Latin American Independence Essays - , Term Papers

Latin American Independence 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 e ngineered 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 gro wing 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 t he 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