examine the repercussions of foreign conflicts. Good examples from the vast literature examining the role of the United States are Bryce Wood, The Dismantling of the Good Neighbor Policy (1985), covering a broad spectrum of 20th-century issues; Lester D. Langley, The United States and the Caribbean in the Twentieth Century, 4th ed. (1989), treating a critically important theatre; Barbara Stallings, Banker to the Third World: U.S. Portfolio Investment in Latin America, 1900–1986 (1987); and Fredrick B. Pike, FDR's Good Neighbor Policy: Sixty Years of Generally Gentle Chaos (1995).

Culture and society

Jean Franco, The Modern Culture of Latin America: Society and the Artist, rev. ed. (1970), covers cultural history. Francesca Miller, Latin American Women and the Search for Social Justice (1991), discusses the changing role of women and women's movements. David Stoll, Is Latin America Turning Protestant? The Politics of Evangelical Growth (1990); and David Lehmann, Struggle for the Spirit: Religious Transformation and Popular Culture in Brazil and Latin America (1996), treat the rise of Protestantism and, less directly, changes in the Roman Catholic Church.David Bushnell

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