Liberals and Liberation: Week 4 Reading

In the opening statements of his book, Dawson discusses the public perception of America's unity during and after the Revolutionary War and then asserts that Latin America is too diverse for such a monolithic interpretation of its revolutionary period. One enduring modern bias of the Latin American postcolonial nations is their bias against the legacy of the Spanish and their system of privileges that placed European aristocrats above the rest of society. This system had many obvious faults (slavery, gender repression, racial discrimination), but within that system there were, in theory, provisions to allow certain indigenous tribes to continue to hold communal land, a privilege under threat from the land privatization campaign that the urban criollo population was in favour of. Similarly, the enslaved Africans were not always in favour of an overthrow of the Spanish monarchy unless there was the promise of being freed by the revolution. While these smaller sectional agendas are important elements of the region's revolutionary spirit, but the liberal democratic revolutions of Simon Bolivar came to define the character of the entire liberation of Latin America. The other liberal regimes of the emerging global economic order in the 19th century supported the liberal revolutionaries if for no other reason than to remove Spain's imperial trade restrictions and afterwards helped cement the new nations' sovereignty with increased commerce.

The disunity associated with Latin American states is a result of historical pressures rather than any reflection on the character or quality of their political spirit. The battle to overcome direct Spanish imperial dominance would not nearly be so hard as the battle to become unentangled from the new colonialism of liberal free trade. How can true independence exist for a modern Latin nation with the United States as a predatory power looming above them? This policy of menacing neighbouring Western Hemispheric nations began with wars of territorial acquisition in Mexico, the Caribbean and Colombia and continues with the modern system of regime change to prohibit nationalization of resources that are harvested by American business interests. In my opinion, this current system of extortion is only possible through the existence of a liberal, dictatorial status quo that were the legacies of the first wave of liberatory struggles. While Simon Bolivar deserves credit and adoration for his defeat of the Spanish Empire, his legacy of economic liberalization and dictatorial republicanism established a paradigm that the revolutionaries of future generations would die opposing.