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 semi-noble Spanish and Peruvians who elected to remain in Latin America to carve out their fortunes, the Church saw indigenous peoples as a resource to be exploited (and, of course, converted to Christianity). Like the landowning elites, the Church envisioned a form of corporatism for the region that emphasized its usefulness as a source of raw materials to enrich local landowners ads well as the European monarchs and nations that held sway over local affairs. Thus...