The New Penguin History of the World (150 page)

None the less, these healthy tendencies were offset by grave weaknesses which they did not touch. A series of insurrections revealed deep-seated
weaknesses in the Spanish empire. In Paraguay (1721–35), Colombia (1781) and, above all, Peru (1780) there were real threats to colonial government which could only be contained by great military efforts. Among others, these required levies of colonial militia, a double-edged expedient, for it provided the
creoles
with military training which they might turn against Spain. The deepest division in Spanish colonial society was between the Indians and the colonists of Spanish descent, but that between the
creoles
and
peninsulares
was to have more immediate political importance. It had widened with the passage of time. Resentful of their exclusion from high office, the
creoles
noted the success of the British colonists of North America in shaking off imperial rule. The French Revolution, also, at first suggested possibilities rather than dangers.

As these events unrolled, the Spanish government was embarrassed in other ways. In 1790 a quarrel with Great Britain led at last to surrender of the remnants of the old Spanish claim to sovereignty throughout the Americas, when it conceded that the right to prohibit trade or settlement in North America only extended within an area of thirty miles around a Spanish settlement. Then came wars, first with France, then with Great Britain (twice), and finally with France again, during the Napoleonic invasion. These wars not only cost Spain Santo Domingo, Trinidad and Louisiana, but also its dynasty, which was forced by Napoleon to abdicate in 1808. The end of Spanish sea-power had already come at Trafalgar. In this state of disorder and weakness, when, finally, Spain itself was engulfed by French invasion, the
creoles
decided to break loose and in 1810 the Wars of Independence began with risings in New Granada, La Plata and New Spain. The
creoles
were not at first successful and in Mexico they found that they had a racial war on their hands when the Indians took the opportunity to turn on all whites. But the Spanish government was not able to win them over nor to muster sufficient strength to crush further waves of rebellion. British sea-power guaranteed that no conservative European power could step in to help the Spanish and thus practically sustained the Monroe doctrine. So, there emerged from the fragments of the former Spanish empire a collection of republics, most of them ruled by soldiers.

In Portuguese Brazil the story had gone differently, for though a French invasion of Portugal had in 1807 provoked a new departure, it was different from that of the Spanish empire. The Prince Regent of Portugal had himself removed from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro, which thus became the effective capital of the Portuguese empire. Though he went back to Portugal as king in 1820 he then left behind his son, who took the lead in resisting an attempt by the Portuguese government to reassert its control of Brazil and, with relatively little trouble, became the emperor of an independent Brazil in 1822.

A glance at the map of contemporary South America reveals the most obvious of many great differences between the revolutions in North and South America: no United States of South America emerged from the Wars
of Independence. Although the great hero and leader of independence, Simón Bolívar, hoped for much from a Congress of the new states at Panama in 1826, nothing came of it. It is not difficult to understand why. For all the variety of the thirteen British colonies and difficulties facing them, they had after their victory relatively easy intercommunication by sea and few insurmountable obstacles of terrain. They also had some experience of cooperation and a measure of direction of their own affairs even while under imperial rule. With these advantages, their divisions still remained important enough to impose a constitution which gave very limited powers to the national government. It is hardly surprising that the southern republics could not achieve continental unity for all the advantages of the common background of Spanish rule which most of them shared.

The absence of unifying factors may not have been disadvantageous, for the Latin Americans of the early nineteenth century faced no danger or opportunity which made unity desirable. Against the outside world, other than the United States, they were protected by Great Britain. At home the problems of post-colonial evolution were far greater than had been anticipated and were unlikely to be tackled more successfully by the creation of an artificial unity. Indeed, as in Africa a century and a half later, one legacy of colonial rule was that geography and community did not always suit political units which corresponded to the old administrative divisions. The huge, thinly populated states which emerged from the Wars of Independence were constantly in danger of disintegrating into small units as the urban minorities who had guided the independence movement found it impossible to control their followers. Some did break up. There were racial problems, too; the social inequalities they gave rise to were not removed by independence. Not every country experienced them in the same way. In Argentina, for example, the relatively small Indian population underwent near-extermination at the hands of the army. That country was celebrated by the end of the nineteenth century for the extent to which it resembled Europe in the domination of European strains in its population. At the other extreme, Brazil had a population the majority of which was black and, at the time of independence, much of it still in slavery. Miscegenation was traditional there, and the result is an ethnic mix which may well be the least troublesome to be found in the world today. Finally, an important part of South America’s colonial inheritance was a set of economic relationships with the outside world which would be slow to change. They would lead later to denunciation of the continent’s economic ‘dependency’. But the legacy had another side to it; much of the continent’s wealth would never have been there but for colonialism. Every plantation crop grown
in Brazil had been brought there by Europeans from overseas – sugar, coffee, chocolate, cattle, wheat.

The new Latin American states could not draw upon any tradition of self-government in facing their many problems, for the colonial administrations had been absolutist and had not thrown up representative institutions. For the political principles they sought to apply, the leaders of the republics looked in the main to the French Revolution, but these were advanced ideas for states whose tiny élites did not even share among themselves agreement about accepted practice; they could hardly produce a framework of mutual tolerance. Worse still, revolutionary principles quickly brought the Church into politics, a development which was perhaps in the long run inevitable, given its huge power as a landowner and popular influence, but unfortunate in adding anti-clericalism to the woes of the continent. In these circumstances, it was hardly surprising that during most of the century each republic found that its affairs tended to drift into the hands of
caudillos
, military adventurers and their cliques who controlled armed forces sufficient to give them sway until more powerful rivals came along.

The cross-currents of civil war and wars between the new states – some very bloody – led by 1900 to a map which is still much the same today. Mexico, the most northern of the former Spanish colonies, had lost vast areas in the north to the United States. Four mainland central American republics had appeared and two island states, the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Cuba was on the point of achieving independence. To the south were the ten states of South America. All of these countries were republican; Brazil had given up its monarchy in 1889. Though all had been through grave civic disorders, they represented very different degrees of stability and constitutional propriety. In Mexico, an Indian had indeed become president, to great effect, in the 1850s, but everywhere there remained the social divisions between Indians,
mestizos
(those of mixed blood), and those of European blood (much reinforced in numbers when immigration became more rapid after 1870). The Latin American countries had contained about 19 million people in 1800; a century later they had 63 million.

This argues a certain increase in wealth. Most of the Latin American countries had important natural resources in one form or another. Sometimes they fought over them, for such advantages became even more valuable as Europe and the United States became more industrialized. Argentina had space and some of the finest pasture in the world: the invention of refrigerator ships in the 1880s made it England’s butcher and later grain grower as well. At the end of the nineteenth century, it was the richest of the Latin American countries. Chile had nitrates (taken from Bolivia and
Peru in the ‘War of the Pacific’ of 1879–83) and Venezuela had oil; both grew more important in the twentieth century. Mexico had oil, too. Brazil had practically everything (except oil), coffee and sugar above all. The list could be continued but would confirm that the growing wealth of Latin America came above all from primary produce. The capital to exploit this came from Europe and the United States and this produced new ties between these European nations overseas and Europe itself.

This increase in wealth nevertheless was connected with two related drawbacks. One was that it did nothing to reduce the disparities of wealth to be found in these countries; indeed, they may have increased. In consequence, social, like racial, tensions remained largely unresolved. An apparently Europeanized urban élite lived lives wholly unlike those of the Indian and
mestizo
masses. This was accentuated by the dependence of Latin America on foreign capital. Not unreasonably, foreign investors sought security. They by no means always got it, but it tended to lead them to support of the existing social and political authorities, who thus enhanced still further their own wealth. It would take only a few years of the twentieth century for conditions resulting from this sort of thing to produce social revolution in Mexico.

The irritation and disappointment of foreign investors who could not collect the debts due to them led sometimes to diplomatic conflicts and even armed intervention. The collection of debt was, after all, not seen as a revival of colonialism and European governments sent stiff messages and backed them up with force on several occasions during the century. When in 1902 Great Britain, Germany and Italy together instituted a naval blockade of Venezuela in order to collect debts due to their subjects who had suffered in revolutionary troubles, this provoked the United States to go further than the Monroe doctrine.

From the days of the Texan republic onwards, the relations of the United States with its neighbours had never been easy: nor are they today. Too many complicating factors were at work. The Monroe doctrine expressed the basic interest of the United States in keeping the hemisphere uninvolved with Europe, and the first Pan-American Congress was another step in this direction when the United States organized it in 1889. But this could no more prevent the growth of economic links with Europe than could the Revolution sever those of the United States with Great Britain (and North Americans were among the investors in South American countries and soon had their own special pleas to make to their government). Moreover, as the century came to an end, it was clear that the strategic situation which was the background to the Monroe doctrine had changed. Steamships and the rise of American interest in the Far East and the Pacific made the
United States much more sensitive, in particular, to developments in central America and the Caribbean, where an isthmian canal was more and more likely to be built.

The outcome was greater heavy-handedness and even arrogance in United States policy towards its neighbours in the early twentieth century. When, after a brief war with Spain, the United States won Cuba its independence (and took Puerto Rico from Spain for itself), special restraints were incorporated in the new Cuban constitution to ensure it would remain a satellite. The territory of the Panama Canal was obtained by intervention in the affairs of Colombia. The Venezuelan debt affair was followed by an even more remarkable assertion of American strength – a ‘corollary’ to the Monroe doctrine. This was the announcement (almost at once given practical expression in Cuba and the Dominican Republic) that the United States would exercise a right of intervention in the affairs of any state in the western hemisphere whose internal affairs were in such disorder that they might tempt European intervention. Later, one American president sent marines to Nicaragua in 1912 on this ground and another occupied the Mexican port of Vera Cruz in 1914 as a way of coercing a Mexican government. In 1915 a protectorate was established by treaty over Haiti, which was to last forty years.

This was not the end of an unhappy story of relations between the United States and its neighbours, though far enough to take it for the moment. Their importance here, in any case, is only symptomatic of the ambiguous standing of the Latin American states in relation to Europe. Rooted in its culture, tied to it by economics, they none the less were constrained politically to avoid entanglement with it. This did not, of course, mean that they did not stand, so far as Europeans were concerned, on the white man’s side of the great distinction more and more drawn between those within the pale of European civilization and those outside it. When the European thought of ‘Latin Americans’ he thought of those of European descent, the urban, literate, privileged minority, not the Indian and black masses.