Latin American Revolution

11 Key excerpts on "Latin American Revolution"

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  A New History of Modern Latin America

  • Lawrence A. Clayton, Michael L. Conniff, Susan M. Gauss(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  Each continues to influence the course of its country’s history. Latin America has also witnessed a large number of revolutionary movements, some of which succeeded partially, like that of Peru between 1968 and 1975 and that of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua between 1979 and 1990. Their impact, too, was often large. Beyond these, Latin America has had innumerable coups or insurrections over the past two hun-dred years, though their impact has been much narrower than the major revo-lutionary events. A key question among scholars is why some rebellions stop short of becoming major upheavals, while others grow into full-scale revolu-tions. Important factors that can encourage revolutions include an interna-tional context that fosters instability, problems of political legitimacy, intellec-tual movements, and mass involvement. Proximity to the United States seemed to be important in Latin America because two of the biggest revolutions occurred in the neighboring countries of Mexico and Cuba. The United States had already played a major role in the independence movements, serving as inspiration and as supplier of arms. But U.S. influence in revolutionary upheavals has been more complicated than simply supplying arms and ideas. On one hand, the United States stood for the ideals that many revolutionaries evoked, like equality, justice, and democracy. On the other hand, the United States represented capitalist exploitation and imperialism, and anti-U.S. nationalism often fueled revolutionary fervor. U.S. involvement in the region also destabilized domestic politics, as seen in chap-ter 13. Certainly the rise of communism as a rival model of state organization served as a catalyst for revolutionary forces in Latin America, helping to account for their antagonism toward the United States. The first communist state, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), was consolidated out of the ruins of imperial Russia in 1917.

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  Debating Modern Revolution

  The Evolution of Revolutionary Ideas

  • Jack R. Censer(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  Latin America Beyond France and the United States, revolutions spread globally, beginning with the Latin American Revolutions in the early nineteenth century. South of the British colonies, from the middle of North America to the tip of South America, lay lands claimed by Portugal and Spain. The latter’s territories began with Mexico and occupied much of the Caribbean and Central and South America, with the large exception of the huge area of Brazil dominated by Portugal. In 1800, all seemed comfortably ruled by Europeans. By 1825, all except a few small territories were independent. Despite the enormous variety of the Latin American countries in history, landscape, and population mix (consisting of slaves, indigenous peoples, those of mixed race, Europeans [or peninsulars], and creoles [white individuals born in America]), scholars tend to emphasize creole leadership in the revolutions that led to independence. Of course, many others held grievances, not only toward Iberian rule but toward creoles, peninsulars, and colonial administrators. The creoles, as an upper-class elite, took the lead. More important, they were well educated and heavily influenced by the progressive notions that had led to revolution elsewhere. Events in Europe also significantly contributed to the Latin American drive for independence. Numerous rebellions and uprisings occurred in Latin America from 1500 on, despite growing Spanish efforts at repression from the mid-eighteenth century. Despite urban rebellions in Brazil in the wake of the French Revolution, and the Tupac Amorce II rebellion in the Andes in 1780–1783, these violent events did not seem to lead directly to independence movements. In fact, the most destabilizing factor may have been the sharp decline after 1800 in Spanish and Portuguese power over the lands and peoples under their dominion. The depletion of silver in American mines also hurt the economies of Spain and Portugal. Moreover the French Revolution,

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  Latin America 1810-2010: Dreams And Legacies

  Dreams and Legacies

  • Aline Helg, Claude Auroi(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • ICP

    (Publisher)

  (ed.), Riot, Rebellion and Revolution. Rural Social Conflict in Mexico , Princeton University Press, Princeton, pp. 95–140. Voss, S.F. (2002). Latin America in the Middle Period, 1750–1929 , Scholarly Resources, Wilmington, DE. Vries, J. de (1994). The Industrial Revolution and the Industrious Revolution, Journal of Economic History , 54, 2, pp. 249–270. Walker, C. (1999). Smoldering Ashes. Cuzco and the Creation of Republican Peru, 1780–1840 , Duke University Press, Durham. Whitehead, L. (2003). ‘The Bolivian National Revolution: A Comparison’, in Grindle, M. S. and Domingo, P. (eds), Proclaiming Revolution. The Bolivian Revolution in Comparative Perspective , Institute of Latin American Studies, London, Chapter 2. Wickham-Crowley, T. (1991) Exploring Revolution. Essays on Latin American Insurgency and Revolutionary Theory , M. E. Sharpe, Armonk, New York. Wolf, E. R. (1982). Europe and the People Without History , University of California Press, Berkeley. Patterns of Protest and Revolution in Latin America 155 This page intentionally left blank This page intentionally left blank C h a p t e r 7 Education, Citizenship, and Decentralization in the Latin American Bicentenary: The Chilean Case Oscar Corvalán Vásquez 7.1. SUMMARY This chapter examines the role public education has played in the progress and construction of democracy in a selected number of Latin American countries, in order to demonstrate that the develop-ment of both goes hand in hand, that they benefit each other and are mutually dependant. Nevertheless, the analysis is mainly concerned with data related to Chile. This chapter offers a summary of the consequences that colonial legacy has had for the construction of the fragile democracy that has prevailed in many Latin American republics, their persistent social inequalities, the heterogeneous nature of their production, and the cumulated negative impact these factors have had on the develop-ment of civic education.

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  ISG 47: Christianity Worldwide 1800 to 2000

  • Jehu Hanciles(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • SPCK Publishing

    (Publisher)

  7

  Latin America and the Caribbean

  Pablo Dieros and Jehu J. Hanciles

   Colonialism versus liberalism: 1800–1929

  During the eighteenth century, Spanish influence in Latin America rapidly declined, even as weak Spanish monarchs increased their financial demands on the colonies to support the excessive expenditures of royal bureaucracy. Most of the burden fell on the shoulders of the Creole oligarchy, the descendants of European settlers born in the Americas. They were heavily taxed, but they had little power in the colonial system. As resentment grew, so did a sense of national identity that was centred on local values and interests.

  South America

  The occupation of Spain by Napoleon’s armies in 1808 marked the beginning of the period of national liberation of the Latin American colonies of Spain and Portugal. After wars of independence all these colonies attained their liberty and declared themselves republics in the 1820s, though the fight continued up until 1898 in the Caribbean. But political independence in Latin America was more a consequence of the efforts of the Creole oligarchy to free itself from exploitative Spanish control than the result of a search by the whole people for their own identity and freedom.

   Political independence and ecclesiastical crises

  The years from 1808 to 1825 represent a period of major crisis for the Roman Catholic Church in Latin America. As the colonial church, it was strongly tied to the old structures of foreign domination, and the rise of the independence movements threatened its existence. Opposition to Spanish political rule also had religious implications, since it was also a revolt against the Spanish-controlled church. Furthermore, the movement towards independence was partly inspired by Enlightenment ideas (from Europe and the United States) that stressed reason, scientific progress and individual freedom as guiding principles. Since these ideas downplayed, even rejected, the importance of religion, the leaders of the new Latin American states did not hold Catholicism in the same esteem as the former colonial masters. Indeed, one of the issues at stake at that time was the separation of church and state, which had strong supporters in patriots such as Símon Bolivar (1783–1830), one of the greatest leaders of the independence movement.

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  Latin America Between Colony and Nation

  Selected Essays

  • J. Lynch(Author)
  • 2001(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  The age of revolution The Spanish American revolutions responded first to interests, and interests invoked ideas. The deconstruction of the Creole State, its replacement by a new imperial State, the alienation of the American elites – these were the roots of Independence. Creole resentment was accompanied by popular unrest, with potential for social revolution rather than political independence; this was a continuing challenge to authority during colony, revolution and republic. In this sequence, ideology does not occupy prime position and is not seen as a ‘cause’ of 96 Latin America between Colony and Nation Independence. Nevertheless, this was the age of democratic revolution when ideas appeared to cross frontiers and leave no society untouched. In Spanish America too the language of liberty was heard in the last decades of empire. Then, after 1810, as Spanish Americans began to win rights, freedom and independence, ideology was used to defend, to legitimise and to clarify the revolution. The second half of the eighteenth century saw a trial of strength between the aristocratic and the democratic concept of society, between monarchical and republican systems of government. Reformers put their faith in the philosophy of natural rights, proclaimed ideas of popular sovereignty and designed written constitutions embodying of the ‘separation’ of powers. To what extent was Latin America influ- enced by the ideas of the eighteenth century and a participant in the movement of democratic revolution? The political and intellectual movements of the time were marked by diversity rather than unity. The concept of a single Atlantic revolution inspired by democracy and nurtured on the Enlightenment does not do justice to the complexity of the period, nor does it discriminate sufficiently between minor currents of revolution and the great wave of change unleashed by the most powerful and radical movements of all.

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  Mexico

  • Alicia Hernández Chávez(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  The traditional interpretation of the Mexican revolution tends to describe it as an unprecedented social and political phenomenon having only ten-uous continuity with the republican and liberal nineteenth century. Re-cent historiography, however, puts more emphasis on its nineteenth-century roots and on the role played by the ideas, social groups, and organizations of that century’s last decade. These studies also question the monolithic view of the revolution. They endeavor instead to recap-ture its pluralistic nature and its specific characteristics in different states and regions. For these reasons, it is useful to remember what was said in the previ-ous chapter about the incongruence at the end of the century between an evident social dynamism and the ossified politics, which were inadequate to the needs of the new social actors who were recognizable some fifteen years before the revolutionary convulsion. More concretely, liberal re-publicanism retreated in the 1890s as the regime it had spawned proved incapable of regeneration and unable to develop policies that could give voice to the new forms of liberal opposition. At this stage we can begin to discern a growing plurality of social actors in Mexico, the precondition for what today we call the revolution. The new society of the day, born under the republic in the most robust period of liberalism, found its way through a thicket of difficulties to establish new social networks and to transform underlying organizational forms, responding to new demands and extending itself throughout the country. In this chapter we will examine the efforts of thousands of social ac-203 c h a p t e r 9 The Revolution 204 CHAPTER 9 tors to coordinate their own demands and wherever possible to piggy-back them onto the demands of the local and national elites.

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  A History of Modern Latin America

  1800 to the Present

  • Teresa A. Meade(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  To be sure, most women who participated in the rebellions received little notice; yet many were active in village uprisings in the waves of protest that preceded the outbreak of independence in the nineteenth century. This militancy among women of the working and peasant classes coincided with the first cracks in the patriarchal system that restricted life for women of all social strata.

  On the Road to Independence

  The eighteenth century ended with the tug-of-war between the dictates of the reorganized Bourbon and Pombaline leadership and a growing colonial opposition. Whereas Enlightenment philosophy was infusing debates over whether the European Crowns had the right to rule the colonies in America, militant voices began to question the right of any monarchy to rule any populace, at home or abroad. Radicals debated moderates, pro-monarchy conservatives confronted militant republicans, anti-slavery forces denounced slavery and the parasitical landowning system it supported. Yet, despite sporadic regional conspiracies no Latin American or Caribbean country actively moved to take up independence until the last days of the eighteenth century, following the slave uprising in the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue. Nonetheless, strains of republicanism and calls for universal brotherhood and equality had begun to filter into the salons, cafes, street conversations, newspapers, pamphlets, and books in Latin American and Caribbean capitals and port cities.

  The call for freedom, however, would not resonate in all ears in the same way. Longstanding servile peasants, castas

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  Borders and Bridges

  A History of U.S.-Latin American Relations

  • Stewart Brewer(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  1 22 Borders and Bridges Herring argues that the events in early nineteenth century that culminated in independence for most of Spain’s New World colonies and all of Portugal’s, came as the unavoidable result of over 300 years of Iberian colonialism and imperialism that created insurmountable tensions and problems in the New World. Part of the formative experience for Latin American independence oc- curred during the final years of the eighteenth century: two violent revolu- tions for freedom and equality born of the European Enlightenment. One of these revolutions, the French Revolution, was responsible ultimately for unsettling the Spanish Empire at its core by destabilizing the Spanish monar- chy. The other, the American Revolution, occurred in the New World just north of the Latin American colonies. Latin American leaders viewed the emergence of the United States with both alarm and expectation. In less than fifty years, Latin America followed the French and the United States by staging their own revolutions for independence and freedom. But the revolutions for independence in Latin America were very different from the American and French Revolutions. Latin American Revolutionaries were not prepared for the drawn-out nature of the fighting, or the implications of self-rule after they won their freedom. Other differences are also telling. For example, the United States had formerly existed as colonies of England from the founding of Jamestown in 1607 to the end of the American Revolutionary War in 1783, a period of 176 years. By contrast, the Latin American colonies had been controlled by Spain from roughly 1492 when Columbus first colonized the island of Hispa ˜ nola to 1825 when the country of Bolivia was created by Sim ´ on Bolívar, a period of over 330 years. The significance of the fact that Latin America had a much longer colo- nial experience than the United States is found in the mentality of the popula- tions.

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  Revolution and Reaction

  The Diffusion of Authoritarianism in Latin America

  • Kurt Weyland(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  104 Revolution and the Reactionary Backlash in Latin America reform initiatives frequently stir up political conflict and polarization in the short run, as Alexis de Tocqueville ([1856] 1978: 179–82, 185–7) famously highlighted. The effort finally to remedy long-standing problems raises great hopes and can unleash an explosion of pent-up demands. This risk of unintentional radicalization exists especially if these changes are launched with overambitious rhetoric, such as President Kennedy’s appeal to “revolutionary ideas and efforts” (reprinted in Taffet 2007: 204) in the initial announcement of the Alliance for Progress in 1961 and the “revolution in liberty” proclaimed by the Eduardo Frei Montalva government (1964–70) in Chile (Fleet 1985: 80). Facing such a major reform project, the forces privileged by the status quo dig in their heels out of asymmetrical loss aversion and fiercely resist the sudden questioning of well-entrenched structures. For that reason, in part, the changes actually implemented fall short of the high-flying expectations raised by the government’s bold pronouncements, as it happened in Chile (Baskind, Lerdau, and Mesmer 2008: 64–7, 83–4, 101). Because both sides of the reform divide mobilize, escalation results and politics becomes acrimonious and contentious. The Alliance for Progress, which rested on the benign assumptions of US liberalism and pluralism (Packenham 1973: 69–74), underestimated the potential for this kind of transitional polarization and conflict and was unprepared for its political repercussions. 55 The depth of Latin America’s socioeconomic problems, especially social inequality and mass poverty, obstructed negotiation and compromise. In the short run, therefore, the reform strategy had unanticipated consequences that were diametrically opposite to its proclaimed goals: rather than producing moderation, it provoked conflict.

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  Latin America and the Origins of Its Twenty-First Century

  • Michael Monteón(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  The violence involved rural identities as well as partisan ones, ethic labels as well as religiosity, and, of course, a good deal of alcohol. 128 Nothing like Gaitán’s movement was ever permitted again. All efforts at land reform were crushed and the union movement was considerably weakened. In 1958, the right-wing military left office. The liberal and conservative leaders agreed to alternate national office, while poverty, political cynicism, and the widespread use of firearms led to guerrilla warfare and eventually created an alternative economy based on drugs and drug-related violence. It is important in the midst of all this not to succumb to the view that everything in Latin America turns into a disaster. The era of nationalist revolutions and import-substitution industrialization transformed the region in positive ways. Life expectancy rose almost everywhere and illiteracy fell. The population grew at an unprece- dented rate. Within their cities, the larger Latin American nations now supported a varied life of literature and cultural institutions devoted to the fine arts. Cities had many of the accoutrements of North America and Western Europe, such as radio, movies, even some television. Nor was the effort a political failure in all respects. Higher rates of education are a requirement for a stronger civic life. Everywhere, the most retrograde elements of the oligarchy were on the defensive or had lost the battle for national power. It seemed briefly, in the late 1940s, that World War II would generate new electoral opportunities in the region by bringing a new generation and new mass movements into politics. Even in the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua, laborers in key sectors gained new rights and the right to 158 Latin America and the Origins of Its Twenty-First Century

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  Latin American Guerrilla Movements

  Origins, Evolution, Outcomes

  • Dirk Kruijt, Eduardo Rey Tristán, Alberto Martín Álvarez, Dirk Kruijt, Eduardo Rey Tristán, Alberto Martín Álvarez(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The novelty of Cuba was its success and the reasons behind this. The island made five key contributions in this respect. First, it revised Latin America’s revolutionary heritage, while rehabilitating political violence as a weapon for social transformation. As already noted, the dominant left-wing (mostly communist) strategy in previous decades did not only involve the use of violence, but also electoral participation whenever the opportunity arose. Violence was temporarily resorted to in insurrectionary cases, like during the overthrow of Pérez Jiménez in Venezuela in February 1958. But not as a structural conception, which would be the defining trait of Cuba’s new revolutionary arsenal as of 1959.

  Second, the Cuban example (1959) was as powerful for Latin America as the Russian Revolution (1917) had been for Europe: a triumph obtained against overwhelming odds and contrary to the predominant ideas of the Left at the time (the anarchists in 1917 and the communists in 1959). Furthermore, it was a revolution that pursued sweeping social and economic reforms that not only succeeded in taking power, but also managed to retain it as it embraced Marxism-Leninism and resisted fierce US opposition.

  Third, the Cuban leadership rapidly supported other revolutionary bids in the region. It was not long before its revolutionary ethos crossed national borders to become a Latin American affair. And since its leadership mainly comprised young middle-class professionals and university students, its example offered the same sectors in other countries of the region an immediate and swift solution, without complex structures or ideological disputes—exactly the opposite of the long-term strategy advocated by the existing communist parties.

  Fourth, Cuban influence and the armed path to revolution embodied by the guerrilla were both central to the development of a new leftist political culture in Latin America throughout the 1960s. As Gilman (2003) has shown, the Cuban Revolution had a crucial impact on the transformation of the Latin American intelligentsia. During the 1960s, the quintessential intellectual would be committed to supporting the Cuban Revolution and the guerrilla struggles in Latin America. Thus, the armed struggle would also be legitimized by the support that it received from some of the most eminent Latin American writers and scholars of the period.3

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