Latin America: Its Rise and Progress

by Francisco García Calderón

GABINO BARREDA.
Great Mexican Educationalist
GENERAL JOSÉ ANTONIO PAEZ.
President of Venezuela (1831-1935 and 1838-1842)

The American élite were monarchists. In liberating a continent their generals and statesmen professed to endow the new nations with the stability of a monarchy. Iturbide was Emperor of Mexico. The lieutenants of Bolivar offered the latter a crown; Paez persistently held the imperial ambition before him. Belgrano, in 1816, at the Congress of Tucuman, stated that the best form of government for the Argentine was "a tempered monarchy"; and many deputies in that Assembly demanded the restoration of the throne of the Incas and of its traditional seat at Cuzco: in short, the creation of an American dynasty.

Bolivar wished to see Colombia and Spanish America constitutional monarchies with foreign princes. Ministers were to exercise a policy "of vigilance or defence, of mediation or influence, of protection or tutelage" on the part of the great European states in respect of the Colombian nation. Other partisans of the monarchy were Flores, Sucre, Monteagudo, Garcia del Rio, Riva-Agüero, and the Argentine director Posadas, who wished to establish that form of government "on solid and permanent foundations" in the provinces of La Plata; Dean Funes, the Colombians Nariño, Mosquera, Briceno Mendez, and others. The founders of South American independence understood that only a strong government could save the new nations from demagogy, anarchy, warfare between military chiefs, and untimely provincial ambitions. They wanted autonomy without licence, monarchy without despotism, and political solidity without Spanish suzerainty.

Despite this conviction on the part of the revolutionaries, South America saw the birth of the Republic. Alberdi wrote that its origin was involuntary, and that it was the result of European indifference and Yankee egoism; more than involuntary, it was spontaneous. The demagogues and the crowd accepted it as the negation of monarchy. The latter symbolised the Gothic despotism, the old humiliating domination, the persistence of castes and municipal privilege. In the popular mind, naturally of a simplifying tendency, monarchy was slavery; anarchy and the republic were liberty; there was no distinction between the King of Spain and other princes, between the absolutism of Ferdinand VII. and the constitutional monarchy of England. A universal hatred condemned all kings. The republic was not so much an organisation or a political system as a negation, and indissolubly bound up with it were the cardinal ideas of country, equality, and liberty.

Monarchy offered America stability and independence; it would have prevented civil war and avoided half a century of anarchy. It was the sole American tradition. The battles of the Revolution gave the hegemony to ambitious generals; against these a central government, above the quarrels of parties, would have defended liberal institutions. A constitutional prince would have given these divided nations unity and continuity, under the pressure of which ambitions, parties, and classes would finally have found their places. The social elevation of half-castes and mulattos would have been less violent under such a system.

Finally, the American monarchy would have entered into the group of Occidental nations, and the Monroe doctrine would not have isolated her politically from the Europe that sent her men, money, and ideas.

But would it have been possible to found respectable and lasting dynasties in America? The fall of two empires, Mexico and Brazil, tells us that republicanism is obscurely implicated with the destinies of the country. The new States had no nobles to surround a prince, nor could they have supported the luxury of a court.

The equalitarian instinct condemned all hierarchies in America, and there were no princes to become creators of nationality as in modern Europe. The viceroys and semi-feudal barons exercised an ephemeral empire and were not Americans; the colonies were used to frequent changes of authority. To these reasons in favour of a republic we must add the danger that foreign monarchies might have involved the continent in the diplomatic complications of Europe. Perhaps even the Holy Alliance would have led the colonies back to Spain, as a prodigal child is led back to its parents.

Bolivar expounded the defects of a foreign monarchy. To the imported king he would have preferred the irremovable president and the English senate, and if in the face of advancing anarchy he glanced at the question of European princes he soon understood that it could never prove a radical solution of the problems of the New World. "There is no power more difficult to maintain than that of a new prince" he told the Bolivians. There were in America "neither great nobles nor great prelates, and without these two props no monarchy is permanent." To the Liberator kings symbolised tyranny; he connected independence with republicanism, and believed that nature itself would oppose the monarchical system in America. In 1829, in a letter to Vergera, the Colombian Minister of Foreign Affairs, he expressed his arguments against the monarchy with great precision: "No foreign prince," he wrote, "would accept as his patrimony a principality which was anarchical and without guarantees; the national debts and the poverty of the country leave no means to entertain a prince and a court, even miserably; the lower classes would take alarm, fearing the effects of aristocracy and inequality; the generals and the ambitious of every stamp could never support the idea of seeing themselves deprived of the supreme command; the new nobility indispensable to a monarchy would issue from the mass of the people, with every species of jealousy on the one hand and of pride on the other. No one would patiently endure such a miserable aristocracy, steeped in ignorance and poverty and full of ridiculous pretensions." The creator of five nations, Bolivar was profoundly conscious of the new social body, a disturbed and disorganised mass. He understood that the ambition of his lieutenants and the equalitarian tendency of the mob would oppose an American monarchy or a foreign principality. Iturbide and Maximilian, two emperors dethroned and shot, have justified his objections.