Independence left much of Spanish America exhausted. Fifteen years of war had wrecked mines and farms, scattered workers and left armies with officers who expected rewards. New governments borrowed heavily in London and soon defaulted. Borders were unsettled and constitutions were rewritten again and again. Into this vacuum stepped the caudillo.

The caudillo

A caudillo was a strongman ruling through personal loyalty and armed followers rather than through laws and institutions. Many began as war heroes or big landowners who could put horsemen in the field. In Argentina, Juan Manuel de Rosas dominated Buenos Aires from 1829 to 1852, using a secret police and forcing citizens to wear his party's red ribbon. In Mexico, Antonio López de Santa Anna took the presidency again and again between the 1830s and 1850s, switching sides as it suited him. Some historians defend the caudillos as the only force that could keep order where institutions had collapsed, and point out that they protected their followers like patrons. Critics answer that personal rule kept institutions weak and taught a habit of settling politics by force that lasted well into the twentieth century.

Liberals and conservatives

Behind the strongmen lay a real argument. Conservatives wanted to keep the privileges of the Catholic Church and the army, favored strong central government and sometimes even a monarchy. Liberals wanted a secular state, federalism, free trade and the end of corporate property, meaning lands held by the Church and by indigenous villages. Liberal reforms broke up Church estates, but they also broke up village common lands, which often ended up in the hands of speculators and big landowners. A policy meant to create free individual farmers frequently dispossessed the very people it claimed to free.

Mexico's hard century

Mexico lost Texas in 1836. In the war with the United States from 1846 to 1848, Mexico lost about half of its national territory, including California and the Southwest, under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The defeat discredited the old order and opened the way for the liberal Reform. Its leader, Benito Juárez, was a Zapotec lawyer who led the liberal Reform and became Mexico's first indigenous president. The Constitution of 1857 limited the Church and the army and set off a civil war. Conservatives then invited France to intervene, and Napoleon III installed an Austrian archduke, Maximilian, as emperor of Mexico. Mexican forces beat the French at Puebla on 5 May 1862, the origin of Cinco de Mayo, though the French later took the capital. When France withdrew, Juárez's forces captured Maximilian and executed him in 1867.

Wars and borders

Wars between the new states were rare but devastating. In the War of the Triple Alliance, from 1864 to 1870, Paraguay fought Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay. Paraguay's ruler refused to surrender, and the country lost a huge share of its population; estimates range from about a quarter to more than half. In the War of the Pacific from 1879 to 1884, Chile defeated Peru and Bolivia, and Bolivia lost its coastline on the Pacific Ocean, along with rich nitrate fields. Bolivia still asks for access to the sea.

The export boom

From about 1870 Latin America was pulled hard into the world economy. Railways built with British capital carried coffee from Brazil and Colombia, beef and wheat from Argentina, nitrates and copper from Chile, rubber from the Amazon and bananas from Central America. Millions of European immigrants, mostly Italians and Spaniards, came to Argentina and southern Brazil. Cities like Buenos Aires grew grand. Many elites embraced positivism, the philosophy of the Frenchman Auguste Comte, which promised progress through science and order. When Brazil's army overthrew Emperor Pedro II and declared a republic in 1889, it put the positivist slogan "Order and Progress" on Brazil's flag.

In Mexico, Porfirio Díaz ruled from 1876 to 1911, apart from one four year term held by an ally. His advisers, known as the científicos, welcomed foreign investment in railways, mines and oil. The economy grew, but elections were rigged, the press was muzzled, and by 1910 most rural families owned no land at all. Order and progress for some meant dispossession for many.

Worked example: civilization or barbarism?

In 1845, writing in exile in Chile, the Argentine Domingo Faustino Sarmiento published Facundo, a portrait of the provincial caudillo Juan Facundo Quiroga and a thinly veiled attack on Rosas. Sarmiento framed Argentina's struggle as civilization versus barbarism: European-style cities, schools and commerce against the violent, lawless world of the gauchos and caudillos of the plains. The book is vivid and full of real insight into how personal power worked. Later, as president from 1868 to 1874, Sarmiento built hundreds of schools. But his framework also cast rural people and indigenous nations as obstacles to be swept aside, and it helped justify the military campaigns of the 1870s and 1880s that seized indigenous lands in the south. Reading Facundo well means admiring its force while asking who gets labeled barbarian, and by whom.