The Independence of Latin America was a process caused by years of injustices, discriminations, and abuse, from the Spanish Crown upon the inhabitants of Latin America. Since the beginning the Spanish Crown used the Americas as a way to gain riches and become greater in power internationally. Three of the distinct causes leading Latin America to seek independence from Spain, were that Spain was restricting Latin America from financial growth, (this included restrictions from the Spain on international trade, tax burden, and laws which only allowed the Americas to buy from Spain), The different social groups within Latin America, felt the pressure of the reforms being implicated on them by the Spanish Crown. They wanted freedom to decide how to run their home without the crown deciding for them what they should do.
The Wars of Independence in Latin America, The Bourbon Reform, was one form of reforms pushed by the people of Latin America towards Independence. The Bourbon bureaucracy engineered unprecedented campaigns to extirpate the vices of the People and to inculcate in them the new virtues of hard work, sobriety, and proper public propriety (Voekl, 183). Spain used the Americas as a way to rise from economic low and to take their riches from them. The role of America remained the same to consume Spanish exports, and to produce minerals and a few tropical products.
In these terms comercio libre was bound to increase dependency, reverting to a primitive idea of colonies and a crude division of labour after a long period during which inertia and neglect had allowed a measure of more autonomous growth With the result that Spain itself was seen as an obstacle to growth. Secondly, in one of the great ironies of Spanish, the elite was divided by on their decision to push towards revolution within. Those creoles pushing towards revolution to free themselves from Spanish rule felt that the Spanish crown was only abusing, discriminating and holding them back form growing economically. The elite felt they were not part of a revolution seeing themselves only as people who were All those part of the social context of Latin America, felt differently within Indians, on side of the Spanish King, though great abuse fell through. Nonetheless, the Indians of New Spain (and elsewhere) enjoyed a set of legal privileges, exemptions, and protection which significantly interferes with their complete integration into colonial society, and kept them in a legal bubble of tutelage ruptured only with the advent of independent Mexican nationhood in the third decade of the nineteenth century (Van Young, 154).
The point here is that where these and other legal and administrative remedies were applied in favor of the Indians of colonial New Spain, they were applied in the kings’ name. Furthermore, religious and civic ritual of all kinds constantly stressed the centrality of the Spanish king to the colonial commonwealth, and his benevolence and fatherly concern with the welfare of his weakest subjects (Van Young 155). Situated as they were between the Spaniards and the masses. The creoles wanted more than equality for themselves and less than equality for their inferiors (Lynch, 44). The creoles discriminated against those in lower classes than themselves. Though they wanted freedom, they did not wanted to lose their status, within society, only wanting to gain position.
Bourbon reforms In Spain, the Bourbon monarchs were convinced that the Spanish empire could not play an important role in global politics if it did not redress its characteristic state of social and economic backwardness. In order to address these problems, it was necessary to have profound understanding of the situation both on the Peninsula and the colonies (Viqueira, 37). The thinkers of the Enlightenment were developing a type of knowledge that was useful to the state in its implementation of economic, political, and social reforms. But it also served to create a new form of legitimation (Viqueira, 37). The Regulations of 1786, boldly modern and markedly repressive, were the appropriate means for the creation of a theater that corresponded to the ideals of the Enlightenment (Viqueira, 50).The Regulation of 1786 dealt with many other details that touched upon diverse subjects, but all related to the imposition of good order in the theater (Viqueira, 50).
Brandishing reason, which they considered to be all-powerful, the enlightened thinkers wished to reform society, to clear out its abasement, and to lead it along the road to progress (Viqueira, 36). To avoid losing its public, the coliseum had to set aside the plays of the Enlightenment, which reflected good taste, and scheduled plays that appealed to the common people (Viqueira, 89). As shown the common people, rejected the reforms that the Spanish crown was imposing on them. They rejected their regulations, and lead them to rebel against the Spanish Crown. I contend that these reforms involved more than the promulgation of new tax laws, the trimming of corporate privileges, and, and the rationalization and expansion of the bureaucracy; Reformers through new institutions like the Alcaldes de Barrio – engaged in radical social engineering to produce a more rational and productive citizen (Voekl, 183).
Before 1810, two distinct, rival, and incompatible forms of society, two differing kinds of civilization existed in the Argentine Republic: one being Spanish, European, and cultivated, the other barbarous, American, and almost wholly of native growth. The revolution which occurred in the cities acted only as the cause, the impulse, which set these distinct forms of national existence face to face, and gave occasion for a contest between them, to be ended after lasting many years, by the absorption of one into the other (Sarmiento, 54). But what my object requires me to notice, is, that the revolution-except in its external symbolic independence of the king- was interesting and intelligible only to the Argentine cities, but foreign and unmeaning to the rural districts.Outside the cities, the revolution was problematical affair, and so far as shaking off the kings authority was shaking off the judicial authority, it was acceptable. The pastoral could only regard the question from this point of view (Sarmiento, 56-7).
The contradiction that produced the explosion of revolutionary insurgence originated not from the base of society but from its summit: the schism between criollos and Spaniards. The inferior status of the criollos -in politics, the administration, and the military, not in the sphere of wealth – did not conform to the status of the kingdom of New Spain within the empire. New Spain was a kingdom like no other kingdoms, but the criollos were not treated as equal to their kinsmen born in Spain. This allied to the revolt of the landless peasants was the cause of the wars of independence (Paz, 17) In the economic sphere, Spain removed from Mexico more riches than she returned (Paz,17). Nationalism: New Spain is a good example of this common place: from within the bosom of a vast philosophical, political, and religious universalism – imperial Spain- emerged the criollo sense of a distinct identity that evolved into Mexican nationalism. (Paz, 30).
