Bloody Independence and the Culture of Secrecy
By Jamie Bisher
In the 1820s, independence dawned on sharply divided societies plagued by disease and illiteracy, where trade and open communication with neighboring regions had been prohibited by law for centuries, where only a small elite had ever tasted the most basic modern political freedoms. Iberia’s feudal hold on Latin America’s five viceroyalties reluctantly gave way to a modern era of independent, competing states. The five viceroyalties were: 1) New Spain, stretching from Oregon and Georgia at its northern corners to Costa Rica; 2) New Granada, encompassing Panama, Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador; 3) Peru and most of Bolivia; 4) La Plata, covering the rest of Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, Argentina and parts of Chile; and 5) Brazil.
However independence did not mean tranquility, and internal turmoil and despotism reigned far more often than occasional lapses into rule of law. Latin America’s adolescent states were bankrupt and could not shake the bad habits ingrained by three hundred years of European exploitation that had manipulated all life and natural resources with the cold efficiency of an ant colony. Long-suppressed emotions were suddenly unleashed by independence, and warfare was pervasive, sparked by racial animosity, violence between separatists and centralists, boundary disputes, territorial conquest, intervention to protect business or collect debts, envy of a neighbor’s natural resources, religious enmity, political conflict between Conservative and Liberal ideologues, caudilloism (as Latin America’s own brand of warlordism has become known), or, most often, dangerous combinations of these explosive ingredients. |
Class struggle, however, is notably absent from the principal causes of 19th century warfare in Latin America. Politics, wealth and power were dominated by remaining gachupines, European-born aristocrats who had traditionally been handed elite administrative and merchant posts, and criollos, ambitious American-born descendents of European stock. The laboring classes and cannon fodder were made up of ladinos and Indians. Ladinos descended from the Spanish foot soldiers and tradesmen who intermarried with the Indians and, although their living conditions were often as precarious as that of the Indians, could purchase land and were generally not subject to forced labor. Indians were typically treated with contempt and subjected to burdensome taxes and forced labor systems driven by various institutions leftover from colonial servitude such as encomiendas, reportimientos and mandamientos.
Regardless of class or ethnic makeup, surreptitious social structures flourished in the shadows. Behind the veneer of assimilation, many Indian communities quietly maintained a parallel political chain of command that served as a conduit for administrative and legal contacts with the official ladino governing structure. A common thread through all classes was the presence of secret societies, “ascending movements” of cells of upperclass plotters gathering in salons or ladino activists whispering in marketplaces and taverns, while remnants of the traditional indigenous hierarchy sought “refuge in secrecy.” |
Years before the Spanish Royalists were driven from the American mainland the victors of independence began fighting over forms of government. Even the great liberators were not immune. As early as the 1820s, an ideological schism among followers of Simon Bolivar and Francisco de Paula Santander cleaved freedom fighters into opposing Conservative and Liberal camps, foreshadowing comparable divisive polarization of domestic politics across Latin America. Conservatives generally favored a unitary state with a strong central government and close relationship with the Catholic Church. Theoretically Liberals wanted a federal system with strong provincial governments and insisted on a clear division between church and state, although some were fiercely anticlerical. These ideologies aroused fierce partisan feelings that, in their most savage forms of expression, littered both urban and rural landscapes with cadavers. “This was not a case of Whig against Tory or Republican versus Democrat,” explained political analyst John Gunther, “it was Lancaster against York, or Montague versus Capulet.” Nevertheless, this partisan passion often masked other volatile emotions that arose from class, racial or religious friction, commercial or boundary squabbles, lust for power, land and treasure, or personality cults. Ideological reversals and betrayals by civilian leaders and military officers were not uncommon, while most soldiers were recruited by force and had little or no say in ideological matters. In many countries Conservative and Liberal principles fell by the wayside as raw political power was forged through personal allegiances and party affiliations came to mean little more than cynical brand names for one despot or another. Generations of partisan bloodshed retarded the political, economic and social development of all Latin America, and placed a premium on the high risk arts of espionage and counterespionage.
Ill-defined borders became a constant source of disagreement between Latin America’s new nations. Poorly defined colonial borders that had previously sparked disputes between European empires were inherited by the newly independent governments, which were desperate for resources, tax revenues and prestige. These border disputes would become the seeds of animosity that transcended ideological harmony or differences. They caught the eye of many a caudillo looking for a cause celebre to which he could hitch his rising fortunes and focus intelligence and military operations. By mid-century no less than nineteen separate border disputes simmered from one end of Latin America to the other (Mexico-United States; Brazil-Paraguay; Guatemala-Great Britain; Argentina-Brazil; Colombia-Ecuador-Peru; Brazil-Uruguay; Colombia-Brazil; Argentina-Paraguay; Brazil-Venezuela; Argentina-Chile; Venezuela-Great Britain; Argentina-Great Britain; Colombia-Venezuela; Argentina-Uruguay; Bolivia-Brazil; Colombia-Nicaragua; Argentina-Chile; Bolivia-Paraguay; and Chile-Peru). Most disputes remained unsettled in 1914.
Warlords and dictators filled the political vacuum left by the departing Spanish administrators. Democratic idealism was sparse in the lean post-independence years, and competing, yet ill-defined national identities undermined any thought of Pan-American solidarity. The costly struggles for independence left new Latin American states bankrupt and some with a ghastly human toll (e.g., Venezuela, where independence struggles cost some 300,000 lives out of a population of 800,000). A quasi-feudal caudillo tradition took hold that stunted economic and social growth, creating a hospitable climate for violent domestic power struggles and catastrophic wars against neighbors for territory and resources.
Dozens of wars large and small racked the continent throughout the 19th century. After a fourteen-year struggle for independence, the United Provinces (modern Argentina) fought Brazil to win Uruguay’s independence in the mid-1820s, then degenerated into a fratricidal slaughter that raged for another forty years. Uruguay plunged into an intraclass conflict that seethed for seventy years.
The stress of war with Peru fractured Bolivar’s Gran Colombia into Ecuador, Colombia and Venezuela in 1828.
The stress of war with Peru fractured Bolivar’s Gran Colombia into Ecuador, Colombia and Venezuela in 1828.
A union of Central American states declared independence in 1821, aborted a union with Mexico in 1823, and dissolved in 1840 after years of continual bloodletting between the predominately Guatemalan Indian Conservatives and Liberal criollos and mestizos.
An 1836 attempt by Bolivia and Peru to form a Confederation of the Andes was defeated on the battlefield by Chile five years later. Meanwhile illegal immigrants from the United States led a successful war for secession in the Mexican territory of Texas. Ten years later Mexico lost California, Arizona and New Mexico to the United States. At the same time, Yucatan fractured along political and ethnic fault lines and spiraled into a vicious “caste war” that pitted “Spanish” Creole and ladino society against a resurrected Mayan nation for the next three generations. |
From 1864 to 1870, the Triple Alliance of Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay devastated Paraguay, which lost more than half its population in a horrific war for regional power.
In Central America, the 1865 death of Guatemala’s archconservative champion, the illiterate religious fanatic Rafael Carrera, begat a violent Liberal reaction that propelled the anti-clerical Justo Rufino Barrios to power eight years later.
Between 1879 and 1883, Chile again battled Peru and Bolivia in the War of the Pacific, depriving the former of a nitrate-rich province and the latter of her precious seacoast. The bitterness that these wars spawned still persists.
Between 1879 and 1883, Chile again battled Peru and Bolivia in the War of the Pacific, depriving the former of a nitrate-rich province and the latter of her precious seacoast. The bitterness that these wars spawned still persists.
The 1890s saw resurgent civil strife as the most developed countries—Argentina, Brazil and Chile—struggled with violent socioeconomic growing pains over interclass power-sharing. Latin America’s internal conflicts reached a crescendo in Colombia’s War of a Thousand Days. It spanned the centuries, climaxed seventy years of hostilities between Conservatives, Liberals and their feudal peasant armies, and left no less than 100,000 soldiers dead, the country in ruins and the treasury empty. As relative tranquility dawned on South America at the turn of the century, wars between caudillos continued to simmer in Central America, cloaked in the usual fascade of Liberal-Conservative rivalry. The bloodshed and terror further ingrained cultures of secrecy, suspicion and treachery.
In the background, warfare seethed continuously against indigenous peoples from the Rio Grande to Punta Arenas. Governments openly attempted to exterminate, enslave, confine or constrain native people who dared defy their authority–Araucanians in Chile, Ranqueles in Argentina, Charrua in Uruguay, Mayans and Yaqui in Mexico, various Amazon tribes in Brazil, Bolivia and Venezuela. It was not all one-sided. In Yucatan, the Maya revolted in 1847 and swarmed to the outskirts of Merida and Campeche. Mayhem reigned the forests for generations. “Spanish” and Maya columns swapped assaults and ambushes, leaving ghosts of atrocities in smoldering towns, villages and plantations, the economy in ruins, and the population in decline. In the Mayan guerrillas’ minimalist organizational structure, the only staff position in their high command was intelligence officer, “who regularly sent agents to infiltrate Yucatecan villages to learn the size and condition of camp garrisons and their intentions and to keep abreast of white politics…” Networks of Maya women behind the lines of battle fed intelligence to companies of guerrillas that regularly annihilated well-equipped columns of Mexican troops until Mausers changed the equations of battle in the 1890s. Even in Argentina, the army was conducting “pacification” campaigns in remote territories as late as 1912. A campaign launched in September 1911 covered some 90,000 square miles along the frontiers of Paraguay and Bolivia after a handful of Argentine soldiers were killed at an isolated outpost. Colonel Rostagno’s cavalry column never engaged any hostiles, but buttressed Argentine authority among the 8,000 Indians living along the Paraguay, Paraná and Pilcomayo Rivers. Governments put a lid on the political aspirations of surviving Indian nations, and they became another element in the culture of secrecy.
Domestic intelligence was a necessity without which no Latin American government could expect to survive. Though written for Venezuela, the words of one observer also applied to the chief executives of the other republics:
The sword of revolution always hangs suspended by a single hair over the head of every ruler… He never knows what moment it may fall. He is continually on the watch. He gives heed to every rumor and notes every sign of opposition. A revolution, if successful, may mean for him death, exile, imprisonment or confiscation of property.
The sword of revolution always hangs suspended by a single hair over the head of every ruler… He never knows what moment it may fall. He is continually on the watch. He gives heed to every rumor and notes every sign of opposition. A revolution, if successful, may mean for him death, exile, imprisonment or confiscation of property.
Foreign and military intelligence focused on neighbors. Most Latin American conflicts involved small armies operating over vast spaces where war-fighting skills, superior weapons, leadership and finance factored heavily to eke out victory. Success turned on imagination and innovation rather than brute strength, and intelligence and deception often provided the edge that led to triumph. Latin American governments and political factions had long experience playing off one European power against another, and the outbreak of war in Europe would promise new opportunities as well as challenges for Latin America’s internal intelligence establishments.
Copyright 2019, Jamie Bisher