Latin America: Its Rise and Progress

by Francisco García Calderón

The caudillos: their action—Revolutions—Divorce between written Constitutions and political life—The future parties—The bureaucracy.

The development of the Ibero-American democracies differs considerably from the admirable spirit of their political charters. The latter include all the principles of government applied by the great European nations: the equilibrium of powers, natural rights, a liberal suffrage, and representative assemblies, but the reality contradicts the idealism of the statutes imported from Europe. The traditions of the prevailing race, in fact, have created simple and barbarous systems of government. The caudillo is the pivot of this political system: leader of a party, of a social group, or a family whose important relations make it powerful, he enforces his tyrannical will upon the multitude. In him resides the power of government and the law. On his permanent action depends the internal order of the State, its economic development, and the national organisation. His authority is inviolable, superior to the Constitution and its laws.

All the history of America, and the inheritance of the Spaniard and the Indian, has ended in the exaltation of the caudillo. Government by caciques, absolute masters, like the caudillos themselves, is very ancient in Spain, as was shown by Joaquin Costa in his analysis of the foundations of Spanish politics. In each province, in each city, was a central personage in whom justice and might were incarnated; admired by the crowd, obeyed by opinion, enforcing his manners and his ideas. The American Indians obeyed caciques, and the first conquerors quickly saw that by winning over the local chiefs they would at the same time subject the native populations. The existence of the caudillos may also be explained by territorial influences. It has been written that the desert is monotheistic; over its arid uniformity one imposing God reigns supreme. It is the same with the steppes, the pampas, and the table-lands of America; vast and monotonous tracts; Paez and Quiroga were divinities of such regions. No other force could limit their authority. Contrasted with the uniform level of mankind which is the work of the plains, their firm chieftainship assumed divine attributes. American revolutions are like the Moorish wars directed by mystic Kaids.

Señor Raphael Salillas writes that in Spain the cacique is a hypertrophy of the political personage; he symbolises the excess of power and of the ambition of Spanish individualism. In America the first conquistadors quarrelled for the supreme authority. The civil wars of the Conquest arose from conflicts between chiefs; none of them could conceive of power as real unless it was unlimited and despotic. After them the all-powerful viceroy, a demi-god in his powers, exercised a similar domination. The South American President, the heir to the traditions of the governors of the colonial epoch, also possesses the maximum of authority; the Constitution confers upon him powers like those of the Czars of Russia.

Power for its own sake is the ideal of such men. The less important chieftains are satisfied by the government of a province; the great leader aspires to rule a republic. Questions of personality are the prevailing characteristics of politics; and despotic rulers abound. When a "Regenerator" usurps the supreme power a "Restorer" appears to dispute it with him; then a "Liberator," and finally a "Defender of the Constitution." The lesser gods fight to their hearts' content, and the democracy accepts the victor, in whom it admires the representative leader, the robust creation of the race. Such a man is not like the character of Ibsen's, who is strong in his isolation; in the caudillo the average characteristics of the nation, its vices and its qualities, are better defined and more strongly accentuated; he obeys his instincts and certain fixed ideas; he conceives of no ideals; he is impressionable and fanatical.

Señor Ayarragarray distinguishes two varieties of caudillo; the cunning and the violent. The latter was above all peculiar to the military period of Ibero-American history. The leader of a band that ravaged like the Huns, he ruled by terror and audacity, enforcing the discipline of the barracks in civil life. The caudillo of the cunning type exercised a more prolonged moral dictatorship; he belongs to a period of transition between the military period and the industrial period. This new master retained the supreme power by lies and subterfuges. A half-civilised tyrant, he used wealth as others used force, and instead of brutally thrusting himself on the people he employed a system of tortuous corruption.

The rule of the caudillos led to presidential government. The Constitutions established assemblies; but tradition triumphed in spite of these theoretical structures. Since the colonial period centralisation and unity have been the American forms of government.

In the person of the President of these democracies resides all the authority which usually devolves upon the public functionaries. He commands the army, multiplies the wheels of administration, and surrounds himself with doctors of law and Prætorian soldiers. The Assemblies obey him; he intervenes in the course of elections, and obtains the Parliamentary majorities that he requires. The upper magistracy is sometimes indocile to the desires of the Government, but in the life of the provinces the judges depend absolutely upon the political leaders. The supreme direction of the finances, the army, the fleet, and the administration in general rests with the President, as before the republican era it belonged to the viceroy.

The parties fight among themselves, not only for power, but to obtain this omnipotent presidency. They realise that the chief of the Executive is the effective agent of all political changes; that ministers and parliaments are only secondary factors in political life. An Argentine sociologist, Señor Joaquin Gonzalez, has said very justly that "each governmental period is characterised by the condition and the worth of the man who presides over it. This presidential system, in default of a solid and elevated political education, has in great measure favoured the return to the personal régime."

To this system correspond the political groups without programmes; men do not struggle for the triumph of ideas, but for that of certain individuals. The consecrated terms lose their traditional meaning. There are civilists who uphold militarism; liberals who strive to increase the presidential authority; nationalists who favour cosmopolitanism; constitutionalists who violate the political charter. The personal system groups conservatives and liberals together. Even in Chili, where the activity of the parties has been unusually continuous, the older parties have split up into shapeless factions. The President establishes his despotic authority over the confusion of these rival groups; he tries to dissolve the small factions, to divide them, in order to rule them.