This week I was very intriguing because as we can see in the news and other outlets, liberalism continues to struggle to bloom successfully in Latin America. In my opinion, one of the main positives, but disadvantages in the case of Latin America, of liberalism is that it needs a strong sense of ‘self’, as Professor Beasley-Murray mentioned in his video lecture. There needs to be, an often unwritten list of ‘do’s’ and ‘don’ts’ to carry out a liberal system that successfully encompasses and acts out liberal ideas.

As we have seen through the course and I’m sure will continue to see, this is something that Latin American countries severely lack. There is not a ‘one size fits all’ version of what liberalism should be, and thus each country, including Britain, the USA, and Canada have had to construct their own picture of what they wanted their country to look like through a liberal lens. This is why colonialism and its ideologies continues to be part of our social and political discussions, because it was often these ideas that became the base for what these countries look like today, since only one narrative is often chosen to appear in the spotlight. Some of the main problems in Latin America unfortunately have been violence and corruption, which have not allowed for this ‘unified’ narrative to ever even begin its conception stage.

When discussing caudillos, I think they are a very smart way of getting one point of view to become adopted by several groups of people. The authoritarian way in which policies that were developed by caudillos do certainly create an idea of one narrative, whether people agree with it or not. That is when the peer pressure can come in. If your neighbours and bosses all believe in one political or military figure that already has control of the territory in which you live, do you really want to go against that? This question is not to be answered through our already established 21st century liberal point of view that an institution like UBC has surely instilled in most of us, but rather try to answer this as a mulatto or black peasant in 19th century Buenos Aires, for example. Much like Professor Beasley-Murray and Dawson discuss, Rosa created a sense of  community, even though perhaps fictive, within people that was not easy for liberalism to break.

In “The Slaughterhouse” by Echeverria, a lot of the blame and responsibility is actually put on the people that backed the caudillos, but not necessarily directly on the authoritarian system that was in place. Do you think this was an effective choice by the author? If you had been a supporter of the caudillos system, would you have found this effective, and why?