Caudillos Versus the Nation State
Throughout past few weeks, we discussed the challenges and the difficulties to identify Latin American objects from politics, demographics, economic and cultural aspects. On this blog post, I would like to discuss the perspectives of the Caudillos and the nation states in respect to following independence movements.
The newly founded Latin American countries were facing many troubles due to highly complicated internal politics. As Bolivar took leadership in the Spanish-speaking Latin American states, he feared the uprisal from the lower class. He dreamt of Latin America unifying as a nation instead of a colony, but Gran Colombia dissolved into three republics and the Federal Republic of Central America followed this trend.
Latin America suffered from cross-border wars to civil wars. ‘Triple Alliance’, that was formed by Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay and went into war with Paraguay. Paraguay lost the war, and the population decreased heavily. I still remember having a discussion with my friend from Argentina two years ago, that since then, Paraguay has struggled to re-construct. Civil wars
Civil wars also erupted in various areas in Latin America, where people fought from the difference in their skin colour and political ideas. From the whites and the coloured in Uruguay to the Conservatives to Liberals in Colombia, the nineteenth century was perhaps bloodier than Europe.
Latin Americans dreamt of liberalism, but violence, the whole continent suffered shattered its possibilities. Liberalism involves a collective commitment to abstract principles of rights and freedoms. However, with such diversity in demographics, politics, and culture, it was too challenging to adopt and convince one’s idea as an ideology.
Brazilian cultural critic, Roberto Schwarz commented that liberalism does have a place in Europe, under industrial capitalism, workers had the freedom to some degree, when compared to the Brazilian system at the time, where slavery remained.
Instead of liberalism, the caudillo system, clientism, took place where citizens remained to have unequal social status. Merriam-Webster defined Caudillos as: ‘a Spanish or a Latin American military dictator.’ Although the dictionary gave a simple definition of the term, I believe this term could be expanded more upon how violent these strongmen were.
In ‘The Slaughterhouse’, by Esteban Echeverría showed how cruel these strongmen were but yet popular, as he bent the law and provided ‘meat’ to his supporters. However, Echeverría’s texts were ambivalent, as it was not an easy to task to see whether if he was sympathizing for the indigenous, due to his grotesque expressions of characterising the indigenous.
I may be wrong, but I believe that United States was successful with this ideology because the indigenous population was so little. So, I wonder if an ideology of liberalism would’ve been successful if the indigenous population was insignificant (so little)?