In 1800 Spain and Portugal ruled almost all of Latin America. By 1826 nearly all of it was independent, except Cuba and Puerto Rico, which stayed Spanish until 1898. Criollo resentment, Enlightenment ideas, and the examples of the American and French revolutions all prepared the ground. Haiti's revolution both inspired rebels and frightened elites who feared a rising of the enslaved. But the spark came from Europe.
A crisis from Europe
Napoleon's invasion of Spain and Portugal set off the independence crisis. In 1808 he forced the Spanish king, Ferdinand VII, to give up the throne and made his own brother king of Spain. Who now ruled the empire? Across Spanish America, local elites formed juntas, governing councils, which at first claimed to rule in the captive Ferdinand's name. Caracas formed one in April 1810 and Buenos Aires in May 1810. Loyalty to an absent king slowly turned into a demand for independence, especially after Ferdinand returned in 1814 and tried to restore absolute rule.
Mexico: a revolt from below, a settlement from above
On 16 September 1810 Miguel Hidalgo, a parish priest in the town of Dolores, issued the Grito de Dolores, a call to rise against bad government. Tens of thousands of indigenous and mestizo peasants followed him. Their sack of the city of Guanajuato horrified criollos, who mostly sided with Spain. Hidalgo was captured and executed in 1811. Another priest, José María Morelos, carried on and called for an end to slavery and to caste distinctions, but he too was executed, in 1815. In the end Mexico won independence in 1821 when a royalist officer, Agustín de Iturbide, switched sides. His Plan of Iguala promised independence, the Catholic faith and equality between Spaniards and criollos, a conservative bargain that elites could accept. In 1822 Iturbide had himself crowned emperor. He lasted less than a year.
South America: Bolívar and San Martín
In the north, Simón Bolívar, a rich criollo from Caracas, led a long and bloody war. After early defeats he regrouped with help from Haiti and promised freedom to enslaved men who joined his armies. He won at Boyacá in 1819, freeing New Granada, and at Carabobo in 1821, freeing Venezuela, and created a large republic called Gran Colombia. In the south, José de San Martín of Argentina took a different route. In 1817 San Martín led an army across the Andes into Chile, a feat of logistics through passes higher than any in the Alps, and won Chile's independence with the Chilean leader Bernardo O'Higgins. He then sailed north and declared Peru independent in 1821. After meeting Bolívar at Guayaquil in 1822, San Martín withdrew from public life. Bolívar's lieutenant Antonio José de Sucre won the Battle of Ayacucho in December 1824, which effectively ended Spanish rule in South America. Upper Peru became a new republic named Bolivia in Bolívar's honor.
Brazil: an empire, not a republic
Brazil took a quieter path. When Napoleon's armies invaded Portugal, the Portuguese royal court moved to Rio de Janeiro in 1808, escorted by the British navy. For thirteen years Rio was the capital of a global empire. When King John VI returned to Lisbon in 1821, he left his son Pedro behind as regent, and Portugal's parliament tried to reduce Brazil to a colony again. In 1822 Pedro declared independence, and Brazil became a monarchy under Emperor Pedro I. The monarchy held Brazil's vast territory together while Spanish America split apart, but it also kept slavery in place.
What kind of revolution?
Historians debate how revolutionary independence was. In many places criollo elites simply replaced Spanish officials, and land and power stayed where they were. Yet the wars mobilized enslaved people, free people of color and indigenous soldiers, who expected something in return; most new states ended the slave trade and passed gradual abolition laws, and they wrote republican constitutions with citizenship for all free men, at least on paper. Unity did not last. Gran Colombia split into Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador in 1830, the year Bolívar died, and Central America's federation broke up soon after. Near the end, Bolívar wrote despairingly that those who had served the revolution had plowed the sea, meaning their revolution had failed to build lasting order.
Worked example: the Jamaica Letter
In 1815, defeated and in exile in Kingston, Bolívar wrote a long public letter explaining the revolution to a British reader. He argued that Spain had kept Americans out of government and trade, so that they were neither true Spaniards nor the original inhabitants of the land, and had never learned to rule themselves. He dreamed of a united Spanish America but judged that distance, climate and local interests made one nation impossible, and he favored strong central governments over the loose federal model of the United States. The letter is a key to Bolívar's later choices, including his support for presidents for life, which critics then and now saw as a betrayal of republican ideals. A good reader takes the letter on two levels: as a sharp analysis of colonial politics and as a case made by a man who wanted power and believed his country needed him to have it.