The Lingering Spanish Colonial Legacy of Latin America

Latin America has never truly thrown off the mantle of Spanish colonialism. In the years subsequent to independence from Spain, as political ideologies separated from each other in forms of conservatism and liberalism, conservative leaders would lay claim to the Spanish paternalist policy toward indígenas to garner native support.^[1] Latin American democracy has evolved from the dynamic of opposition by the masses to paternalist ideas promoted by ruling elites, colonial, military, or popular rulers. Paternalism is the lingering colonial legacy of Latin America.

The paternalist attitude has its roots in the earliest heroes of the Latin American wars of independence from Spain such as Simon Bolivar, “the Liberator.” Bolivar was an educated creole who was influenced greatly by Enlightenment ideals. However, in his description of an inherited senate ruling an independent Venezuela, Bolivar claimed that “[d]evoted to the government because of a natural interest in its own preservation a hereditary senate would always oppose any attempt on the part of the people to infringe upon the jurisdiction and authority of their magistrates.” Bolivar continues, “It must be confessed that most men are unaware of their best interests and that they constantly endeavor to assail them in the hands of their custodians…” In this statement, Bolivar simultaneously supports a paternal and conservative political vision. In ensuing years, Bolivar’s larger-than-life mythos would bequeath a heritage of paternalism to succeeding leaders.^[2]

Paternalism is often implied intrinsically in a variety of types of regimes. For example, paternalism is expressed in Argentine sociologist Fernando N. A. Cuevillas’ definition of the caudillo, the politico-military strongman who often controlled the state in Latin American countries:

I would use “caudillaje” to apply to that regime which consists of the personification or incarnation of authority, where he who governs acts with extraordinary charismatic moral ascendancy over his people: advising them, guiding them, leading them paternally. The power of the caudillos is inspired authority before it is juridical authority. Caudillaje appears as a social institution full of ethical content (political and military control, the authentic totality of power, the psychic leadership of the governed, the moral magnetism of the leader’s personality), which makes it most suitable for those States whose political life is determined by the integration of individual and collective traditional values.^[3]

Such a definition of the caudillo fits then Augusto Pinochet of Chile, a dictator who came to power in a 1973 coup d’etat of a democratically elected government. Pinochet established what has become known as a “protected democracy,” a concept incompatible with traditional liberal democracy such as the United States maintains. Protected democracy as described by Claudia Heiss is “the notion that people must be protected from themselves and from organizations that might subvert the existing political order…” Both Spanish imperial masters and New World conservative elites operated as paternalists to maintain the existing political order. Latin American military dictatorships used protected democracy reforms reinforce paternalist policies. For example, Pinochet used a form of protected democracy that imposed the preservation of traditional values such as Roman Catholicism, “love for the fatherland, and a particular understanding of the family…” In taking power, Pinochet claimed to defend these values from foreign as well as domestic threats.^[4]

Traditional constitutional democracy requires that all military forces be subordinate to elected civilian authorities. However, because of paternalist tendencies in senior military leadership, where many caudillos in the Twentieth Century including Augusto Pinochet originated, democratic rule is often challenged by a military that is not effectively under civilian control. Civil-military relations are complicated nearly everywhere in Latin America and are a source of serious tension for many nations. Often this tension is simply a renewal of the struggle against paternalism by disfranchised populations.^[5]

Ultimately, argues Moises Arce, Bolivar’s paternalist heritage has led to a “…sense of marginalization and discrimination alongside a political system that produces strong barriers to genuine participation…” that has contributed to a renewal of protest politics in Latin America. Referring to Bolivia’s struggle for true liberal democracy, Arce offers that “[a]lthough the ability to form coalitions had given the Bolivian party system a measure of stability, these same coalitions had effectively shut out the opposition from access to the decision-making process.” Those frustrated groups shut out of governance have had to resort to “extrasystemic means,” such as demonstration and protest that are integral to a democratic system, to effect change. This conflict is a conflict against traditional paternalism.^[6]

In Bolivia, as in the rest of Latin America, paternalism has created a civil society where paternalism itself is the standard against which to judge the relative development of democracy. Leon Zamosc, in his article “The Indian Movement and Political Democracy in Ecuador,” uses the definition of civil society as:

the ensemble of social practices that generate a space of voluntary association and the sets of relational networks, or social actors, that occupy that space. Within this scope, the cast of civil society actors includes all voluntary groups formed or the sake of the common aspirations and concerns of its members. This formula is useful because it grasps civil society on its own terms, avoiding the pitfalls of definitions that imply assumptions about its relationships with the political institutions, such as the idea that civil society is necessarily autonomous from the state, necessarily opposed to the state, or necessarily good for democracy.^[7]

By addressing Latin America on its own terms, paternalism, the implied or explicit idea that “men do not know what is in their own best interest,” comes into focus as a source of conflict, irrespective of the socioeconomic origins of a given regime.

In Pinochet’s departure from power and the ending of his Chilean dictatorship, he reinforced the state paternalist structure formally through arbitrary reforms of the Chilean constitution, this time by granting the military budgetary and administrative autonomy. In the new system that would fill Pinochet’s place, Heiss states the military was “…a guardian to defend the nation against threats but also to decide when such threats existed…” Even a duly elected legislative body or an independence judiciary was insufficient to protect the masses from themselves. Military functions were actually expanded in post-dictatorship, nominally democratic, Chile.^[8]

The idea that there needs to be a “watch dog” of sorts at the national level of governance was also a paternalist impulse expressed by Simon Bolivar in his proposed 1826 constitution of Bolivia. He devises a fourth branch of government he calls “the Censors” that “…are the prosecuting attorneys [fiscales] against the government in defense of the Constitution and popular rights…” The Censors would “safeguard morality, the sciences, the arts, education, and the press. The Censors exercise the most fearful yet the most august authority. They can condemn to eternal opprobrium arch criminals and usurpers of the sovereign authority. They can bestow public honors upon citizens who have distinguished themselves by their probity and public service. The scepter of glory has been placed in their hands…” Pinochet’s autonomous military filled much the same role as Bolivar’s Censors.^[9]

Similarly, because of Bolivar’s inherent paternalism, it is in him that an early dynamic, the conflict between a paternalist government and popular government, for the evolution of democracy in Latin America can be witnessed. In the same remarks to the 1812 Congress of Angostura, in which he declares that “most men are unaware of their best interests, Bolivar naively proclaimed that a “…hereditary senate, as a part of the people, shares its interests, its sentiments, and its spirit. For this reason it should not be presumed that a hereditary senate would ignore the interests of the people or forget its legislative duties.”^[10]

Democracy does not preclude paternalist ideas from being expressed. Most of Latin America’s political leadership today is market-oriented, centrist, or right-leaning. However, according to Antonio de Aguilar Patriota, Brazil’s ambassador to Washington. “The categories of leftists and rightists don’t apply so well to what’s happening today in South America…They don’t capture the political dynamics of the moment. These days democracy is taking root. All governments in South America are democratically elected.” Through the economic policies of Latin America governments, paternalism can still be observed.^[11]

Economically, paternalism can be seen in market reforms that are considered “neoliberal” in nature. Moises Arce notes that market reforms are executed from the top-down with little or no input from legislative bodies or social groups, excepting those groups that support the economic reforms. Latin American countries, and the majority of residents of those countries, were “presumed to be passive recipients of state initiatives, incapable of resisting, modifying, or reversing the implementation of these policy reforms…” Literature relating to Latin American economic reforms “remains overwhelmingly state centric, treating societal actors as too dramatically weakened and fragmented to react against the economic policies that challenge their lives.”^[12]

Paternalism as an ideology of a ruling elite, either elected or dictatorial, warps the perception of democracy by those in rule. It is the frosted lens that prevents popular democratic governments with a full cross-section of the diverse Latin American population. Eduardo Galeano best describes the schism between paternalist rulers and those ruled. “Reality is what it is, not what it is wished to be by those who first confuse it with heaven and then assume the right to confuse it with hell… And the reality is that Latin American democracies want to be real democracies…But any dynamic democracy, transformer of reality, is dangerous to the structure of impotence.”^[13]

Bibliography

Arce, Moises and Roberta Rice. “Societal Protest in Post-Stabilization Bolivia.” Latin American Research Review 44, no. 1 (2009): 88-101. http://proxy01.ccis.edu:2096/journals/latin_american_research_review/toc/lar.44.1.html

Bolivar, Simon. “The Congress of Angostura, 1819,” Latin America: Conflict and Creation, edited by E. Bradford Burns. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1993.

Bolivar, Simon. “The Constitution for Bolivia, 1826,” Latin America: Conflict and Creation, edited by E. Bradford Burns. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1993.

Burns, E. Bradford, ed. “The Challenge to Democracy,” Latin America: Conflict and Creation. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1993

Cuevillas, Fernando. Quoted in “The Caudillo in Spanish America,” Latin America: Conflict and Creation, edited by E. Bradford Burns. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1993.

Flamini, Roland. “The New Latin America.” CQ Global Researcher 2, no. 3 (March 2008): 57-84.

Galeano, Eduardo. “Masquerading Reality,” Latin America: Conflict and Creation, edited by E. Bradford Burns. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1993.

Heiss, Claudia and Patricio Navia, “You Win Some, You Lose Some: Constitutional Reforms in Chile’s Transition to Democracy.” Latin American Politics and Society 49, no. 3 (March 2007): 163-190. http://proxy01.ccis.edu:2096/journals/latin_american_politics_and_society/toc/lap49.3.html

Keen, Benjamin and Keith Haynes. A History of Latin America. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009)

Zamosc, Leon. “The Indian Movement and Political Democracy in Ecuador,” Latin American Politics and Society 49, no. 1 (Fall, 2007): 1-34. http://proxy01.ccis.edu:2096/journals/latin_american_politics_and_society/toc/lap49.3.html

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[1]. Benjamin Keen and Keith Haynes, A History of Latin America, (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: 2009) p. 196

[2] Simon Bolivar, “The Congress of Angostura, 1819,” Latin America: Conflict and Creation, ed. E. Bradford Burns, p. 54

[3]. Qtd. in “The Caudillo in Spanish America,” Latin America: Conflict and Creation, ed. E. Bradford Burns, p. 63

[4]. Heiss, Claudia and Patricio Navia, “You Win Some, You Lose Some: Constitutional Reforms in Chile’s Transition to Democracy,” Latin American Politics and Society, vol. 49, no. 3, March 2007. p.167

[5]. “The Challenge to Democracy”, Latin America: Conflict and Creation, ed. E. Bradford Burns (Prentice Hall: New Jersey, 1993), p. 322,

[6]. Moises Arce and Roberta Rice. “Societal Protest in Post-Stabilization Bolivia”, Latin American Research Review, vol. 44, no. 1, p. 91

[7]. Zamosc, Leon. “The Indian Movement and Political Democracy in Ecuador,” Latin American Politics and Society, vol. 49, no. 1, pg. 3

[8]. Heiss, “You Win Some, You Lose Some,” 167

[9]. Simon Bolivar, “The Constitution for Bolivia, 1826,” Latin America: Conflict and Creation, p. 57

[10]. Ibid

[11]. Flamini, Roland. “The New Latin America,” CQ Global Researcher, March 2008, p. 59

[12]. Arce, Moises and Roberta Rice. “Societal Protest in Post-Stabilization Bolivia”, Latin American Research Review, vol. 44, no. 1, p. 88-89

[13]. Eduardo Galeano, “Masquerading Reality,” Latin America: Conflict and Creation, ed. E. Bradford Burns., p. 144