History of Contemporary Latin American Politics

No student of contemporary Latin American politics can begin to understand the complexity of the region's political landscape without studying the history of the region and the varying movements that transformed the colonies of Spain and to a significantly lesser degree, Portugal, into republics required to function autonomously. Brooke Larson (Text) is one author who considered how a large number of forces coalesced in the Andes region between 1810 and 1910 to create new liberalism movements and their attendant governance structures in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia. This particular author stresses the fact that in the building of these new nations, the seeds of conflict between colonial elites and indigenous peoples played a vital role in shaping the development of new countries. It is interesting that other authors, including Martin and Wasserman (Text) make much the same point, an idea that will be further explicated in this essay.

Several important factors certainly shaped the historical development of Latin American countries during the colonial and republican eras. One cannot understand this process of development without recognizing the overwhelming significant role played by the Church -- the Roman Catholic Church -- which established itself as a major economic, religious, and political force within the entire region. Priests accompanied the first Conquistadores and remained behind to establish their own missions and plantations; like the noble and sem

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e late eighteenth century failed largely because of the limited coordination and cooperation between the lower and upper classes. However, Charles Walker (Text), using the nation of Peru as his primary focus, demonstrates quite clearly that the main impetus for and barrier to meaningful development after colonialism ended was this vast distance between the classes. The distance between the classes led almost invariably to conflicting goals and objectives with respect to independence, different strategies for land reform, demands on the part of the poor for inclusion in government decisionmaking, and a counter-reaction on the part of colonial elites (bolstered by the Catholic Church) who saw little or no need for any sort of major change in governance structures or political relations upon independence. Of course, with revolution, as described by Rugeley (Text), came new conflicts between the different castes in various countries and, in addition, conflict between the peasants in the rural countryside and urban elites. In Yucatan, as described by Rugeley (Text), European governmental transfers of territory resulted in the placement of Napoleon Bonaparte's brother, Joseph, as the ruler of the Iberian Peninsula in 1808. This in

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