The Great Rupture and its Consequences: Rival Authorities and Fragile Institutions, c. 1810 to c. 1870
The first phase (roughly the 1810s to the 1870s) was a formative period of institution building, characterised by the persistence of a wide range of competing authorities to which rival power holders and power seekers appealed as the sources of their right to rule.
Because such authorities conveyed competing criteria by which the legitimacy of states, governments and office holders were to be judged, the result was a crisis of legitimacy. During this first phase of state formation, most power seekers found inspiration in the continuous arrival of European-derived mutations of liberalism and conservatism, spawning a range of ideological authorities whose followers issued anathemas invoking mutual declarations of extermination. Almost everywhere, in this phase, the fragility of governing institutions - a characteristic that has never faded entirely in Latin America - was at its maximum level. State-making tended to be dominated by power-seeking personalities, caudillos and their clients, many of whom organised under the banner of one or another justice-seeking ideological or moral authority. The rivalry over control of the nascent state apparatus, which itself frequently consisted of little more than the means to coerce rivals and to occupy the customs-house, has rarely been more intense. Power deployed in the pursuit of state-making was likely to be transient and dispersed, focused above all on defending itself against rivals.Another distinguishing feature of the first phase of state formation, and the violence associated with it, was its matrix: the great rupture of 1808-24, which separated the Americans from a governing entity in which the power of monarchy and the authority of religion, though overlapping rather than strictly separated, had together managed to generate and sustain order for more than three centuries. Independence normalised what was relatively exceptional during the period of Spanish rule: the use of force.
Under Spain, there was not even a standing army until the late eighteenth century; composed almost entirely of Spanish Americans, its main function was to defend the realms against Spain's European adversaries. The military occupation of Spain and the removal of its legitimate monarch, Ferdinand VII, by imperial France in 1808 unleashed the discord over authority that would shortly begin to lacerate the Hispanic world. A restoration of the old order, founded on the power of kingship and the authority of religion, natural law, corporate rights and the church, would prove to be beyond reach. While the process of separation itself need not occupy us here, its outcome is crucial for understanding the patterns of public violence that would follow. The simultaneous collapse of substantive traditions of rule and the invasion of emancipatory ideologies generated a crisis of order in all the new republics of Spanish America. It was a fate largely avoided by the Empire of Brazil, whose independence from Portugal was proclaimed in 1822 by none other than a resident prince of the ruling Braganza dynasty of Portugal itself. Brazil's transition to independence, marked by continuity, favoured the persistence of familiar institutions suitably recalibrated by the legitimate monarch. In the Spanish dominions, only Puerto Rico and Cuba eschewed independence, adhering to the monarchy until 1898 when an independence war in Cuba and a US invasion of Puerto Rico finally terminated Spain's presence in America.Independence was not so much sought by Ibero-Americans as thrust upon them by events in Europe. A rupture that was unplanned, and for which no one was prepared, generated experiences whose effects would resound across the rest of the century and beyond, in two main ways: first, in the pressing need to adopt institutions of self-rule subject to some socially recognised authority to replace those of the monarchy, a need that persisted well beyond the actual acquisition of full independence in 1821-4; and second, in the myriad, and often destructive, means devised to advance the fortunes of one or another party, programme, regime or leader in the search for political order.
Rather than a clearcut encounter between a Spanish army and American armies seeking national independence, the violence of the independence era (1808-24) was overwhelmingly internal, pitting groups of Americans against each other - an ominous portent. Grievances and identities tied to ethnicity (Indian, European, African and their composites), class (typically smallholders, landless peasants and estate owners) and locality (in defence of claims to political autonomy) blended with new and old ideological and religious commitments, spurring mobilisations and conspiracies, civil wars, and cross-border interventions. Politics became militarised, military forces became politicised, and statemaking became an improvisational art subject less to constitutional mandates than to the transient exigencies of office holders, office seekers and their respective political programmes.Emerging immediately as a characteristic practice of the age was the pronunciamiento, the vehicle of so much state-centred violence and the primary expression of the region's search for a socially recognised, legitimacy-bestowing authority. A pronunciamiento might range from an act of force against an incumbent power holder - a straightforward coup d'etat - to some declaration of principles issued by a disaffected group, aimed at intimidating those in power as a prelude to negotiating a new governing arrangement. Their paradoxical character, typical of the age, has been remarked by Fowler, their most assiduous analyst: ‘unlawful yet legitimate, revolutionary and at the same time tiresomely bureaucratic, openly aggressive yet not always violent', defying the government even while ‘hoping to negotiate with it'. By 1876, Mexicans had launched more than 1,500 pronunciamientos, making them, rather than elections, the primary means of effecting political change.[864]
Across Spain's former dominions, a crisis of order comparable to Mexico's sowed devastation, though the fighting forces elsewhere tended to be more fragmentary and disparate than those of Mexico, whose army managed to preserve, at least until the 1850s, a semblance of the unity it inherited as the direct successor of the royal army. Uprisings and civil wars contested power not only on the national level but also at the infra-national; so far, a systematic numerical analysis of their frequency, range, intensity and cost in lives and property has eluded researchers.
Suggestive indicators abound, however, beginning with the high rates of turnover among heads of state and the frequency with which constitutions were replaced or reformed.[865] In Colombia, over the course of the nineteenth century, a year of peace was exceptional. The country saw between nine and fourteen national-level civil wars (historians disagree on how to count them), perhaps two wars that qualified as ‘international', three coups d'etat by the army and numerous local wars. In the ‘semi-absence' of a state, in the estimation of Sanchez, war fused with politics. Political and military leadership became inseparable. The men who followed the caudillos into battle rarely did so willingly but as the clients of their patron, making the wars more patrician than popular. Invariably ending with a pact between the leaders (because clear winners or losers rarely emerged), these wars and the devastation they wrought became the means by which principled differences would be affirmed in Colombia until the present day.[866]Here and elsewhere in Latin America, state-making was in effect privatised among an ever-shifting array of rivals who alternately fought and pacted with one another. As a result, the actual strength of ‘the state' at any given moment was less important than the certain knowledge that those who occupied its offices rarely counted as the ultimate source of power. To a partial extent this was true even for Brazil, where a monarch presided over a weak but stable national system of administration that tolerated the regular use of violence among rival patron-client networks for control of local and regional posts, particularly at election time. Chile, almost alone in the Hispanic world, succeeded in overcoming an initial decade of violent disorder by establishing in 1830-3 a competent, centralised state with a national army that exercised, in the interest of public order, a near monopoly on violence, under one of Latin America's most enduring constitutions (1830-1925).
Of the many explanations for the ‘Chilean exception' of comparative tranquillity, the foremost is the cohesion of the elite and the consequently high level of social recognition accorded to the legitimating principles upon which the state was founded. And yet even so, that consensus was fragile enough to fail in three civil wars (1851,1859,1892). Much like Chile, Costa Rica in the 1830s also established an effective, socially recognised state apparatus that managed to draw under its control, in the form of a national army, disparate sources of public violence. The army tended to dominate the civilian leadership, making Costa Rica's regime stability, like Chile's, markedly authoritarian. Compared to their northern neighbours in Central America, Costa Ricans experienced far less of the sort of violence that arose among rival caudillos for control of a quasi-state structure forever subject to improvisation. But like Chileans, they were not entirely exempt from public violence, for at least seven coups d'etat from within the national army decided who would rule between 1846 and 1870.Neither in this nor in subsequent phases of state formation was international war, of the sort driven by geopolitical tensions and aiming at territorial conquest, a common occurrence in Latin America. That may have been a gift of the state's improvisational and therefore less capable character. Typically counted among the few such wars was the most ruinous of the nineteenth century, that of the Triple Alliance, in which Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay ganged up against Paraguay from 1864 to 1870. Costing at least 350,000 deaths in combat alone, the war propelled all four countries towards the construction of more militarised, national states. Not to be overlooked in the same category was the US-Mexican war of 1845-8, which resulted in the US capture of half of Mexico's territory, and the War of the Pacific (1879-84), in which Chile annexed huge and strategically rich parts of Bolivia and Peru.
A more frequent type of cross-border warfare, categorised by Loveman as ‘transnational wars of political consolidation', including wars of secession, significantly altered boundary lines at least nine times between 1823 and 1851.[867] Within nine years of declaring its independence, Gran Colombia disintegrated into three republics in 1830: Venezuela, Ecuador and Colombia. In 1823, the provinces of the former Kingdom of Guatemala - which had seen almost no violence during the independence era - seceded from the shortlived Empire (soon-to-be republic) of Mexico, to which they had been forcibly annexed in 1821-2. They established themselves as the Federal Republic of Central America, a union that fell apart in the late 1830s under the pressure of continuous war among the provincial capitals for control of the federal republic. Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica separately declared their independence. But in neither the former Gran Colombia nor the former Republic of Central America did secession deliver domestic peace; caudillo-led civil war and rebellion persisted at levels no less intense within the new countries, and in the case of Central America civil war often entailed mutual invasions of each other's territories.