A couple years ago when I was in Brazil, I visited the city of Manaus – a city surrounded by the Amazon rainforest.  Due to its advantageous location, Manaus was highly involved in the business of extracting and exporting rubber from the Amazon’s abundant rubber trees during the age of exportation.  The wealth acquired by the area in that era is bluntly evident in the form of a grandiose opera house, one of the city’s main attractions.  While the opera house is a beautiful building with elegant pillars and staircases, red velvet seats, ceilings adorned with painted frescoes, expensively furnished rooms, and a mosaic-tiled dome, many residents of Manaus despise the building and what it stands for.  Built by the wealthy barons who prospered during the controversial rubber boom, locals believe that the opera house was constructed using blood money.  This is not an unfounded claim, for the rubber boom saw much violence as foreign traders and investors unfairly treated local people and forced them to harvest rubber in brutal conditions.  Furthermore, these foreigners disrespected land claims and the natural environment, as well as the local people’s normal way of life, completely disrupting their community.  The rubber business only profited the few who owned and monopolized it, thus some elites became very wealthy at the expense of the local majority.  This unfortunate trend of violence and inequality is sadly consistent with Dawson’s descriptions of the impacts of the exportation era in Latin America.

On an entirely different note, Dawson mentions that the governments of many countries in Latin America adopted positivism during the export era, thus authoritatively controlled their nations without input from their citizens because they assumed that the citizens would not even understand their own interests.  This way of thinking makes it easy for the government to gain and possibly abuse absolute power since the citizens are so docile and disinterested/not involved in politics.  Of course, there would have been some who stood up to the government; however it seems that the people truly did think the government was acting in their best interests because no major rebellions or insurgencies occurred (that I know of from Dawson’s text).  It is unfortunate that such a dystopian form of government is evident in so many parts of history around the world, not just during this time period in Latin America.

Finally, I find it interesting that business owners found it advantageous to ‘protect the virtue’ of their female employees in order to reduce the risk of unions and revolts against the employer.  Despite gendered wage differences, this is still a considerable amount of fair treatment being offered to women in a time when this would have been unheard of elsewhere.  It is fascinating that the employers (likely all men at the time) had the foresight to treat women so well, and I wonder if this is due to a cultural belief or tradition that the men of Latin America may have respected, or if the women were involved in making this fairer treatment happen.

While the nineteenth century was a time when most countries gained a higher level of civilization through liberalism, Latin America seemed to go backwards from civilization to barbarianism, through the system of Caudillos.  Caudillos appealed to the people’s sense of feeling and their short-term and easily-fixable problems, which spread their popularity.  This method was smart – it focused on gaining the support of the masses and understood how the governing body should interact with its supporters; however, its execution was poor because there were no morals upheld in this system, and it quickly deteriorated into madness and violence.  For instance, Caudillos put up fronts and appearances, and competition between them resulted in regional conflicts that involved far more people than just the rival Caudillos.

This is where liberalism comes in.  While liberalists in Latin America failed to appeal to the people (leading to the vast discontent toward liberal ideals), they had the right idea concerning how to govern in the long-term and produce long-term progress without nearly so much corruption as the Caudillo system.  In short, the Caudillo system is like a Band-Aid, whereas liberalism is more like a vaccine or cure.  Since hindsight is twenty-twenty, it is evident that of course liberalism would have been a better choice for Latin America than the Caudillo system, however back then, the people didn’t have the same think-to-the-future mentality that many people today have.  Caudillos would have seemed better, and it was certainly pitched to them in a much grander light than liberalism, so that is the system that gained power.

Furthermore, liberalism failed to grab hold of Latin America because the region was far from ready to adopt that level of civilization.  Latin America was still extremely young and unstable at this point, especially compared to the long-established civilizations in Europe, which had years to organize social and political structures.  Thus while Europe was ready for change, Latin America still had slavery, indigenous servitude and the casta system – all of which divided its people and contributed to the region being decidedly unready for liberalism.  While other areas of the world acted like the mature adult, looking to the future and keeping morals in mind, Latin America was still an immature child that delighted itself in relatively petty conflicts with no concept of morals.

Youth and instability cannot be the only reasons for Latin America’s lack of progression, though, for North American nations were also quite young and yet managed to organize themselves civilly and accept liberalism.  I am still struggling to understand why North America and Latin America developed so differently given their similar origins.  Even today, Latin America is behind in so many aspects (e.g. politically, socially, economically, and developmentally) and North American countries are leaders in some of these aspects.  How could things have gone so vastly differently in North America compared to Latin America?  Is Latin America’s ill fortune with progress and development rooted all the way back to its conception?  How could Latin America not ‘catch up’ to other countries (in regards to development) between its conception and now?  Why did North America never struggle with this, like Latin America did?  What other regions of the world have shared Latin America’s struggles, and can they somehow act as a guide to show Latin America how to get past their roadblocks to progress?

The stories of independence in Latin America are a far cry from the only one I’ve ever had to know about, namely Canada’s.  In Canada, we gained independence way later than other countries, and we did it diplomatically, consulting Britain and reaching agreements through negotiations rather than by violently expelling our sovereignty.  As a result, Canada never suffered under the same trials and tribulations faced by many countries in Latin America (though it did have its own troubles).  Of course other factors were at play here, such as the fact that the colonial era in Canada never had a caste system that so influenced the rebellions in Latin America.  And so, I find reading about other nations’ routes to independence rather strange because it seems so foreign, even if these nations’ methods were more common than my own country’s.  I feel as if there is a disconnect in the history I have learned all my life in the Ontarian school system, and the history of other areas of the world.  I realize that I truly wish we were taught history from numerous more global viewpoints, rather than just from Canada’s!

Coming from a nation that, to my knowledge, has never endorsed or had a culture involving slavery, I cannot seem to fathom just how influential slavery and slave rebellions were to the independence and rights movements of many Latin American countries.  I never realized that such oppression would drive entire nations to fight for their freedom.  Again, since I’ve only ever viewed independence from a Canadian standpoint, in which the driving factor for the establishment of one united country had nothing to do with rights and everything to do with the logistics of managing such a huge territory and defending it from the US, the notion that people first fought for their rights and, consequently, their freedom seems backward to me.  Canada was long established before major issues in oppression and inequality were solved (some only as recently as the 1980s, and some still unresolved).  I am surprised by how different I find Canada and Latin American countries, since essentially, both originated in the same way (i.e. through colonization).  Perhaps this has to do with who the colonizers were (e.g. the British and French versus the Spanish and Portuguese), however I think there must be more to it than that, even if I cannot pin-point what these factors are.

Some questions:

• Why did Canada never have slavery?  Did Europe have slavery, and if not, then why would Europe’s colonies in the New World have such prominent slavery and oppression?
• Are some countries in Latin America still in a state of political change and reform?
• Have all countries in Latin America now adopted democratic governmental structures?  Why or why not?
• Why was Canada’s route to independence so different from other countries’ routes to independence?