Caudillo
[5]An important characteristic of the caudillo is their charisma, which drew in followers that could be utilized to change the political climate and shape state-formation in the post colonial era.
Men characterized as caudillos have ruled in Cuba (Gerardo Machado, Fulgencio Batista, Fidel Castro), Panama (Omar Torrijos, Manuel Noriega), the Dominican Republic (Desiderio Arias, Cipriano Bencosme), Paraguay (Alfredo Stroessner), Argentina (Juan Perón and other military strongmen), and Chile (Augusto Pinochet).
His local control as a strongman needed to be maintained by assuring the loyalty of his followers, so his bestowing of material rewards reinforced his own position.
As the war of the Triple Alliance spread, ideological language shifts occurred in Buenos Aires by the ruling Unitarians, who began referring to rural caudillos as barbarians and enemies of civilization.
In Spanish America, new sovereign states grappled with the question of balancing a central authority, usually in the hands of the traditional elites, with some kind of representation of the new "citizenry" of the republics.
These regimes attempted to curtail centrifugal forces, often termed "federalism", where regions or states of a nation-state had more autonomy and instead established the hegemony of the central government.
According to political scientist Peter H. Smith, these include Juan Manuel de Rosas in Argentina; Diego Portales of Chile, whose system lasted nearly a century; and Porfirio Díaz of Mexico.
The quintessential Mexican caudillo, who gained national power for decades, was Santa Anna, who was initially a Liberal but became a Conservative and sought strengthening of the central government.
Following the Mexican–American War, regional caudillos such as Juan Álvarez of the state of Guerrero and Santiago Vidaurri of Nuevo León-Coahuila ousted Santa Anna in the Revolution of Ayutla, bringing Liberals to power.
Álvarez follows the pattern of the "folk caudillo", whom historian François Chevalier calls a "good cacique, [who] protected the mainly indigenous and mestizo peasants of Guerrero, who in turn gave him their loyalty".
[33] Álvarez briefly served as President of Mexico, returning to his home state, leaving ideological liberals to institute the era of La Reforma.
Important figures whose local power had consequences nationally included Mariano Escobedo in San Luis Potosí; Ramón Corona in Jalisco and Durango; and Porfirio Díaz in parts of Veracruz, Puebla, and Oaxaca.
There were other caudillos whose power was more local but still important, including Gerónimo Treviño and Francisco Narajo in Nuevo León, Servando Canales and Juan Cortina in Tamaulipas, Florencio Antillón in Guanajuato, Ignacio Pesqueira in Sonora, Luis Terrazas in Chihuahua, and Manuel Lozada in Tepic.
Those opponents gravitated to supporting Díaz, a military hero of the French intervention, who challenged Juárez and Lerdo by attempting rebellions, the second of which, the Plan of Tuxtepec, was successful in 1876.
"[35] Simón Bolívar, the foremost leader of independence in Spanish America, attempted to recreate the Viceroyalty of New Granada in the nation of Gran Colombia.
As with Mexico and Central America, the political turmoil and penury of the governments of the Bolivarian republics prevented foreign investors from risking their capital there.
Like Paraguay's Jose Gaspar Rodriguez de Francia, Belzu chose to enact the aforementioned welfare programs because the idea of communalism was more in tune with the traditional values of native populations than the emphasis on private property that other caudillos embraced.
His enemies wanted to destroy the state-run projects that helped nationalist program but likewise improved the public sphere on which the country's poor were reliant.
[38] In contrast to most of Spanish America, post-independence Chile experienced political stability under the authoritarian rule of conservatives, backed by the landowning class.
In Paraguay, José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia (r. 1814–1840) was Supreme Dictator of the Republic, maintaining the landlocked country's independence from Argentina and other foreign powers.
He has been a controversial figure in Hispanic American history: many modern historians credit him with bringing stability to Paraguay, preserving independence, and "bequeathing to his successors an egalitarian, homogeneous nation".
[43] "Sometimes counted among the dictators of the era, contemporary history has viewed Francia as an honest, populist leader who promoted sovereign economic prosperity in a war-torn Paraguay.
Stable political regimes that could ensure the security of foreign investments, facilitate extraction of resources, and production of agricultural crops and animals were the necessary structures.
Díaz was averse to being dependent on the Mexican army, since as a general and leader of a coup d'état himself, he knew their potential for intervening in national politics.
Pancho Villa also helped oust Díaz, supported Madero, and following his murder in 1913, became a general in the Constitutionalist Army commanded by civilian Venustiano Carranza.
Emiliano Zapata, peasant leader from the state of Morelos, opposed to Díaz and every subsequent Mexican government until his murder in 1919 by Carranza's agents.
During Calles's presidency (1924–1928), he stringently enforced the anticlerical laws of the Mexican Constitution of 1917, leading to the Cristero War, a failed major uprising under the leadership of some regional caudillos, including Saturnino Cedillo of San Luis Potosí.
In 1929, Plutarco Elías Calles founded a political party, then known as the Partido Nacional Revolucionario (PNR), and became the jefe máximo (maximum chief), the power behind the presidency in a period known as the Maximato (1928–1934); PNR's iteration as the Institutional Revolutionary Party dominated Mexican politics until 2000 and functioned as a brake on the personalist power of regional caudillos in Mexico.
[20][21] Colombian Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez published two works with strongmen as main characters: The Autumn of the Patriarch[48] and The General in his Labyrinth, the latter a controversial novel about Simón Bolívar.
[49] In 1946, Nobel Prize laureate Miguel Ángel Asturias published El Señor Presidente, based on the life of Manuel Estrada Cabrera (1898–1920), which was translated to English in 1975.
