How Did Presidential Republics Emerge in Spanish America during the Prolonged and Harsh Independence Process (1810–26)

Abstract

The Latin American independence process began in 1810, but this was merely the initial part of very difficult and often harsh developments, both in terms of the build-up of the new nations and of the determination of the future political institutions of these new nations, including whether they would become presidential republics; indeed, perhaps only since the beginning of the twenty-first century have presidential republics been fully established in Latin America, although some difficulties still occasionally occurred. The contrast is sharp with the orderly development of the presidential republic in the thirteen North American colonies a third of a century before Latin American countries began their independence process: this was so despite the new American republic having had to face two wars with Britain and after its first constitution, the Articles of Confederation , had proved ill-adapted and was replaced within ten years by a federal presidential compact. There was unity of purpose and widely accepted leadership in the United States, while these characteristics were almost entirely absent in the Latin American case, and, to be precise, specifically in the Spanish American case, at least as long as Brazil remained a monarchy, indeed an ‘empire’, from its independence from Portugal in 1822–1889. Why, then, was there such a contrast? Specifically, how far can the characteristics of the independence process be held responsible for at least some of the major problems which Spanish America had to face afterwards?