Caudillismo

Caudillismo After Independence in Spanish America

We will now elaborate on the limited meaning of caudillismo restricted to the framework of the struggles to control power that followed independence in Spanish America. In 1845, the book Facundo, written by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, provided the classical interpretation of caudillismo in Spanish America in the 1800s. From that standpoint, caudillismo is the expression of political barbarism and the antithesis of a government that ensures security, freedom, and ownership rights for a country's inhabitants. Sarmiento's book is a portrait of Facundo Quiroga, the “Tiger of the Plains,” a caudillo in the first half of the 19th century. In Quiroga, Sarmiento believes that he sees the incarnation of the antinomy of civilization and barbarism faced by the peoples of the Americas as a result of their revolutionary experience and geography—the desert—which had turned violence into a lifestyle. Quiroga in the Argentine pampas and José Antonio Paéz in the Venezuela prairies represent caudillismo as a system of government and type of political leadership. Physical vigor, spontaneous cruelty, and the rusticity inherent in the rural world they come from can account for the despotism of the regimes they represent. Antonio López de Santa Anna from Mexico appears as the “Attila of civilization” and Juan Manuel de Rosas as the “River Plate Caligula” of Argentina.

Latin American historiography and the contributions of European and U.S. studies revealed practically unknown facets of the caudillismo phenomenon in the postindependence period, which led to a better understanding of an era obscured by myths and legends. The caudillo figures started to appear with more nuances than in the view of their contemporaries, and it was noted that their governments, in many cases, adapted traditional legality within the emergence of a new context.

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