Modern Latin America Since 1808 Midterm Exam (Study Guide and Primary Source Analysis)

Haitian Revolution - Ideology and relationship to French Revolution

1. Age of Revolutions: American (1776), French (1789), Haitian slave revolt (1791).

2. French Revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789) articulated universal rights but initially excluded enslaved people and many free people of color.

3. Enslaved and free people of color in Saint‑Domingue appropriated this language to argue that freedom and citizenship must apply regardless of race.​

4. Toussaint Louverture’s 1797 letter insists that liberty once granted cannot be revoked, tying emancipation to French revolutionary principles of liberty and equality.​

Haitan Revolution - Signficant of Black Leadership

Significance of Black leadership: Toussaint and later Dessalines show Black political and military leadership at the center of a revolution that both destroys slavery and colonial rule; Haiti becomes the first Black republic and first state founded by former slaves in 1804. By the numbers the majority of the black population in Americas are slaves making this historic.

Haitain Revolution - Implications for abolition in the Americas

The Haitian Revolution made the abolition of slavery both imaginable and dangerous across the Americas, forcing every slaveholding society to rethink the link between slavery, race, and political order. It showed that enslaved people could overthrow both slavery and colonial rule at once, but it also prompted many elites elsewhere to double down on slavery and racial control, especially in places like Cuba and Brazil. 1804 Constitution in Haiti leaves to the abolition of slavery completly in the territory.

Haitain Revolution - Slave Society vs. Society with Slaves

• A slave society is one where slavery is the central labor system and organizes property, family, and power (e.g., Saint-Domingue before 1791, Brazil, Cuba, U.S. South).

• A society with slaves uses slavery, but slavery is not the dominant organizing institution (e.g., most of Spanish America, with smaller enslaved populations integrated into broader social structures).​

• The Haitian Revolution destroyed a paradigmatic slave society and showed that such systems could be overturned from below, accelerating abolitionist pressures in societies with slaves and terrifying elites in slave societies, who responded with “second slavery” expansion and harsher control.

Haitian Revolution—Relationship between overthrow of colonialism and slavery

• Haiti uniquely fused anti‑colonial and anti‑slavery struggle: independence in 1804 came from a mass slave revolt and produced the first state explicitly founded on the rejection of racial slavery.

• Elsewhere, independence did not automatically mean abolition: most Spanish American republics separated the overthrow of colonial rule from the full overthrow of slavery, using gradual measures (free‑womb laws, compensation, staged emancipation) to protect elite property.

• Haiti thus exposed the contradiction of liberal revolutions that proclaimed liberty while preserving slavery and pushed abolitionist ideas across the Atlantic, even as many neighboring elites used fear of “another Haiti” to justify delaying or managing abolition on their own terms.

Haitain Revolution - International responses and indemnity

1. Post‑1804 isolation: the U.S., Spain, and France refuse recognition (considers it still Saint Domingue); Britain maintains limited de facto ties but no early formal recognition.​ Vattican witholds recognition.

2. France recognizes independence only in 1825 on condition of a massive indemnity (150 million francs, later refinanced with interest), which absorbs the bulk of Haiti’s budget and cripples development for over a century.

3. This demonstrates how imperial powers used debt and diplomatic pressure to punish a Black republic and limit the broader appeal of slave emancipation.

Haitain Revolution - Key Dates

1. 1791: Bois Caïman ceremony and initial slave uprising.

2. 1793–1794: local and then general French emancipation decrees.​

3. 1801: Toussaint’s constitution declares all men in Saint‑Domingue free and French.​

4. 1802–1804: Napoleonic expedition, war of independence, Dessalines’ victory.​

5. 1804: Independence and creation of Haiti.​

6. 1825: French indemnity agreement.

Spanish American Wars of Independence - Factors that prompted independence; Liberalism?

• Liberalism framed sovereignty as resting in the nation rather than the king, legitimizing the idea that Spanish Americans could govern themselves if the monarch was absent or illegitimate. Republicanism and Deomcracy. This is an expansion of citizenship (more people decide the terms of government they live in).

  • Push toward secularism. They want a secular state, a check on the catholic church can dictate politics.

• The U.S. and French Revolutions, plus the language of rights circulating in the Atlantic, gave creoles a vocabulary of citizenship, representation, and equality before the law they could invoke against colonial privilege and absolutism.

• The Cádiz Constitution of 1812 codified many liberal principles (national sovereignty, constitutional monarchy, representation), ideas of citizenship expanded; the Spanish nation was constituted by both sides of the Atlantic, everyone born in the territories is a citizen of the Spanish nation. Includes Creoles, indigenous people are citizens of the spanish nation as well, Africans/Afro-descendent people are not citizens. A response to the Napoleonic wars.

Spanish American Wars of Independence - Factors that prompted independence; Creole/Peninsular divide and Bourbon Reforms?

• Bourbon Reforms increased taxes, centralized administration, and sent more peninsular officials, reducing creole control over local offices and treating American territories more as colonies than partner kingdoms.​

• A tiny peninsular minority held the highest posts over a much larger, wealthy creole elite, producing a sense of humiliation and exclusion despite creoles’ economic and social power.​

• Fiscal pressure and administrative reshuffling also angered broader sectors (indigenous communities, mixed‑race groups, miners, merchants), as seen in earlier uprisings like Tupac Amaru II, creating a social base of discontent that creole leaders could tap once the imperial crisis hit.

Spanish American Wars of Independence - Factors that prompted independence; Napoleonic invasions and Court of Cádiz

• Napoleon’s invasion of Iberia (1807–1808), forced abdications of Charles IV and Ferdinand VII, and installation of Joseph Bonaparte created a crisis of legitimacy: who actually ruled Spain and its empire?​

• In Spain, resistance elites formed juntas and convened the Cortes of Cádiz; in Spanish America local juntas claimed to rule in Ferdinand’s name, effectively practicing autonomous government under cover of loyalty.​

• The 1812 Cádiz Constitution offered representation and some legal equality to American territories, but its exclusion of people of African descent from full citizenship and the later restoration of Ferdinand’s absolutism (1814) convinced many creoles that reforms under Spain were reversible, pushing them toward outright independence.

Spanish American Wars of Independence - Successes of Simón Bolívar’s project

• Military liberation and territorial scope: Bolívar led or coordinated campaigns that ended Spanish rule in Venezuela, New Granada (Colombia), Ecuador, Peru, Panama, and helped create Bolivia, making him central to victory at battles like Ayacucho and to the dismantling of the last Spanish viceroyalty in the Andes.

• Creation of Gran Colombia and Andean federation projects: He briefly realized a large republican union in Gran Colombia and then pushed for an Andean federation linking Peru and Bolivia, showing an ambitious project of continental-scale state‑building rather than narrow localism.​

• Political thought and constitutional experimentation: Through texts like the Jamaica Letter and the Bolivian Constitution, he articulated a distinctive republicanism—combining separation of powers with strong executive authority and limited suffrage—that grappled seriously with how to make fragile postcolonial societies governable.​

• Inclusionary decrees (on paper): His decrees on Indian rights, lands, and tributes abolished some colonial forced labor practices, proclaimed Indigenous people as citizens, and promised restitution of communal lands, at least at the level of law.

Spanish American Wars of Independence - Shortcomings of Simón Bolívar’s project

1. Failure of lasting unity: Gran Colombia fragmented into separate states (Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Panama), and his later Andean federation vision also failed; regional rivalries, geography, and elite resistance meant his project of a large, cohesive “Colombian” nation did not survive his lifetime.

2. Authoritarian drift and legitimacy problems: His move toward lifetime presidency and concentration of power, especially in the Bolivian Constitution, alienated federalists and many elites who saw it as a new form of centralist domination, feeding rebellions against his rule.

3. Limited social transformation: Despite lofty rhetoric and some decrees, entrenched hierarchies of race and class mostly persisted; Indigenous and popular sectors saw few structural changes in landholding and power, and independence did not become a social revolution for the majority.​

4. Aftermath of caudillismo and fragmentation: The political order that followed his project was marked by regional caudillos, civil wars, and weak institutions; in Chasteen’s terms, independence under leaders like Bolívar opened the door to “postcolonial blues” rather than the stable, liberal republics he imagined.

Spanish American Wars of Independence - Impacts on Latin American society post-independence; What qualities defined the Early National Period?

• Political instability and weak states: New republics wrote liberal constitutions, but governments were underfunded, short‑lived, and often overthrown; constitutions existed without a strong culture of constitutionalism.​

• “Postcolonial blues”: Chasteen describes widespread disillusionment as liberal promises of equality and prosperity collided with economic collapse, war debts, and the persistence of colonial social hierarchies.​

• Continuity in social order: Legal caste labels disappeared and slavery began to decline in many republics, but land, wealth, and political power stayed concentrated in Creole elites; Indigenous and popular sectors saw little structural change.

• Caudillo politics and patronage: Personalist leaders built power through networks of loyalty and favors rather than strong institutions, making politics revolve around men and their followers more than parties or laws.

Spanish American Wars of Independence - Impacts on Latin American society post-independence; Militarization of Society

• Oversized, politicized armies: Independence wars created large standing armies that new states could barely pay; officers quickly became political brokers or rulers, and military budgets consumed scarce revenues.​

• Rise of caudillos as warlords: Figures like Rosas, Santa Anna, and Páez drew legitimacy from battlefield glory and commanded armed followers who could make or unmake governments, normalizing coups as a political tool.​

• Violence in everyday governance: In Sarmiento’s account, rural Argentina shows how coercion, gaucho militias, and local strongmen substituted for courts and bureaucracies, embedding violence into local rule.​

• Militarized “order” vs. popular participation: Conservatives and many liberals alike accepted military intervention as necessary to restore or preserve order when electoral or constitutional mechanisms failed.

Spanish American Wars of Independence - Impacts on Latin American society post-independence; liberal/conservative divide

• Liberals: emphasize individual rights, free trade, separation of church and state, and legal equality (at least in theory).​

• Conservatives: defend corporate privileges (Church, army), hierarchical social orders, and closer ties to tradition.

• Competing projects: Lecture notes summarize liberals as favoring equality before the law, federalism, free trade, secular education, and expanded citizenship, while conservatives defended tradition, hierarchy, Catholic primacy, centralism, and protectionism.

• Church at the center of conflict: Control of education, marriage, and property made the Church a key battleground; liberal anticlerical measures provoked conservative mobilization and sometimes civil wars.

• Ideology vs. patronage: Although elites argued in liberal or conservative terms, in practice caudillo rule and patronage politics often blurred these lines, with loyalty and local interests overriding doctrine.

Spanish American Wars of Independence - Impacts on Latin American society post-independence; Abolition and the rise of the “Second Slavery”

ABC Countries (America (U.S.,) Brazil and Cuba)

• Slave trade and slavery were gradually outlawed in most Spanish American republics between the 1810s and 1850s, often tied to independence constitutions and liberal reforms.​

• Yet legal abolition was uneven and slow, with measures like Brazil’s 1871 Law of the Free Womb freeing children on paper while binding them to masters’ unpaid labor until adulthood.​

• Emancipation outside Haiti could be “paper thin,” as Rebecca Scott shows for Saint-Domingue refugees re‑enslaved in Louisiana despite having been legally freed under French law.​

Spanish American Wars of Independence - Impacts on Latin American society post-independence; Rise of the “Second Slavery”

Rise of “Second Slavery”

• Ada Ferrer (following the “second slavery” framework) shows that while Haiti destroyed slavery and colonial rule, Cuba, Brazil, and the U.S. South simultaneously expanded plantation slavery on a massive scale.​

• This Second Slavery refers to 19th‑century slave systems (Cuba, Brazil, U.S. South) that grew within an age of antislavery, tightly linked to global capitalism, industrial demand, and modern states.​

• In Cuba, planters and Spanish authorities turned Haiti’s revolution into both a warning and an opportunity: they intensified sugar production, imported more enslaved Africans, and built the world’s leading sugar economy by the 1820s.​

• Slavery thus expanded precisely when freedom became legally imaginable, producing a paradox where emancipation ideals circulated even as plantation bondage deepened and modernized.

Neocolonial Period and Export Boom - General chronology of the Neocolonial Period (1870-1929)?

1. After independence (by the mid‑1800s), oligarchic republics consolidate and link their economies to industrial powers through primary‑export production (coffee, sugar, nitrates, beef, minerals). This export boom phase is what the course labels the neocolonial period.​

2. By the turn of the 20th century, foreign (first European, then increasingly U.S.) capital controls key sectors—railroads, mining, plantations, ports—so that formally sovereign states function as “empire nation‑states” without real economic sovereignty.​

3. The period effectively ends with the Great Depression, when world trade collapses, creditors cannot enforce debts, and Latin American exports can no longer find markets, forcing governments toward economic nationalism and later ISI.

Neocolonial Period and Export Boom - Nature of economic development in this period

1. Export boom based on a few primary commodities (coffee, sugar, nitrates, beef, minerals), with railroads, ports, and urban infrastructure built largely to move exports out rather than integrate national markets.​

2. Heavy British and later U.S. investment in railways, mines, plantations, and utilities, producing “empire‑nation‑states” that were politically independent but lacked real economic sovereignty.

3. Growth that favored landowning elites and foreign investors; rural peasants and workers experienced land loss, labor coercion, and weak protections despite headline “modernization.”

4. Ideology of order and progress (positivism) used to justify liberal dictatorships: liberal economic policy plus authoritarian politics to keep labor and popular sectors under control while pursuing export‑led “modernity.”

Neocolonial Period and Export Boom - The rise of liberal dictatorships

In the neocolonial export‑boom era, “liberal dictatorships” were regimes that applied liberal economic principles (free trade, private property, openness to foreign capital) while ruling through authoritarian, often military, strongmen who promised order and “progress”:

They emerged after the early post‑independence chaos, when elites wanted railways, ports, and export growth but feared mass politics and social upheaval.

• Governments welcomed British and U.S. investment, protected foreign companies and large landowners, and reoriented states around export infrastructure (railways, ports, telegraphs), yet restricted effective suffrage and repressed labor and peasant organizing.

• “Order and progress” (positivism) became the justification: dictatorship was framed as temporary, scientific rule necessary to modernize, discipline the countryside, and integrate Latin America into the world market.​

• Politically they kept constitutions and elections as facades, but real power rested in presidents, caudillos, and their patronage networks, producing “empire‑nation‑states” that were formally sovereign but economically dependent on external powers.

Neocolonial Period and Export Boom - Ideas about modernity, order and progress

1. Modernity = making Latin America look like industrial Europe/US: railroads, ports, telegraphs, boulevards, electric light, export growth.

2. “Order and progress” (positivism) = belief that scientific, elite‑led rule should guide society, not broad popular democracy.

3. Priorities: political stability, secular education, protection of private property, openness to foreign capital and technology.

4. Large landowners and foreign companies seen as natural agents of modernization and national progress.

5. Peasants, indigenous communities, and militant workers viewed as “backward” obstacles to be disciplined, controlled, or assimilated.

Neocolonial Period and Export Boom - What was the nature of the export boom?

1. Rapid growth of export‑oriented sectors (coffee, sugar, beef, nitrates, rubber, copper, etc.) tied Latin American economies tightly to British and U.S. capital, technology, and markets.

2. Railroads, ports, and urban infrastructure expanded to move exports efficiently, but development was highly uneven and centered on export zones and major cities

Neocolonial Period and Export Boom - What was the nature of the export boom; Impacts on labor?

• Shift from slavery or smallholder autonomy toward coerced or tightly controlled wage labor: debt peonage, sharecropping, contract labor, and company‑town systems (e.g., rubber tappers, banana enclaves, mines).

• Massive rural‑to‑urban and regional migration as people were pushed off land and pulled into export sectors; work was often seasonal, low paid, and violently policed. Many become indebted to their employers which allows them to be exploited.

• Growth of a semi‑organized urban working class and new unions, but bosses and states frequently repressed strikes with force.

Neocolonial Period and Export Boom - What was the nature of the export boom; Impacts on land tenure

• Enclosure and privatization of land: survey laws, railroad concessions, and land‑sales let elites and foreign firms claim huge haciendas, estancias, and plantations.

• Communal and smallholder lands (indigenous ejidos, village lands) were dispossessed or pushed onto marginal soils; concentration of landownership reached extreme levels (tiny elite, vast landless rural majority).

• Export frontiers (coffee zones in Brazil, cattle in Argentina, rubber in the Amazon, bananas in Central America) became dominated by large estates or foreign enclaves.

Neocolonial Period and Export Boom - What was the nature of the export boom; Impacts of political representation of the masses

• Formal republics persisted, but politics remained oligarchic: property‑owning elites, often allied with foreign capital, monopolized real power.

• Peasants, indigenous communities, and most workers had little or no effective suffrage; clientelism, fraud, and outright exclusion limited their voice. No popular political wealth.

• When the masses pressed claims (land, wages, local autonomy), governments typically answered with repression, paving the way for later mass‑based and revolutionary movements (e.g., Mexican Revolution).

What was the Monroe Doctrine and what were its main stipulations?

• Declared in Monroe’s 1823 annual message, it stated that the Americas were “not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European power.”

• The U.S. would view any European political intervention in the Western Hemisphere as “dangerous to our peace and safety.”

• In return, the U.S. pledged non‑interference in existing European colonies and in Europe’s internal affairs and wars.

• Over time it came to assert a U.S. “sphere of interest” in the Western Hemisphere, even if the U.S. initially lacked the power to enforce it alone.

Monroe Doctrine - Within the context of Latin American Idependence

• The doctrine was issued just as most Spanish American colonies had become, or were becoming, independent after the Napoleonic Wars, and there was fear that the Holy Alliance might help Spain restore its empire.

• It signaled U.S. diplomatic support for the new Latin American republics’ independence against European recolonization, and some Latin American leaders initially welcomed it as a protective shield.

• At the same time, it framed these republics less as equal partners and more as states inside a U.S.-defined hemispheric order, setting the stage for asymmetrical relations.

Monroe Doctrine - U.S. expansionism “Ripe fruit theory”

• In 1823, John Quincy Adams argued that Cuba, once “forcibly disjoined” from Spain, would “gravitate only towards the North American union,” comparing it to an apple falling from a tree.

• This “ripe fruit” theory reveals how U.S. policymakers saw Latin American (and especially Caribbean) territories as naturally destined to fall into the U.S. orbit once European ties weakened—an expansionist reading compatible with the Monroe Doctrine.

Monroe Doctrine - U.S. expansionism “1848 Mexican Cession”

• The Mexican‑American War ended with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), by which Mexico ceded about 55 percent of its territory, including present‑day California, Nevada, Utah, most of Arizona and New Mexico, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming.

• This vast land grab extended U.S. power to the Pacific and showed that, alongside warning Europe out of the hemisphere, the United States was willing to use war and treaties to expand at the expense of its Latin American neighbors.

The War of 1898 - Implications for Cuban Independence/Platt Amendment and Military Occupation

• U.S. victory over Spain in 1898 ended Spanish sovereignty; the Treaty of Paris established Cuba’s formal independence but placed it under U.S. military occupation (1898–1902).

• The Platt Amendment (1901) set conditions for ending occupation: it limited Cuba’s treaty‑making and debt, granted the U.S. a right to intervene to preserve “independence” and order, and allowed leases like Guantánamo Bay.

• Cuba thus became a protectorate: nominally independent after 1902, but with sovereignty constrained and periodic U.S. military interventions in the early 20th century.

The War of 1898 - Thought and legacy of José Martí

• Martí, killed in 1895 fighting in Cuba’s independence war, envisioned a republic grounded in civic virtue, anti‑imperialism, and Latin American solidarity against both old Europe and an expansionist United States, especially in essays like “Nuestra América.”

• He rejected biological racism, emphasizing a mestizo, multi‑racial citizenship in which Black, Indigenous, and white Cubans were political equals, and warned that U.S. materialism and racism threatened Latin American autonomy. “Nuestra America”

• Later U.S. control via Platt sharply contrasted with Martí’s project, turning him into a symbol for anti‑U.S. nationalism and decolonial critiques in Cuba and across the region.

The War of 1898 - Role of abolitionism in Cuban independence movements and ties to Second Slavery

• 19th‑century Cuba exemplified “Second Slavery”: a late, highly capitalist sugar‑plantation boom based on massive slave labor even as antislavery ideas spread in the Atlantic world.

• Early Cuban independence struggles (like the Ten Years’ War) tied the fight against Spain to abolition, with insurgents promising or enacting emancipation for enslaved people who joined the cause.

• By the 1890s, abolition (1886) and the participation of Afro‑Cubans in nationalist armies meant that independence was framed as both the end of empire and the completion of a long anti‑slavery, anti‑racial‑hierarchy project.

The War of 1898 - Rise of US overseas empire

• The 1898 war ended Spain’s empire in the Caribbean and Pacific and inaugurated a U.S. overseas empire with new island possessions. This is with the Treaty of Paris.

• The United States acquired long‑term control over Puerto Rico and strategic influence in Cuba, and used the war as a springboard for imperial ventures beyond the continent.

• This marked a shift from a primarily continental power to one that held tropical colonies and naval bases as nodes in a global imperial network.

The War of 1898 - Caribbean protectorates (Cuba, Panama, Puerto Rico)

• Cuba: Nominally independent after 1902 but subject to the Platt Amendment, periodic U.S. military interventions, and heavy U.S. economic penetration.

• Panama: Secession from Colombia (1903) occurred under U.S. sponsorship; treaties over the Canal Zone effectively created another protectorate centered on U.S. strategic and commercial control.

• Puerto Rico: Annexed from Spain, it became a U.S. territory with limited self‑government and no full federal representation, functioning as a permanent colonial possession within the emerging U.S. empire

Mexican Revolution - Nature and central developments of the Porfiriato

i. Modernization and integration into global economy

• Under Porfirio Díaz (in power from 1877 to 1910 with a brief interlude), Mexico achieved political stability, fiscal balance, and rapid export‑led growth built on foreign trade and investment, especially in railways, mining, oil, and export agriculture. Starts as a liberal republican and becomes a liberal dictator for over 30 years on sham elections.

• U.S. capital played a key role: by 1900, private U.S. investors owned about a quarter of Mexico’s territory, controlling crucial sectors like railroads, mining, and petroleum, which tied Mexico tightly into the neocolonial world economy.

• Urban centers gained paved streets, electric lighting, trams, and modern infrastructure, and export zones like henequen in Yucatán, sugar in Morelos, and cattle in Chihuahua were reorganized for the global market, even as much of rural Mexico remained impoverished.

Mexican Revolution - Nature and central developments of the Porfiriato

ii. Mechanisms of political domination (elections, rural loyalty)

• Díaz seized power in a coup in 1876 and then turned formal elections into controlled rituals: after using an ally (Manuel González) as a puppet president, he repeatedly amended or ignored no‑reelection rules to win presidential “reelections” in 1884, 1888, 1892, 1896, 1900, 1904, and 1910.​

• At the local level, power was enforced through jefes políticos and caciques who managed elections, suppressed dissent, and kept order; the rurales, a rural police force, became notorious for summary violence, including shooting suspects in the back, with thousands of deaths attributed to their repression.

• The regime balanced coercion with patronage: provincial oligarchs like Luis Terrazas in Chihuahua, sugar planters in Morelos, and henequen magnates in Yucatán monopolized economic and political power in exchange for loyalty to Díaz, creating a closed oligarchic system.​

Mexican Revolution - The relationship between Porfirio Díaz, US private interests, and the peasantry

• Díaz deliberately opened Mexico to U.S. interests, making it the first country where U.S. citizens invested on a large scale, especially after the U.S. transcontinental railroad was completed and northern capitalists looked south.

• Rail and oil infrastructure were heavily U.S.-dominated: 80% of Mexican railroad stocks and bonds were held by U.S. investors such as the Rockefellers, J.P. Morgan, the Guggenheims, and Russell Sage, who praised Díaz as a guarantor of order and profits.

• Land and labor costs of this alliance fell on peasants and indigenous communities: land laws in 1883 and 1893 enabled survey companies and developers to expropriate untitled or “vacant” lands, so that by the Porfiriato’s end, 98% of rural families were landless and forced into wage labor under harsh overseers on haciendas, plantations, and export estates.​

• Village subsistence plots were displaced by cash crops (sugar, henequen, cotton, coffee), leading to corn and bean shortages and rising food prices, while campesinos endured conditions approaching “virtual slavery” in some regions, especially where repression of Yaquis and other communities was intense.

Mexican Revolution - Demands of various factions, their ideologies and leaders

• Maderistas (early constitutionalist liberals): Led by Francisco Madero, a wealthy northern landowner and businessman, they demanded “Sufragio efectivo, no reelección” (effective suffrage, no reelection) and genuine enforcement of the 1857 liberal constitution, focusing on political democracy more than radical social change.

• Zapatistas (agrarian radicals): Centered in Morelos under Emiliano Zapata, they issued the Plan of Ayala (1911), denouncing Madero as a traitor and demanding restitution of village lands, expropriation (with or without indemnity) of large haciendas, and creation of ejidos and communal holdings; their ideology was rooted in local peasant demands for land and justice, not national state‑building.​

• Villistas (northern popular army): Led by Pancho Villa from Chihuahua, head of the División del Norte, they mobilized ranch hands, miners, and smallholders around promises of land, wages, and revenge against hated Porfirian elites; Villa later allied with Zapata in the Conventionist camp against Carranza and Obregón.

• Constitutionalists (middle‑class and regional elites): Led by Venustiano Carranza (governor of Coahuila) with strong Sonoran contingent under Álvaro Obregón, they fought Huerta in the name of constitutionalism and national sovereignty, then turned against Villa and Zapata; they accepted social reform and labor legislation but aimed to reassert central state authority under upper‑ and middle‑class leadership.

Mexican Revolution - The 1917 Constitution, articles 27

-Article 27 (land, resources, Church)

• Article 27 declares that ownership of land and water “originally” resides in the nation, which can transmit it to individuals but retains the right to expropriate for “public utility” with compensation; it explicitly authorizes dividing large estates, promoting small holdings, and creating new agrarian communities.​

• It guarantees that towns and villages lacking sufficient land and water may receive grants taken from nearby properties and confirms earlier Carrancista agrarian decrees, thereby constitutionalizing agrarian reform and peasant rights to ejidos.​

• The article nationalizes subsoil resources—metals, petroleum, hydrocarbons—and makes them inalienable property of the nation, allowing only conditional concessions to companies formed under Mexican law and forcing foreigners to renounce diplomatic protection over such holdings.​

• It also bars religious institutions from owning real estate and declares existing church realty to be national property, a move that helped provoke later religious conflict (Cristero War) by attacking ecclesiastical wealth and influence.​

Mexican Revolution - The 1917 Constitution, article 123

Article 123 (labor)

• Article 123 recognizes the legal existence of labor unions and affirms workers’ rights to organize and strike, creating one of the most advanced labor codes of its time.

• It regulates hours, rest days, and working conditions, and underpins later legislation on minimum wages, job security, and social welfare; even if imperfectly enforced, it signals a constitutional commitment to social rights alongside civil and political rights.

Economic Nationalism and Populism - What is the relationship between the neocolonial period and the rise of economic nationalism?

• In the late 19th–early 20th century, Latin America was formally independent but economically dependent on foreign capital, technology, and markets, especially British and U.S. investors in railways, mining, export agriculture, and oil.​

• The Great Depression shattered this export‑led model: export prices collapsed, foreign credit dried up, and imports became unaffordable, pushing states to turn inward and promote domestic industry instead of relying on imported manufactures.​

• Economic nationalism emerged as governments moved to protect local industry (tariffs, exchange controls), nationalize strategic resources (oil, utilities), and assert state control over sectors previously dominated by foreign firms, often in the name of defending the nation from neocolonial exploitation.

Economic Nationalism and Populism - Role of Import-substitution Industrialization (ISI)

• ISI was the strategy of replacing imported manufactured goods with domestically produced ones, typically behind high tariffs and quotas, so that local industries could grow without direct competition from industrial powers.​

• The Depression and World War II made ISI almost inevitable: with export earnings and foreign loans down, Latin American states had to use their own raw materials and build factories to supply their urban markets, often with the state itself investing in steel, oil, and basic industries.

• ISI reoriented politics: it strengthened the central state and urban industrial bourgeoisie, expanded the industrial working class, and created the social base for populist leaders who promised wage gains, social benefits, and protection in exchange for loyalty.

Economic Nationalism and Populism - What leadership style emerged at this time?

i. Nature of Peronism

• Juan Domingo Perón in Argentina embodied a mass, charismatic, nationalist style that claimed to stand above class conflict and represent the “pueblo” as a whole, especially the urban working class (descamisados) and new migrants to Buenos Aires.

• Peronism (justicialismo) framed itself as neither laissez‑faire capitalism nor Marxist socialism; it fused economic nationalism (nationalizations, protectionism), strong unions, and extensive social welfare with authoritarian controls on opposition and media.

• Perón used the state to raise wages, expand labor rights, and incorporate unions into a corporatist structure tied directly to the presidency, so workers’ access to benefits depended on loyalty to the leader and movement.

Economic Nationalism and Populism - What leadership style emerged at this time?

ii. Program of Estado Novo

• In Brazil, Getúlio Vargas’s Estado Novo (1937–1945) was an authoritarian, centralized regime that dissolved parties, censored the press, and ruled by decree while promoting nationalism, industrialization, and social reform.​

• Vargas built a corporatist labor system: the state recognized and regulated unions, created labor courts, and passed laws on hours, minimum wages, and social insurance, binding organized workers to the regime.​​

• The Estado Novo expanded state‑owned enterprises (steel, oil, infrastructure), used propaganda to forge a unified Brazilian identity, and presented Vargas as the paternalistic “father of the poor” who mediated conflicts between capital and labor.

Economic Nationalism and Populism - Idea of the “Third Path” between capitalism and communism

• Both Perón and Vargas—and similar leaders elsewhere—explicitly rejected “unbridled” liberal capitalism and Soviet‑style communism, presenting their projects as a third way grounded in national traditions, state planning, and social justice.

• This “third path” emphasized: national control over key industries; class collaboration within a corporatist framework; strong, interventionist states; and expansion of social rights, all under charismatic executives who claimed to embody the nation and protect it from foreign capital and revolutionary extremism.

Economic Nationalism and Populism - Populist dictatorships and their relationship to urban workers, among other popular sectors

• Populist regimes relied heavily on urban industrial workers, lower‑middle sectors, and recent migrants, offering wage increases, social programs, and symbolic recognition in exchange for organized political support.

• They built corporatist institutions in which unions and professional associations were legally recognized but tightly controlled, turning labor into a pillar of the regime while limiting independent party organization and leftist currents.​​

• These governments also courted other popular sectors—small shopkeepers, petty bureaucrats, some peasants—through clientelism, rhetoric of national inclusion, and selective benefits, while using police and military repression against opponents (communists, oligarchic rivals, dissident unions).