Comparative Latin American Politics

Ronald M. Schneider

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429981128
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Latin America is a region of great diversity and a rich laboratory for understanding the processes of political development and their interaction with economic growth, social modernization, and cultural influences. Highlighting crucial periods of dynamic socioeconomic and political change, Comparative Latin American Politics provides a balanced, concise overview of select Latin American countries without underestimating the complexities of a region noted for its striking differences. The book focuses on the dominant dyad of Mexico and Brazil while also considering in detail Argentina, Chile, Peru, Columbia, and Venezuela - seven countries that contain four-fifths of the region's inhabitants as well as an even higher proportion of its economy.

Recognizing that political institutions and cultures are built over generations, author Ronald M. Schneider divides his analysis into two parts. Part one examines the period from independence to 1930, when countries were coping with an array of post-independence problems and challenges of national consolidation. Part two concentrates on 1930 to the present day and fleshes out current political practices and structures. Each part devotes chapters to specific country coverage as well as meaningful comparative perspectives that illuminate the political evolution of the region and offer salient lessons for other developing parts of the world.

PART 1

Latin America: Independence to 1930

1

Comparative Perspectives

Independence to 1930

Colonial Legacy and Achieving Independence

The protracted colonial period, from the end of the fifteenth century through the early decades of the nineteenth, witnessed the implantation of political institutions bearing the heavy imprint of medieval corporatism, in which the hierarchically organized church, military, and largely peninsular (Iberian-born) bureaucracy each enjoyed special privileges, and the Creole aristocracy (New World—born Europeans) pursued its interests through interaction with them. Royal authority was maintained through separate lines of authority and often overlapping, if not partially contradictory, instructions to the throne’s three sets of representatives (church, military, and administrators). Early on, the bureaucracy became a vehicle for patronage and payoffs to reward and ensure loyalty. With time, the large landowners, particularly those who astutely allied themselves to the corporate pillars, came to be an important political factor. Late in the colonial period, intense rivalry developed between peninsulares and criollos (Spanish for “Creoles”) over their conflicting commercial interests. These differences shaped their respective attitudes toward continuation of the colonial relationship.

Because of this rivalry, an “us-against-them” mentality developed and fused with the belief that politics was a zero-sum game in which any gains by one group came at the expense of others—if not in direct terms, at least in the form of foreclosed opportunities. Strong personal loyalties and intolerance of opposing views, which would later translate into intransigent partisanship, became prevalent political traits. Moreover, with power in the hands of competing hierarchical groups—the military, the church, bureaucratic authority, merchants, and large landowners—these groups became the arbiters of policy, relying on their power rather than negotiation and compromise. During the colonial era kinship ties had been very important because force and intimidation were often applied and the courts were frequently instruments of punishing enemies and rewarding friends and relatives. One could generally rely upon family, not a government that might favor your rivals and, by definition, ruthless opponents. These views and values became part of a political culture that persisted over the span of generations (for Latin America’s long colonial era lasted three centuries—a far longer period than these countries’ independent lives have yet spanned). In many ways these views and values would be reinforced by the strains and strife of the independence struggle.

Underlying the reservations of the economic elite concerning the one-sided nature of their relationship to the mother country, by the beginning of the nineteenth century Spain had become an inadequate industrial supplier and trading partner for its growing New World colonies. In sharp contrast, Britain was well advanced into the Industrial Revolution and experiencing rapid expansion of trade, particularly with Latin America, whose payment for British goods in silver was highly attractive within the prevailing mercantilist system. As the original conquest and settlement of the leading colonies was by now two and a half centuries in the past, the structure of society and the relations among groups had altered significantly from the early colonial era. In the view of the most influential elements, adjustments to this transformation within the bounds of empire were desirable, but if the mother country was not prepared to go halfway, then other options at least merited consideration.

Latin America’s independence movements combined the selfish economic concerns and personal political ambitions of many actors with the lofty ideals and unrealistic expectations of others. Only a handful of the educated elite were imbued with ideas of liberty, republicanism, and democracy stemming from the US example and the very brief flame of the French Revolution—before it was put out by Napoleonic imperial floodwaters. For the vast majority these developments were virtually unknown or essentially irrelevant. Most Hispanic Americans were passive observers or were swept up in the course of events against their will, and politically active elements were in most instances chiefly influenced by perceptions of where advantage lay for their particular interests and where opportunity existed for their ambitions. Landowner-merchant conflict interacted with the peninsulares-criollos rivalries in ways that were sometimes crosscutting, but often more reinforcing.

The most basic common feature with respect to the variegated independence movements was that they were decisively catalyzed, facilitated, and in part caused by the monumental and protracted struggle, known as the Napoleonic Wars, for supremacy in Europe between globally dominant Britain and continentally hegemonic France. Had Spain not been occupied and thus temporarily incorporated into Bonaparte’s domains, its Western Hemisphere possessions would not have become independent at this particular time. Instead, through entering into alliance with France in 1795, Spain had opened up a Pandora’s box of unforeseen consequences that created economic and political distance between the Iberian mother countries and their American colonies. England, the dominant sea power, used its naval forces to reduce and eventually cut communications, forcing Spain to suspend its already leaky trade monopoly. The ensuing experience of trading legally with other colonies and neutral countries, especially the United States, stoked Creole desires for greater economic self-determination. The political divide widened and deepened after Charles IV granted Napoléon passage through Spain to invade Portugal, a staunch British ally. The immediate effect was the Portuguese government’s 1808 move to Brazil, which transformed that disjoined array of essentially coastal colonies into the empire’s administrative center based in Rio de Janeiro. The impact of the Spanish monarch’s error was also felt in Hispanic America, as that same year Napoléon Bonaparte turned on his erstwhile Spanish allies, placing his brother Joseph on the throne in Madrid. Both Charles and his successor, Ferdinand, became French captives, so the “hub of all political authority” for Spain’s colonies was removed.¹ Colonial elites struggled with how to maintain control without even the legitimizing and unifying symbol of a monarch at the head of the governmental hierarchy. This loss was traumatizing, as New World Spaniards, only a little over 3 million in a regional population of 17 million, feared a racial bloodbath such as the one that had recently occurred in Haiti.

This authority vacuum resulted in both the peninsular and criollo elites’ setting up a variety of provisional governments, ostensibly to rule in the king’s name, but in the meantime actively advancing their own interests. At that point the New World bourgeoisie were increasingly interested in equality over independence, home rule over separation, and autonomy over emancipation.² In Mexico City these caretaker regimes were controlled by peninsular loyalists, whereas in Santiago, Caracas, and Bogotá Creoles dominated the provisional juntas. The spread of ayuntamientos (“governing councils”) to all major population centers drastically expanded political participation to less substantial businessmen and property owners. The restoration of Ferdinand to the throne in 1814 pushed Spanish America further toward independence. In Spain 12,000 liberals were jailed or exiled in a campaign to restore traditional monarchical power, and in the colonies royal use of military force, including reinforcements from the mother country, to repress independence movements hardened Creole resolve. Then, in the face of a mutiny in 1820, Ferdinand agreed to liberal reforms, a concession that while reducing tensions in Spain, divided and weakened loyalist support in the colonies by undermining confidence in the monarchy. Hence independence struggles, already under way in many parts of the region, forged ahead, proving triumphant during the 1820s. The result was instability and de facto regimes based on force, not the functioning republican regimes promised by leaders of the independence movement.

A political scientist testing explanations for revolt against the Spanish throne concludes that “by the beginning of the nineteenth century the Creole elite in each case wanted to nationalize decision-making, appropriating authority for themselves. The critical factor was the political bargaining relationship between local elites and the government of the empire and of each colony.”³ Optimistic concerning the new opportunities, the catalyzers of independence were blissfully unaware of how daunting, even perilous, the years ahead would prove to be, and how unprepared they were for the challenges ahead. The political situation prevailing in Spanish America as its component countries were looking forward to independence and finding a path to national consolidation and establishment of order was one in which

long-term social, political, and economic change had differentiated the Spanish American empire internally and had led to the formation of consciously competing groups. When imperial legitimacy broke down, these preexisting groups turned from competition over status and wealth to competition for power. Their unrestrained conflict in the political arena led to a collapse of colonial legitimacy.⁴

As a result:

When legitimacy was in question, many groups, both elite Spaniards and Creoles, moved simultaneously to appropriate political legitimacy…. Coups and countercoups undermined the legitimacy of each of three colonial governments at the time that the legitimacy of the entire imperial system was in question.⁵

Contrary to the expectations of the enthusiasts of independence, this turmoil would not cease once an end to this chaotic turmoil was accomplished. Indeed, for most of Spanish America it would increase, and in some countries it persisted for a generation—if not even longer.

New Nations from Colonialism to Consolidation, Independence to 1870

In most countries, independence was obtained by 1830—with great variations in the effort involved and the leadership generated. The ensuing decades witnessed the frustration of high hopes and a substantial persistence of old patterns behind a facade of rhetoric and cosmetic change. Often this process took place within a context of instability mixed with dictatorial experiences (as has been the case in the early years of almost all nations in all parts of the world). Brazil was a major exception, having in many ways experienced an exceptionally easy separation from its mother country, involving a period in which Portugal’s government was transferred to Rio de Janeiro; once this transitional period was over, the heir to the Portuguese throne remained as prince regent. He subsequently became monarch, and his son would occupy the throne until 1889. Thus Brazil avoided the traumatic double rupture of breaking at the same time both with the mother country and with the world’s established source of legitimizing political authority, that is, divine right monarchy. At the time, the United States was the only republic in the world—still unproven in a myriad of ways. In sharp contrast, Mexico’s path to independence was both drawn out and violent, as popular movements were bloodily repressed before an upstart adventurer proclaimed himself emperor but was soon forced out. This train of events opened the way for a long era of caudillo politics, in contrast to Brazil’s stable monarchy. Antonio López de Santa Ana of Mexico and Pedro II of Brazil were antithetical figures, each dominating the political stage for his country’s first generation of independence, the former into the 1850s, and the latter nearly twice as long. Santa Ana would have the misfortune of presiding over the loss of half his country to the United States, while Dom Pedro II would hold his vast country together.

Strikingly different, Argentina’s independence came early and with little bloodshed, largely because royalist forces were limited in this sparsely populated area of—at that time—little economic value. Its liberator would then cross the Andes to help Chile win its independence and subsequently to fight against Spanish forces in Peru. As a result, there would be a protracted period of instability before a dictatorial caudillo imposed order in Argentina. The ensuing authoritarian and often brutal rule of Juan Manuel de Rosas, lasting just past midcentury, would be followed by eventually successful efforts, stretching through the 1860s, to unite the coastal metropolitan area to the interior. (Rosas and Mexico’s Santa Ana were two very distinct types of nondemocratic political leaders, the former a product of Mexico’s large area, population, and long independence process and the latter a civilian emerging in the context of an early and easy independence in what was little more than Buenos Aires and its immediate hinterland.) By dramatic contrast, northern South America underwent a bloody armed struggle to free itself from the Spanish yoke, resulting by the late 1820s in Simón Bolívar’s short-lived Gran Colombia. With Venezuela splitting off in 1830, the remainder limped along without a dominant leader until the evolution of an elitist two-party system in the 1850s and 1860s. Venezuela, an out-of-the-way traditional ranching society, spawned a durable caudillo pattern of politics that would continue into the twentieth century. Peru, center of Spanish rule and settlement on the continent, had resisted independence until it was imposed militarily by Bolívar’s armies in the latter half of the 1820s. Hence the legitimacy vacuum had the most serious effects there, where efforts to construct a viable political system proved extremely difficult, but caudillo rule and its negative legacy were avoided. Chile, having won its independence early on with considerable aid from Argentina, enjoyed the best initial leadership of any Latin American country and built the foundations of a stable representative political system in the 1830s.

For these six Hispanic countries, independence did not transform the fundamentals of the inherited political-governmental system, although it did institute one very important change in removing the monarch, who had been both the legitimizer of authority and the arbiter among the rival power factors. With the disappearance of the viceroy as the king’s local representative, central government institutions were greatly weakened; regions that had been victims of a lopsided center-periphery relationship often broke off. (These included Chile and Venezuela.) In all these new nations the most pressing and, as it proved, enduring problem faced in their first decades of independence was how to establish the legitimacy of their new governments. Elites were aware that Great Britain, with its parliamentary form of government, was the most advanced country in the world, but to retain monarchy would undermine the Latin Americans’ justification for having separated from Spain. Thus, impelled by a deeply felt need to break with the colonial era and not follow the path being taken by their ex-rulers, they generally turned to the US republican model without seriously questioning its appropriateness, in their hurry not seriously considering whether this model had any connection to their experience and habits, much less their needs. Unconstitutional behavior and rule were almost guaranteed by the decision of the educated urban elites to adopt US-style presidentialism, separation of powers, and especially federalism. Adopted as supposed essentials of a republican system, they had no place in countries that had nothing to federalize and where legislatures and courts sorely lacked independence.

Naively, however, the region’s upper classes persisted in viewing Anglo-American political institutions as responsible for the economic progress of England and the United States. Enlightenment ideas of politics were even farther from Latin American reality than from that of France, where a hopefully egalitarian revolution had spawned violent civil strife, followed by popular enchantment with imperial rule by a social upstart. (By the crucial period of the independence wars of Spanish America, the French had a restored the traditional monarchy, imposed upon them essentially by British force of arms.) Essentially realistic, those who came to occupy political offices in the new Latin American republics often ignored what high-sounding and idealistic constitutions might say:

Recognizing the need for strong leadership in these often disorganized, chaotic societies, the Latin American founding fathers entrusted the executive with strong powers, while weakening the influence of the congress and courts. The president was also given vast emergency powers frequently needed in these fractured, disorganized polities to declare a state of emergency, suspend the constitution and rule by decree…. The Catholic Church was often established as the official religion.⁶

Not surprisingly in the light of distinctly adverse circumstances, but dismaying to those leaders who unrealistically aspired to achieving both stability and a significant degree of democracy (at least as it was understood in those days, when Jeffersonian paternalistic elitism was being challenged only by Jacksonian ideas), effective authority in most of Spanish America reverted to audacious regional leaders, who defied the urban elites and used their private armies in a warlord manner to usurp power from those who felt entitled to it, but who generally lacked the skill, determination, and support to successfully resist the caudillos, ruthless mobilizers of armed support to seize power. In rare cases members of the Creole elite survived by out-caudilloing their country challengers. Chile, under the leadership of Diego Portales, was the outstanding exception; rather than copying the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acronyms
• Maps
• Introduction and Overview of Latin America
• Part 1 | Latin America: Independence to 1930
• Part 2 | Latin America Since 1930
• Part 3 | Comparative Perspectives and Outlook
• Glossary
• Index