caudillismo
caudillismo, a system of political-social domination, based on the leadership of a strongman, that arose after the wars of independence from Spain in 19th-century Latin America. The Spanish word caudillo (“leader,” from the Latin capitellum [“small head”]) was used to describe the head of irregular forces who ruled a politically distinct territory. These forces were governed through an informal system of sustained obedience based on a paternalistic relationship between the subordinates and the leader, who attained his position as a result of his forceful personality and charisma.
Caudillismo as a concept was first used in the former Spanish colonies of Latin America (often called Spanish America) to describe the leaders who challenged the authority of the governments arising from the independence process after 1810; it also referred to the political regimes instated by such leaders. Different interpretations of the origin of caudillismo have included such factors as the militarization of politics as a result of the wars of independence, the absence of formal rules after the collapse of the colonial order, the ruralization of power, the importance of monarchical tradition, the legacy of authoritarianism and anarchism from the Spaniards, and the characteristics of the village societies.
The militarization of politics and society that outlived the battles for independence linked caudillismo to military power and political competition with armed struggles. The caudillo was first a warrior. During wars of liberation, civil wars, and national wars, he was the strongman who could recruit troops and protect his people. In Mexico and Peru, for example, professional military men played an important role in the political process as pressure groups. In other countries the military organization at the end of the colonial period was swept away by the wars of independence. Nonetheless, some military heads were dominant figures in those places—for instance, Francisco de Paula Santander in New Granada (present-day Colombia), Juan José Flores in Ecuador, José Antonio Paéz in Venezuela, and Andrés de Santa Cruz in Bolivia.
Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s 1845 book Facundo provided the classical interpretation of caudillismo in Latin America in the 1800s, framing it as the expression of political barbarism and the antithesis of a government that ensures security, freedom, and ownership rights for a country’s inhabitants. Sarmiento’s book is a portrait of Juan Facundo Quiroga, the “Tiger of the Plains,” an Argentine caudillo in the first half of the 19th century. In Quiroga, Sarmiento believed that he saw the incarnation of the conflict between civilization and barbarism faced by the peoples of the Americas as a result of their revolutionary experience, which had turned violence into a lifestyle. Physical vigour, spontaneous cruelty, and the rusticity inherent in the rural world they came from can account for the despotism of the regimes represented by such caudillos as Quiroga, Paéz, Mexico’s Antonio López de Santa Anna, and Argentina’s Juan Manuel de Rosas (the “River Plate Caligula”).
After the rupture of the colonial order, opportunities for social advancement expanded. Agustín de Iturbide, the “constitutional emperor of Mexico” (1822–23), came from a poor Creole family, and Gamarra and Ramón Castilla, both from Peru, were mestizos. They all reached positions that previously would have been inaccessible to them, but this relatively liberal opening acted as an instrument to impede the excessive dissemination of popular participation within a context in which the legitimacy of power was always questioned.
The terms caudillismo and caudillo continued to be used after the conditions that gave rise to what may be called “classical caudillismo”—that of the 19th century—disappeared. The terms have been extended to encompass any kind of personalized leadership that exercises power in an arbitrary manner within a context of weak or unstable political institutions. Caudillismo is used at times to designate and also stigmatize the governments of “strongmen,” with no contextual reference.