Category Archives: war

by | 26 March 2022 · 3:39 pm

Latin American Industry in World War II

From The Penguin History Of Latin America, by Edwin Williamson (Penguin, 2003), Kindle p. 332:

The Second World War turned out to be a watershed for Latin American industrialization. The worsening international situation had exacerbated the historic rivalry between the armed forces of Brazil and Argentina. Sensing the drift to war in Europe, the military establishments in both countries wanted to develop their own armaments industries instead of relying on imports. But the manufacture of arms required the setting-up of steel and electrical industries, and so from the 1940s the armed forces of Brazil and Argentina pressed their governments to develop an industrial base. Furthermore, as the outbreak of war created strong international demand for raw materials and foodstuffs, the Latin American export-economies boomed, and as wartime conditions abroad reduced the flow of imports, especially luxury goods, Latin American countries were able to build up large surpluses in their balance of payments: this enabled national debts to be paid off and led to the accumulation of domestic capital for investment in industrial projects.

The USA played a decisive part in fostering industrial development during these years. Needing Latin American raw materials for its war effort, it offered loans, technical expertise and equipment to assist the Latin American countries in their programmes of industrialization. During the early 1940s numerous US missions went to Latin America and signed trade agreements. The major republics duly declared war on the Axis powers and supplied the Allies with minerals and commodities. The notable exception was Argentina, where sympathy for Italy and Germany within the military junta caused it to adopt an awkward neutrality, for which it forfeited the kind of technical and financial assistance from the USA that Getúlio Vargas was getting for Brazil. The lack of US aid was an important cause of the economic difficulties which General Perón had to face in the post-war years and which contributed to his downfall in 1955. Still, even though the USA helped Latin American countries to initiate industrial development, the policy of industrialization as such was the late product of the nationalism that had evolved since the turn of the century, intensifying in the 1920s and 1930s.

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Filed under Argentina, Brazil, economics, Germany, industry, Italy, Latin America, U.S., war

by | 17 March 2022 · 10:45 am

From Habsburg to Bourbon Spain

From The Penguin History Of Latin America, by Edwin Williamson (Penguin, 2003), Kindle pp. 195-197:

The state of Spain was embodied in the weak and imbecilic Charles II, the last of the Habsburg line and a monarch incapable of male issue. Upon his death in 1700 there followed a war among the European powers to decide the Spanish succession. Philip of Anjou, the grandson of Louis XIV of France, eventually acceded to the throne of Spain, but his right to it was recognized by his enemies at the price of important concessions set out in the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713. Flanders and the Italian dominions were lost to Austria and Savoy; Great Britain kept Gibraltar and Minorca, and was allowed the exclusive right to supply African slaves to the Spanish Indies, and to an annual shipload of merchandise for trade with the American colonies; Portugal retained her smuggling centre of Colônia do Sacramento on the east bank of the River Plate. These concessions to Britain and Portugal underscored Spain’s imperial debility, since they infringed, at least for a time, the monopoly of trade with the Indies, which she had done so much to defend. Spain’s sovereignty was now reduced to the Peninsula and her realms in America and the Philippines.

This curtailment of power, though humiliating, at least unburdened Spain of dynastic possessions in Italy and the Low Countries which had drained her over the past two centuries. The Treaty of Utrecht, in fact, forced Spain to relinquish the Habsburg concept of empire, based as it had been on an essentially medieval vision of a supranational constellation of kingdoms under a single sovereign pledged to the defence of Catholic integrity in Europe. The new dynasty of French Bourbons would rule Spain as a European nation state among others, and her still very substantial dominions overseas would be regarded as resources to be exploited economically so as to strengthen her position in the theatre of European power politics. Over the course of the new century, therefore, the Bourbons were to recast the aims and methods of Spanish imperial government.

The spirit of reform significantly altered the ideological basis of the Catholic monarchy, which the Habsburgs, having taken it over from Ferdinand and Isabella, had developed as the guiding principle of their imperial statecraft. The peculiarly Spanish symbiosis of Crown and Church, which endowed the Catholic monarchy with its monopoly of legitimacy, gave way under successive Bourbon kings to a more stringent absolutism of French regalist inspiration. According to this new doctrine of the divine right of kings, the monarch was invested with the authority to rule by God Himself; his power, therefore, was not limited in principle by religious and ethical sanctions upheld by the Church, and much less so by the more ancient, medieval sense of contract with or obligation to his subjects which was still latent in Spain and which had always been much closer to the surface among the conquistadors and their successors in the Indies.

The new regalism permitted the monarch to do what the Habsburgs had been restrained from doing by the force of religious counsel: it allowed the Crown to frame policies on pragmatic grounds of national self-interest. Impracticable chimeras upon which Catholic Spain had spent so much blood and treasure – the defence of orthodoxy against Dutch rebels and English schismatics, the crusade against the Turk, the protection of Indian rights in the New World – no longer needed to be pursued beyond reasonable limits, for the light of reason had to be allowed to filter through the blinds that kept Spain in her neo-medieval ‘darkness’. And yet, those blinds could not be removed altogether; the Catholic Church was too well entrenched in the state and society and, in any case, the Bourbons realized the value of the Church as both a pillar of the social order and a unifying factor in a far-flung empire.

The ideology of the Bourbon reformers has been aptly called the Catholic Enlightenment, for it was a cautious attempt to adjust to the scientific and rationalist spirit of the eighteenth century without disturbing the fundamentals of the Catholic faith.

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by | 11 March 2022 · 7:05 am

Origins of Portugal’s Empire

From The Penguin History Of Latin America, by Edwin Williamson (Penguin, 2003), Kindle pp. 70-72:

Portugal’s experience of the Reconquest and her Iberian cultural heritage made her share many characteristics with her neighbour Castile, their cognate histories frequently crossing and overlapping with each other. As in the case of Castile, the centuries of fighting against the Muslims produced a society in which religion had a crusading quality and was closely associated with the national identity. The system of land tenure was similar to Castile’s: in the fertile, well-populated north, there were a large number of smallholders and tenant farmers; in the south the latifundium and a seigneurial regime predominated.

The Portuguese were not particularly given to seafaring. Though fishing was significant, most of the population were actually peasants who worked the land. Still, Portuguese society was motivated by aristocratic and military values, and, with its reconquest concluded some two centuries before Castile’s, Portugal’s quest for glory and riches was carried abroad to North Africa and into the Atlantic, where the spirit of adventure of a small minority was to lead to remarkable feats of maritime exploration and empire-building. Exploits overseas, however, went hand in hand with commerce, stimulated by the presence of considerable numbers of Genoese merchants and mariners who had settled along the coast, and especially in Lisbon, which was by far the most populous city.

The Portuguese monarchy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was constantly under threat from ambitious nobles, from a powerful Church, and, not least, from dynastic quarrels in which the hand of Castile was invariably suspected, and with good reason. Relations with Spain would remain ambivalent: the larger neighbour exerted a very powerful influence on culture as well as politics, but there would always exist forces of repulsion, and Portuguese foreign policy was chiefly concerned with maintaining national independence from Castile. Portugal’s long association with England – starting as a trading relationship in the twelfth century and periodically formalized by a series of treaties – stemmed from the need for a strong ally to counterbalance the perennial threat of incorporation by Spain.

A turning-point came in 1385 at the battle of Aljubarrota, when a new king, John of Aviz, nominated by the Portuguese Cortes and aided by English allies, won a victory against Castile and the Portuguese nobles. The long reign of John I (1385–1433) saw the development of a powerful monarchy capable of creating a stable nation state largely free from baronial challenges and galvanized by a renewal of the crusading spirit, though this was now directed towards Africa: the imperial phase of Portuguese history began with the taking of Ceuta in 1415. A few years later, John’s son, Prince Henry the Navigator, established a school of navigation at Sagres on the Algarve and became the patron of the voyages of exploration that would continue long after his death in 1460 and would eventually open Africa, India and the East to the Europeans.

The death of John I was followed by an interlude of aristocratic revolt and dynastic civil wars, the latter overlapping with the wars of succession which put Isabella on the Castilian throne. In Portugal, John II (1481–95) finally imposed order and proceeded, by a combination of murders and executions, to break the power of the nobility and confiscate much of its wealth. It was John II who finally created in Portugal an absolutist nation state resembling the Catholic monarchy of Spain, with the Church playing a crucial role in giving a monopoly of legitimacy to the unifying authority of the Crown.

For eighty years after John’s death, Portugal’s Catholic monarchy supervised the building of one of the most far-flung empires ever to have been created by Europeans: in 1487 the Cape of Good Hope was rounded by Bartholomew Dias; by 1498 Vasco da Gama had reached India; the year 1500 saw another Portuguese expedition discover a land that would eventually become Brazil; in the course of the sixteenth century the Portuguese established bases and factories in Ceylon, Malacca and the Spice Islands of the Indonesian archipelago; by the 1570s they had won a monopoly of the lucrative trade between China and Japan from a base established at Macao on the Chinese mainland in 1557.

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by | 5 March 2022 · 7:47 am

Post-Bolivarian Blues in Latin America

From Bolivar: American Liberator, by Marie Arana (Simon & Schuster, 2013), Kindle pp. 409-410:

No one knew more than Bolívar how imperfect the work had been. Independence had been achieved—enlightened forms of government considered—and yet the victors had emerged with no singleness of purpose, no spirit of collegiality. Warlords still wanted to rule their little fiefdoms, their undersized dreams a match for undersized abilities. It was as true in Bolivia as it was in Venezuela: Notions of a larger union seemed pompous, foreign, vaguely threatening. The colonies were dead, but the colonial mentality was very much alive. The new republics were as insular and xenophobic as Spain had encouraged its American satellites to be. Venezuelans saw Peruvians as arrogant royalists. Coastal dwellers saw mountain dwellers as benighted Indians. Southerners saw northerners as outlandish Negroes. “Goodbye, sambo!” someone yelled as General Sucre pulled out of La Paz. No one seemed to want the dream of an amalgamated America.

The cost of liberty, as Bolívar well knew, had been staggering—far more so than in the United States. Vast, populated regions of Latin America had been devastated. A revolution begun by polite society on the assumption that its wins would be painless had become mired in two decades of catastrophic losses, rivaling in carnage the twentieth century’s more heavily armed conflicts. Populations had been cut in half. Regional economies had come to a rumbling halt. Indeed, the republics Bolívar had liberated were far worse off economically than they had been under the Spaniards; whole provinces had been laid waste. Silver mines had been abandoned; farmlands burned to ash, textile production stopped cold. The chance for a new America to create a robust, interregional market had been lost to squabbling border struggles. Although indigenous and black generals appeared in the army for the first time—a phenomenon that would transform the face of South America—the great masses of Indians and blacks were no better off after the revolution. For a long while, they would be far worse off than they had been under Spain’s oppressive laws. Slavery, which Bolívar had worked hard to eradicate, had been supplanted by other forms of subjugation; Creoles had appropriated the Spanish rule. The Americas that were emerging under Bolívar’s horrified eyes were feudalistic, divisive, militaristic, racist, ruled by warlords who strove to keep the ignorant masses blinkered and under bigoted control. Eventually this would change. There is a vast difference, after all, between slavery and freedom; between opportunity and a shut door; between a ballot and totalitarian rule. But those fundamental transformations would take a century and a half to work through the continent. Latin America lay in financial and social ruin, its cities on the verge of anarchy. It was hardly the enlightened world the Liberator had envisioned.

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by | 2 March 2022 · 9:40 am

Fratricide at Ayacucho, 1827

From Bolivar: American Liberator, by Marie Arana (Simon & Schuster, 2013), Kindle pp. 334-335:

At eight o’clock, as the sun warmed the morning air, one of the Spanish generals, Juan Antonio Monet, a tall, sturdy man with a russet beard, approached the patriot lines and called out to General José María Córdova, whom he knew from former days. Monet told Córdova that in the royalist ranks, as in the patriot, there were soldiers with relatives on the opposite side: would he allow them to greet each other before hostilities began? When General Córdova consulted with Sucre, the general in chief agreed immediately. And so it was that fifty men of opposing sides met on the slopes of Cundurcunca, among them a number of brothers, to embrace and weep—as one chronicler put it—in a heartbreaking display of farewell. Indeed, for Peruvians as for Venezuelans and Colombians before them, revolution meant fratricide, and men who spoke the same language, held the same religion, even shared flesh and blood, would now set upon one another in defense of an idea. Seeing the heart-wrenching scenes, General Monet asked Córdova if there wasn’t some way to come to terms and avoid the bloodshed. Córdova answered: Only if you recognize American independence and return peacefully to Spain. Monet was taken aback and said as much: Didn’t the young patriot general realize that the Spanish army was vastly superior? Córdova responded that combat would determine whether that was true. Monet walked away shaking his head. There was no turning back.

The battle was fierce, short. The royalists clambered down Cundurcunca in their red, gold, and blue regalia, laboring mightily under the banners, their helmets glinting in the sun. Republicans in dark, somber overcoats lined up to meet them. Cries went up as they watched the enemy troops descend: “Horsemen! Lancers! What you see are hardly warriors! They are not your equals! To freedom!”—and so on, up and down the lines. Before the battle officially began, a young Spanish brigadier was first to attack and first to fall; even so, the royalists took immediate control of the action. General Valdés and his men descended on the republicans like a horde of punishing angels, splitting their formation so wide that it gaped, momentarily helpless. But patriot morale was strong and the setback spurred them to higher resolve. When Córdova cried out, “Soldiers! Man your arms! Move on to victory!” his battalion scrambled to mount a fierce retaliation and soon the course of battle changed. The patriots bayoneted royalists left and right, snatching their silver helmets as trophies. By one in the afternoon, they had taken the heights. By mid-afternoon the field was littered with the fallen. Before sundown, Canterac offered Sucre his unconditional surrender.

Almost three thousand royalists were taken prisoner, surrendering in the face of a daunting republican fervor. Perhaps it was the exhaustion after so many weeks of forced marches; or a terror of Bolívar’s famed barbarian hordes; or the dizzying altitude, which, at thirteen thousand feet, can steal the very breath from a man. Or perhaps what prevailed in the end was Sucre’s brilliant strategy to make the soldiers of the king work harder, climb higher, march longer; and then strike them with a virulent force. The white-haired viceroy La Serna, fighting bravely to the last, had to be carried off the field with injuries; General Miller, who found him by chance in one of the huts where the wounded were nursed, offered the gallant old soldier tea from his saddlebag and insisted that medics attend to him promptly. The dead amounted to 1,800 for Spain; only 300 for the republicans.

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by | 1 March 2022 · 9:48 am

San Martin’s Plans for Peru, 1822

From Bolivar: American Liberator, by Marie Arana (Simon & Schuster, 2013), Kindle pp. 299-300:

When they finally spoke about the political system San Martín had in mind for Peru, Bolívar’s suspicions were confirmed. The Protector laid out his plan for establishing a monarchy with a European prince in rule. Bolívar had heard rumors about this, but hoped they weren’t true. A year before, he had sent one of his aides, Diego Ibarra, to Lima, with a letter of congratulations for San Martín and instructions for Ibarra to learn what he could. Was San Martín considering a monarchical plan and, if so, how deeply was he committed to it? “Sound out the general’s spirit,” he ordered Ibarra, “and persuade him, if you can, against any project of erecting a throne in Peru, which would be nothing short of scandalous.” Now he was hearing about a Peruvian king from the Protector himself. San Martín explained to Bolívar that he had spoken about his plan to both viceroys; that he had sent a delegation of diplomats to England months before to discuss just such a throne and which prince or duke might fill it. If England weren’t willing, his delegates would look for qualified candidates in Belgium, France, Russia, Holland, or—even—Spain. It was the reason he had stalled in forming a Peruvian congress or drawing up a Peruvian constitution. As far as San Martín was concerned, the nation was not ready for democracy—education was in a shambles; ignorance abounded; the pillars upon which democracy could depend did not exist. Bolívar might have agreed on this last point, but he was viscerally opposed to royalty, to kings and queens, to that old, musty European system that had required so much American blood to purge. He would not hear of it. Bolívar left the meeting as somber and impenetrable as a sphinx. San Martín left it deeply mortified.

There had been no question that at every point of discussion, San Martín had been the supplicant, Bolívar the khan. The Liberator had everything the Protector needed: a winning army, the acclaim of his people, the luster of success, the recognition of a major world power. But Bolívar had given nothing; instead he had walked away deeply apprehensive of San Martín’s motives.

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by | 27 February 2022 · 9:11 am

Talking Peace with Chivalry, 1820

From Bolivar: American Liberator, by Marie Arana (Simon & Schuster, 2013), Kindle pp. 255-256:

So it was that the archenemies of one of the bloodiest episodes of South American history met on a muddy road, far from the medullas of political power. They approached one another from opposite directions, their paths as contrary as their essential natures: Bolívar had come from a long line of aristocrats and wore his pedigree lightly; Morillo, born into a family of peasants, had become Count of Cartagena in the course of an illustrious career. Bolívar was confident, spontaneous, as only the wellborn can be; Morillo was shrewd and deliberate, having scrapped for every honor he had been awarded. Into that historic moment, Bolívar rode a strong mule, was accompanied by a handful of men, and was dressed in the garb of a humble soldier. Morillo, on the other hand, set out on a magnificent horse, was clad in a uniform bespangled with decorations, and accompanied by fifty of his best officers and a full regiment of hussars. As they rode over the bare hills in the damp chill of a November morning, they might have glimpsed the sparkling expanse of Lake Maracaibo in the distance. If they had glanced south, they would have seen the splendid peaks of the cordillera. Weary of war, anxious about their own capacities to execute it, they came to that crossroad with high and not dissimilar hopes.

Morillo was first to arrive, and when he appeared at the appointed place he was soon met by Bolívar’s aide Daniel O’Leary, who announced that the Liberator was on his way. As they perched on their horses, peering expectantly down the road, the general asked what kind of escort would accompany the president of the republic. O’Leary replied that Bolívar’s retinue amounted to no more than twelve patriot officers and the three Spanish commissioners who had negotiated the armistice in Trujillo. Morillo was taken aback. “Well,” he finally managed, “I thought my escort too small for this venture, but I see that my old enemy has outdone me in chivalry. I’ll order my hussars to withdraw.” He did so immediately. The Liberator’s modest party soon appeared on the crest of the hill that overlooked Santa Ana, and Morillo moved forward to meet it. As the two neared one another, General Morillo wanted to know which of the horsemen was Bolívar. When O’Leary pointed him out, the Spaniard exclaimed, “What? That little man in the blue jacket and sergeant’s cap; the one riding the mule?” But no sooner had he said it than Bolívar was before him. The generals dismounted and embraced each other heartily. Their words were cordial, warm—filled with the kind of respect and admiration only the most serious rivals can have for one another. They headed to the private house Morillo had commandeered for the occasion, and sat down with their officers for a celebratory lunch.

For all the enmity that had passed between them, the two leaders were instantly companionable, with much to discuss. Morillo had fought in the Battle of Trafalgar only days after Bolívar had trekked to Rome as a young man and made his spirited vow on the heights of Monte Sacro. Morillo had served under the Duke of Wellington, the brother of Richard Wellesley, whose help Bolívar had solicited when the revolution was but an idea, with much blood yet to be shed. There were innumerable toasts made to the end of hostilities and the future of Spanish American understanding. “To the victories of Boyacá!” one Spanish colonel sang out. “To Colombians and Spaniards,” General La Torre added, “may they march side by side all the way to hell against the despots and the tyrants!” The men spoke of sacrifices, of heroism, of the past ten years of their lives, which had been steeped in the dark business of war.

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by | 26 February 2022 · 10:58 am

Napoleonic War Surplus in Venezuela

From Bolivar: American Liberator, by Marie Arana (Simon & Schuster, 2013), Kindle pp. 216-217, 220:

THE ORINOCO WAS BUSTLING with outsiders. Admiral Brion, who was living in one of the lavish mansions on the waterfront, was overseeing a veritable whirl of activity along the river. … War supplies, too, were suddenly becoming plentiful. In June, a British ship delivered clothing and supplies for ten thousand men; days later, Brion himself brought in a valuable cargo of arms. By the end of July, a large ship had sailed in from London, followed by a brig from New York, bearing enough muskets, pistols, gunpowder, swords, and saddles to outfit an entire army. Bolívar purchased any and all such supplies, paying for them however he could—with mules, fruit, tobacco, livestock. “Arms have been my constant concern,” Bolívar had written to Luis López Méndez, his agent in London, but now they were flowing to him in abundance. So much so that at times there was no need for the equipment. One shipment arrived with fine leather saddles for Páez’s cavalry—saddles his wild horsemen would never use. The remnants of Wellington’s war with Napoleon, nevertheless, were beginning to put Bolívar’s troops at striking advantage. Within a few months, he had stored away fifty thousand stands of arms.

…

Wellington’s victory had provided something else to the republic: regiments of seasoned war veterans. As irony would have it, British soldiers who had fought alongside General Morillo’s officers in Spain were now enlisting to fight against them in Venezuela. The two years that followed the Battle of Waterloo saw a vast reduction in the size of the British army. In April of 1817, the London Times reported that half a million ex-soldiers were coming home to Britain’s greater population of 25 million. In good times, this would have been difficult enough; but these were not good times—England and Ireland had suffered famine, riots, rampant unemployment—and soldiers were returning to almost certain poverty. When Bolívar’s London agent López Méndez announced he wanted to recruit experienced soldiers to fight in the revolution, he found himself flooded with applicants.

…

Bolívar … allowed any of the foreigners appalled by the conditions of his post to leave without reprisals or recriminations. The ones who remained would prove to be an invaluable infusion of grit and dedication. Within a month, he would be sending for more. Within five years, fifty-three ships would bring more than six thousand volunteers from Britain and Ireland to serve in South America; 5,300 actually arrived. The ones who made it up the Orinoco to the plains quickly learned that making war in that faraway terrain was no easy way to earn money. Their contributions made a great difference to the revolution in that precise moment in history. Bolívar was convinced of it. He was known to say that the real Liberator of Spanish America was his recruiting agent in London, Luis López Méndez.

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by | 25 February 2022 · 7:02 am

A Year Without Summer, 1816

From Bolivar: American Liberator, by Marie Arana (Simon & Schuster, 2013), Kindle pp. 181-182:

Eighteen sixteen was the year without a summer. As Lord Byron put it, the bright sun had vanished and stars wandered “darkling in the eternal space.” The colossal eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia on April 10, 1815—the largest volcanic event in recorded history—had traveled the globe to spew a fine ash over Europe and the Americas. A year later, the earth’s atmosphere was so saturated with sulfur that brilliant sunsets inflamed the English skies, torrential rains washed away European crops, and a persistent gloom hung over North America. At the time, few imagined that a single geologic event in a remote location could affect the entire globe, and yet there was so much evidence of a freak imbalance: stinging frosts carpeted Pennsylvania in the middle of summer, killing the livestock; in Germany, harvests failed, causing a crippling famine; a typhus epidemic swept through the Mediterranean. There were surprising ramifications. Food riots gripped England and Ireland; Luddites torched textile factories with renewed frenzy. In a dark castle in rain-pelted Switzerland, Mary Shelley wrote the novel Frankenstein. In northern Europe, J. M. W. Turner was so stunned by the fiery skies that he recorded them in magnificent canvases for years to come. In France, rampant disease prompted a new age of medical discovery. And in the Caribbean, where Bolívar prepared to relaunch his revolution, a perfect calm preceded the hurricane season, which arrived a month sooner than usual, tossing the sea with singular fury.

Eighteen sixteen also became the revolution’s cruelest year. There were wholesale beheadings, hangings, firing squads—all in the name of “pacification.” General Morillo had installed draconian laws to rid Venezuela—Spain’s most defiant colony—of revolutionaries once and for all. The royalists arrested suspects in rural backwaters and relocated them to heavily defended towns, where they could be overseen. Anyone found wandering the countryside was a candidate for the gallows. Morillo’s men burned crops, purged the forests of fruit trees, killed farm animals, impounded horses, and executed any blacksmith capable of forging a lance’s head or any other weapon. Royalist commanders exacted taxes and punitive fines, making themselves rich and powerful in the process. Patriots, on the other hand, were stripped of whatever property they had.

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by | 24 February 2022 · 8:01 am

Bolivar’s 1815 Letter from Jamaica

From Bolivar: American Liberator, by Marie Arana (Simon & Schuster, 2013), Kindle pp. 175-177:

One of Bolívar’s many writings during that time was an astonishingly prescient letter addressed to an Englishman in Jamaica who expressed interest in his struggle for independence. More than a friendly missive, this was a masterful tour d’horizon. Clearly Bolívar meant it to enjoy wide dissemination. Written in vibrant prose and reflecting a profound grasp of the legacy of colonialism, the letter was read at first only by the small English circle for whom it was intended. It would take more than a dozen years to be retranslated into Spanish. But the letter served as a blueprint for Bolívar’s political thought, and its ideas would emerge in countless documents during those formative days.

The “Letter from Jamaica” declared unequivocally that the bond between America and Spain had been severed forevermore: it could never be repaired. Although the “wicked stepmother” was laboring mightily to reapply her chains, it was too late. The colonies had tasted freedom. “Our hatred for Spain,” he declared, “is vaster than the sea between us.”

In turns a paean to the inexpressible beauty of the continent and a shriek of fury at its despoliation, Bolívar’s letter is a brilliant distillation of Latin America’s political reality. His people, he explains, are neither Indian nor pardos nor European, but an entirely new race, for which European models of government are patently unsuitable. Monarchies, to these Americans, were abhorrent by definition; and democracy—Philadelphia style—inappropriate for a population cowed and infantilized by three hundred years of slavery. “As long as we do not have the political virtues that distinguish our brothers of the north,” he argued, “a democratic system, far from rescuing us, can only bring us ruin. . . . We are a region plagued by vices learned from Spain, which, through history, has been a mistress of cruelty, ambition, meanness, and greed.” Most important to the welfare of these fledgling republics, Bolívar insisted, was a firm executive who employed wisdom, dispensed justice, and ruled benevolently for life. His America needed a strong, centralized government—one that addressed the people’s wretched condition, not a perfectly conceptualized, theoretical model dreamed up by idealists on some far-flung shore.

But the “Letter from Jamaica” was more than mere propaganda; it was inspired prophecy. In it, Bolívar predicted that revolution-torn Mexico would opt for a temporary monarchy, which indeed it did. He pictured the loose confederation of nations that later became Central America. Given Panama’s “magnificent position between two mighty seas,” he imagined a canal. For Argentina, he foresaw military dictatorships; for Chile, “the blessings that flow from the just and gentle laws of a republic.” For Peru, he predicted a limbo in which privileged whites would not tolerate a genuine democracy, colored masses would not tolerate a ruling aristocracy, and the constant threat of rebellion was never far from hand. All these would come to pass. In some countries, one could even say, Bolívar’s visions still hold.

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