Latin American Wars of Independence
Enlightened viceroys and intendants introduced new improvements and refinements that made life in colonial cities more healthful and attractive (Keen Haynes 158). Educational reforms, the influx of new books and the influx of books and ideas, and increased opportunities to travel and study in Europe widened the intellectual horizons of the Creole youths (158). Many creoles read forbidden writings of Raynal, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, and other radical philosophies. These gains did not strengthen Creole feelings of loyalty to the mother country instead, they enlarged Creole aspirations and sharpened their sense of grievance. They harbored bitter resentment against institutions that suppressed their development. As a result, Creoles and peninsulars tended to become mutually hostile castes.
American Revolution posed a threat to Spanish colonizers because ships that entered legally or illegally came with subversive documents from the American Revolution. Both revolutions sought to throw off rule of mother country whose mercantile system hindered the further development of a rapidly growing colonial economy. Both were also led by well-educated elites who drew slogans from the ideas of Enlightenment. However, the Latin American wars of Independence did not have a unified direction or strategy (162) due to vast geographical distances and economic and cultural isolation of the various Latin American regions from each other. It also lacked the strong popular base provided by more democratic and fluid society of the English colonies.
When Miguel Hidalgo waved the banner of Virgin of Guadalupe and proclaimed the independence of Mexico, it seemed like the word independence meant two different things for two different factions (Vandewood, 166). Mexico was divided into two after the colonial rule the Creole elites and the Indian masses. The former wanted to unite the nation but the latter simply wanted to return to pre-Columbian greatness (166). Each faction had different desires and naturally, it the oppressed faction was the latter. Mexico had been freed from colonial oppression but it had to face regionalism and corruption from its own citizens. Mexicos first steps toward establishing its own system of governance was a turbulent journey.
The 1826 congressional election is a good example of corruption in postcolonial Mexico, where the Escoseses accused the York Rite Masons, or the Yorkinos, of vote buying and false patriotism. This was a crucial election because it replaced half of the Senate and the entire Chamber of Deputies and also determined who would control many state legislatures (Warren 79). Two newspapers, El Aguila Mexicana and El Sol, expressed very different views on the Yorkinos. El Sol accused the Yorkinos of using politics as a way of securing patronage for Mason lodge members but El Aguila Mexicana defended them and said that the Yorkinos were egalitarian (80). The Escoseses criticized the Yorkinos for false patriotism and said that they did no more than kiss the chains of Spanish oppression during the Independence war (80). It would be wrong to assume that the Yorkinos were liberalists and the Escoseses were not the Escoseses simply wanted to build a new government gradually while the Yorkinos wanted rapid development (Fowler 96).
Both parties had bought prefabricated ballots during the elections. The Escoseses complained that the Yorkinos bought the Scots Rite sample ballots and destroyed them at the same time that the other Yorkinos paid poor folks to vote more than once (Warren 81). The Yorkinos, on the other hand, did not allow these accusations to dampen their spirits. They were confident that they had all the support that they needed because they represented the general public opinion, unlike the Escoseses. The senate conducted an investigation on secret societies, which eventually turned into a game the senate was not able to suppress the secret societies. The Yorkinos had nothing to fear because the general public sentiment was on their side this sentiment unnerved the Escoseses such as the former vice president General Nicolas Bravo, who spearheaded a revolt to unseat the Yorkinos from their powerful position (Fowler 97).
The 1928 Presidential elections determined whether popular sentiment was heard in the government. It was a fight between Independence war hero and Yorkino bet Vicente Guerrero and Manuel Pedraza, the Escoseses bet. Pedraza beat Guerrero by two votes. Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana protested the results and rallied for Guerrero. The election results were deemed null in December 3, 1928 and Guerrero took over as president of Mexico.
Postcolonial Argentina was plagued by internal conflict as well. When independence was attained from Spain, congress discussed the future of Argentina as an independent country. Some caudillos did not agree on several terms. For instance, many resented the heavy taxes imposed to support the struggles (Aeberhard, Benson Phillips 703). The 1820s began with an inter-caudillo war between the Unitarists and Federalist forces. Bernardino Rivadavia, the first outright president of Argentina, wanted to propose a new constitution however, provinces rejected this because they did not want to give the concession of the land to national government (703). These objections weakened the Rivadavia presidency.
Juan Manuel de Rosas was a controversial figure in the history of Argentina. Intellectuals criticized Rosas as barbaric tyrant who violated the rules of the constitution but there were also others who recognized his efforts in defending Argentina against exploitation (Lewis 43). Rosas focused on the economic needs of Buenos Aires by allowing wealthy ranchers and investors to take huge tracts of land and by instituting tariffs against ranching products produced outside the province (45). Rosas was known to suppress his political opponents. When he briefly retired in 1832, a threat of a civil war appeared. People did not find his achievements sufficient to justify his atrocious acts.
Most of the Latin American Countries had won political independence from their mother countries after the Wars of Independence. However, the creoles who led the wars did not intend to transform the existing order in their countries they simply wanted to drive away their colonizers so they could rule the country themselves (Chasteen Wood, 23). The creoles, the new liberal generation, was typically composed of mostly ambitious politicians whose social mobility was made possible by secondary education (106). They simply wished to eradicate the remnants of their colonial past so they can have more social mobility in their own country. Latin America may have escaped from the hands of their colonizers but the rule of their fellow citizens did not significantly improve the political atmosphere.
Second Question
Majority, if not all, of Latin Americas economy relied on agriculture and land. The old feudal system in which landholders had control over the peasants was the prevalent system during the Spanish colonial period. One of the desires of Latin American countries was to gain full control of their own economic system and to allocate lands fairly among its citizens. Not all citizens, however, shared these sentiments. People from different classes wanted to possess land but for different causes. Efforts to propagate equality in Latin America were certainly abundant but liberal policies did not take into account the vast differences between the wealthy and the poor (Bakewell 4434).
The desire for economic liberation has long been a Colombian dream since the period of Spanish colonization because for the longest time, wealth distribution in the country was unequal. Wealth only rested on the hands of the few. Land ownership remained with the church and the upper class. One of the hopes of the Colombians was to attain economic equality and independence from their motherland. Independence from Spain, however, did not change the economic weather in the country. The national and regional upper classes, including landlords, merchants, slave owners, the upper class echelons of the clergy, and the self-proclaimed local and military regional leaders, rejected any attempt to change the social, economic, and political structure (Osterling 61). President Francisco de Paula Santander was one of the few government officials who proposed reforms in Colombia. One of his goals were to implement free trade system and to make agricultural land circulate among the interested parties and become a commodity easily traded in the open market (62). He was, unfortunately, unable to implement his reforms.
Numerous presidents had ruled the country since Santander but were not able to successfully implement economic reforms. However, it was not until President Tomas de Cipriano Mosqueras administration that reforms were concretized. The percentage of unappropriated land had increased rapidly in the late nineteenth century, that rural conflicts by landless peasants (69). The government passed the first legislation in 1874, which was intended to grant ownership of previously unoccupied land to those who had incorporated it into agriculture and who worked for it over the decade (69).
The legislation did not provide a simple solution to the complicated problem. Powerful but landless elites saw it as an opportunity to lobby for unoccupied lands which had been settled by landless and illiterate elites before. Many colonists, small farmers and peasants also claimed that powerful landlords had appropriated land that they or their predecessors had developed for agriculture, and that the former unappropriated or uncultivated land was technically the property of those who had worked it and not those who had lobbied and manipulated the title granting rights (69). Colombia was divided into elites and peasants who fought for land. The conflict of both started the violence in Colombia that continued throughout the twentieth century.
Guatemala had the same problem with land. Coffee was a staple in Guatemalan agriculture and a vast expanse of land was needed in order to produce more of it. However, ownership of land rested on the few, powerful elite of the country. All of this was about to change under the presidency of Justo Rufino Barrios. Almost immediately after taking the presidency in 1873, Barrios implemented a series of decrees that made land available to coffee planters and encouraged privatization by simplifying procedures for the conversion of community property into individually titled holdings (Grandin 112). Barrios confiscated church and monastery land. He also took hold of uncultivated land and sold them cheaply or granted to private interests and indigenous communal lands (Keen and Heyes 266). The small to medium-scale coffee growers were supposed to be the beneficiaries of this law but incidentally, foreign immigrants took advantage of this law as well. It came to a point where foreign-owned land produced half of the countrys coffee and only 7.3 of the Guatemalan population owned the land (266).
Nicaraguas agriculture and economy was dependent on coffee plantations as well but it only became a principle economic activity in the 1870s (267). Before that, Nicaraguans were dependent on cattle ranching and subsistent agriculture. The sudden growth of coffee in the world market prompted elitists to secure a land suitable for growing coffee. Laws were implemented in 1877 that villages to sell their communal lands. The passage of vagrancy laws and laws that permitted landowners to hire native people for agricultural work ensured cheap labor in the land. This sparked various indigenous revolts in Nicaragua. One of the revolts was the War of the Communeros in 1881, where the indigenous groups were defeated and was followed by a ferocious repression that took five thousand lives (267).
In 1893, the coffee planters staged a revolt because the traditional ways of the cattle raisers clashed with their modern ways. The revolt brought the liberalist Jose Santos Zelaya to presidency. As a modernist president-dictator, Zelaya prioritized the construction of infrastructure such as railroads, roads, port facilities and telegraphic communications (267). Zelaya, just like a typical liberalist, believed that foreign investors were necessary to the countrys economic growth. He granted large concessions to foreign capitalist by 1909, Nicaraguas production of coffee, lumber and gold the principal sources of Nicaraguas wealth was dominated by North American firms (267).
El Salvador, like the previous countries mentioned above, went through the similar situation. The colonizers were attracted to El Salvador mainly because of their rich land. El Salvador went through two economic cycles in just two years. The first cycle was dominated by cacao, which collapsed in the seventeenth century (267). Indigo replaced cacao but it experienced a sharp decline in the latter half of nineteenth century as a result of competition and the development of synthetic dyes.
Coffee production entered the picture only in the 1860s, when there was a search for a new export crop. Coffee production was a risky business because coffee trees did not grow until three years. Producers had to have capital or credit for this business, which the hacenderos he grew indigo had access to (267). A government decree declared that if two-thirds of a pueblos communal lands were not planted in coffee, ownership would pass into the hands of the state (267). This prevented Indians from looking for new land and forcing them to work in plantations. Land ownership still remained in the hands of 14 families (Foley Hapipi 23).
Latin America was eager to concretize change in the economic system that was brought by their colonizers. However, not everyone had the same goals and intentions. The powerful elite citizens wanted to drive away their colonizers to secure for themselves huge tracts of land for business and wealth. They did not want to change the system they simply wanted to change the people behind it. On the other hand, the natives and the small farmers yearned for land that they could call theirs because they had long been taking care of the land that was not theirs. Land meant different things for different classes. Land was a source of personal fortune and relations of privilege and power for the small, landed oligarchy for the indigenous groups and a vast majority of workers and producers, it was their primary source of livelihood (Veltmeyer 287). Land reform attempts were meant to equalize the classes and the distribution of property but the results depended on who had the political power and how parties manipulated the law.
Categories:
0 comments:
Post a Comment