190 PART TWO
Occasionally, governments exercised this right. In the 1820s clerical and con-
servative opposition forced the liberal vice president of Gran Colombia, Francisco
de Paula Santander, to authorize the dropping of a textbook by the materialist
Jeremy Bentham from law school courses. In Buenos Aires, Rosas publicly burned
subversive books and other materials. According to Tulio Halperin-Donghi,
however, a reading of the press advertisements of Buenos Aires booksellers sug-
gests that this repression was singularly ineffective. In Santiago in the 1840s,
Francisco Bilbao’s fi ery polemic against Spain and Catholicism was burned by
the public hangman. According to Sarmiento, however, it was not the content
of Bilbao’s book but its violent, strident tone that caused this reaction; Bilbao, he
added, had been justly punished for his clumsiness.
After mid-century, with the enthronement of positivism, which glorifi ed sci-
ence and rejected theology as an approach to truth, efforts to suppress heretical or
anticlerical writings diminished or ended completely in many countries. In gen-
eral, during the last half of the nineteenth century, there existed in Latin America
a relatively free market in ideas—free, that is, as long as these ideas were couched
in theoretical terms or referred primarily to other parts of the world and were not
directed against an incumbent regime. Governments were often quick to suppress
and confi scate newspapers and pamphlets whose contents they considered dan-
gerous to their security, but they remained indifferent to the circulation of books
containing the most audacious social theories. By way of example, the Díaz dicta-
torship in Mexico struck at opposition journalists and newspapers but permitted
the free sale and distribution of the writings of Marx and anarchist theoretician
Peter Kropotkin.
As a result of the ascendancy of positivism, the church suffered a further de-
cline in infl uence and power. Conservative victories over liberalism sometimes
produced a strong proclerical reaction, typifi ed by Gabriel García Moreno, who
ruled Ecuador from 1860 to 1875 and carried his fanaticism to the point of dedi-
cating the republic to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Rafael Núñez, dictator of Colom-
bia from 1880 to 1894, drafted a concordat with the Vatican that restored to
the church most of the rights it had enjoyed in colonial times. But such victories
failed to arrest the general decline of the church’s social and intellectual infl u-
ence among the literate classes. Anticlericalism became an integral part of the
ideology of most Latin American intellectuals and a large proportion of other
upper-class and middle-class males, including many who were faithful church-
goers and observed the outward forms and rituals of the church. But church infl u-
ence continued to be strong among women of all classes, indigenous peoples, and
the submerged groups generally.
After independence, economic life initially stagnated, for the anticipated
large-scale infl ux of foreign capital did not materialize and the European demand