162 CHAPTER 8 THE INDEPENDENCE OF LATIN AMERICA
The Spanish people had yet to say their word.
On May 2, 1808, an insurrection against French
occupation troops began in Madrid and spread like
wildfi re throughout the country. The insurgents
established local governing juntas in the regions
under their control. Later, a central junta assumed
direction of the resistance movement in the name
of the captive Ferdinand VII. This junta promptly
made peace with England. When the Spanish
armies fought the superbly trained French troops
in conventional battles in the fi eld, they usually
suffered defeat, but guerrilla warfare pinned down
large French forces and made Napoleon’s control
of conquered territory extremely precarious.
By early 1810, however, French victory
seemed inevitable, for French armies had overrun
Andalusia and were threatening Cádiz, the last
city in Spanish hands. The central junta now dis-
solved itself and appointed a regency to rule Spain;
this body in turn yielded its power to a national
Cortes, or parliament, which met in Cádiz from
1810 to 1814 under the protection of English na-
val guns. Because most of the delegates came from
Cádiz, whose liberal, cosmopolitan atmosphere
was hardly typical of Spain, their views were much
more liberal than those of the Spanish people as
a whole. The constitution the Cortes approved in
1812 provided for a limited monarchy, promised
freedom of speech and assembly, and abolished the
Inquisition. But the Cortes made few concessions
to Spain’s American colonies. It invited Spanish
American delegates to join its deliberations but
made clear that the system of peninsular domina-
tion and commercial monopoly would remain es-
sentially intact.
In Spanish America, creole leaders, anticipat-
ing the imminent collapse of Spain, considered
how they might turn this dramatic rush of events
to their own advantage. Those events had trans-
formed the idea of self-rule or total independence,
until lately a remote prospect, into a realistic goal.
Confi dent that the armies of the invincible Napo-
leon would crush all opposition, some creole lead-
ers prepared to take power into their hands with
the pretext of loyalty to the “beloved Ferdinand.”
They could justify their action by the example of
the Spanish regional juntas formed to govern in
the name of the captive king. The confusion caused
among Spanish offi cials by the coming of rival em-
issaries who proclaimed both Ferdinand and Jo-
seph Bonaparte the legitimate king of Spain also
played into creole hands.
In the spring of 1810, with the fall of Cádiz ap-
parently imminent, the creole leaders moved into
action. Charging viceroys and other royal offi cials
with doubtful loyalty to Ferdinand, they organized
popular demonstrations in Caracas, Buenos Aires,
Santiago, and Bogotá that compelled those author-
ities to surrender control to local juntas dominated
by creoles. But creole hopes of a peaceful transi-
tion to independence were doomed to failure. Their
claims of loyalty did not deceive the groups truly
loyal to Spain, and fi ghting broke out between pa-
triots and royalists.The Liberation of South America
The Latin American struggle for independence
sug gests comparison with the American Revolu-
tion. Some obvious parallels exist between the two
upheavals. Both sought to throw off the rule of a
mother country whose mercantilist system hin-
dered the further development of a rapidly growing
colonial economy. Both were led by well-educated
elites who drew their slogans and ideas from the
ideological arsenal of the Enlightenment. Both were
civil wars in which large elements of the population
sided with the mother country. Both owed their fi -
nal success in part to foreign assistance (although
the North American rebels received far more help
from their French ally than Latin America received
from outside sources).
The differences between the two revolutions
are no less impressive, however. Unlike the Amer-
ican Revolution, the Latin American struggle for
independence did not have a unifi ed direction or
strategy, due not only to vast distances and other
geographical obstacles to unity but to the economic
and cultural isolation of the various Latin Ameri-
can regions from each other. Moreover, the Latin
American movement for independence lacked the
strong popular base provided by the more demo-
cratic and fl uid society of the English colonies.
The creole elite, itself part of an exploitative white