en little sovereign states broke away from Spain, they discovered that their new subjects felt these newly established governments lacked legitimacy (Winn 83). These new states were loosely formed by a ragged assortment of courts, custom houses, and military units. In actual practice their power was nearly ineffectual when placed against the competing wills of well-established and wealthy landowning families. Those with money and not those in government ruled causing great instability in these newly founded states. What resulted were reoccurring bouts of civil strife and unstable politics. Simon Bolivar, one of Spanish America's great freedom fighters, sadly observed near his death that "America is ungovernable. Those who have served the revolution have ploughed the sea" (Winn 83). Winn underscores the instability of the region, the near impossibility of establishing sustaining independent sovereign-
ties by citing these statistics: The Central Americans had spli
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