Latin American "Strong Man"

"We are going to teach the South American republics to

elect good men" (U.S. President Woodrow Wilson).

The sentence quoted above is illustrative not only of the U.S. attitude of hegemonic paternalism toward Latin America, but also of the persistent role of personalism in Latin American politics. Wilson, it may be noted, did not say that he was going to teach the Latin Americans to "establish good institutions." He could hardly have done so, since the formal structures of most Latin American republics were then and are now modelled more or less closely on that of the United States itself. He focused on "good men" because the general perception outside (and often inside) Latin America was that the region was dominated by "bad men," whose personal power overrode that of the formal institutions of government. The coup and the caudillo are enduring figures in our image of Latin America  justly so, perhaps, in a region where there were more than 100 successful revolution

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al obedience. He could not have such a relationship with his armed followers, however; nor could he create a bureaucratic military system to control them. His control over them was necessarily personalistic in character. The prolonged and fierce wars of independence against Spain cut the centralizing civil bureaucracies of the nascent republics loose from their anchor in the Spanish monarchy. They continued to function as bureaucracies, so that the map of independent Spanish America was drawn from the most part along the same lines as the subdivisions under Spanish rule. These subdivisions could not be effectively unified into an "Estados Unidos del Sur" on the one hand; nor on the other hand could they easily be further fragmented. But the bureaucratic centralized systems lacked any means of defining how leadership at the top should be established. The idealistic goals of the liberals who originated the independence movements were quickly disappointed, and the military leaders who had actually fought the Spaniards tended to move into the vacuum. But these men had in the war been answerable to no one but themselves, and so they continued. Their armies came not out of a longestablished military tradition, but out of the
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Approximate Word count = 3265
Approximate Pages = 13 (250 words per page)

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