Citizens in Arms
THE ORIGINS OF the Spanish American republican experiment were associated with war. The Napoleonic invasion of Spain, the ensuing armed reaction in the Peninsula, and the successive wars in America, which lasted altogether for fourteen years and resulted in independence for most of the former colonies, are at the background of the shaping of the new polities. Those confrontations entailed a wide-ranging mobilization of people and resources and the deployment of different types of armies across the vast Spanish American territories. In the political context following independence, however, the existing military landscape did not remain unchallenged, and a topic dear to the republican tradition attained a prominent place in the public debates of the new era: how to defend the recently acquired freedom in the face of both internal and external threats.
This issue had been at the heart of republican ideological and political controversies since classical times. The conviction that only those who belonged to the polity, the citizens, should be in charge of the defense of the republic, and that leaving it in hands of professional soldiers—mercenaries—opened the door to corruption and tyranny goes back to antiquity, and was still invoked in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe and the United States. Standing armies manned by professionals and militia consisting of free citizens represented two very different forms of understanding military force. The latter was considered to be best suited to republican values, yet in the face of the empirical demands of war and in the name of efficiency, authorities oftentimes resorted to professional armies as an alternative or a complement to citizen militia. And although there was a long-standing tension between the two systems, time and again governments settled for a combination of both.1
In matters of defense, the Spanish Americans turned to these republican legacies and experiences, and early on they introduced the right of citizens to bear arms for the protection of liberty, a key piece in the construction of the new polities. The institutional expression of armed citizenship was the militia. Yet in this regard, as well as in the issue of professional armies, the early political leaderships did not start from scratch. Rather, they had to cope with the de facto militarization that outlived the wars of independence, as well as with the traces of colonial institutions and practices that were still in operation. They were also very aware of the discussions and legislation on this matter in countries that functioned as republican references.
Legacies
In America, for centuries, the Spanish Crown had kept regular forces—cuerpos veteranos of professional soldiers—as well as a rather irregular militia system, manned by the vecinos, for local defense purposes. These military arrangements were extremely variable, and it was only by the second half of the eighteenth century that, in the context of the Bourbon reforms, Charles III introduced new regulations in order to enhance the efficiency of the imperial armed forces in the colonies. Due to the high costs involved in the upkeep of the cuerpos veteranos, however, militia were the main target of reform, and they were rearranged and reinforced to cover most of the territories. The success of these measures was uneven and, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the situation varied greatly from place to place, with the larger cities—from Mexico to Buenos Aires—being the main locations of the so-called milicias regladas (regulated militia).
By then, war broke out and changed the political and military landscape completely. There was a massive mobilization of human and material resources to back the war efforts. In most places, professional armies experienced a substantial and sustained expansion as well as an increase of their political importance. Militia, in turn, lived on, while various kinds of so-called irregular forces made their appearance in the war scene, usually organized by local groups in order to take part in the conflicts.
In the aftermath of independence, the effects of such widespread militarization proved long lasting. Alejandro Rabinovich has coined the term sociedad guerrera to refer to the situation that prevailed then in the River Plate area where, he argues, “the state of war became permanent … the normal condition of social life.” He draws a compelling picture of such a society, which—he claims—lasted for several decades, until the 1870s. Whether or not the term is applicable for so long and entirely adequate to other areas, it calls attention to a crucial dimension of Spanish American history in the first decades of the nineteenth century, the profound and lasting impact of the extensive military mobilization experienced in the 1810s and early 1820s. In what followed, “war seems to have been actively adopted and consciously encouraged by the revolutionary elites, with a very important popular support.”2
In this context, military organization was a key aspect in the formation of the new polities. In tune with the republican values prevalent among the postrevolutionary leaderships, the first efforts in this regard pointed to the affirmation of the militia as the institution that materialized the principle of the citizen in arms. In fact, after the wars, the authorities that came to power in the different corners of Spanish America reactivated the militia and redefined this formerly colonial institution in connection with the new concepts of the body politic and the sovereign people. They followed the prestigious examples of the United States and revolutionary France. The defense of the republic was to be in charge of the citizens, who had the right and obligation to protect liberty and fight against despotism. In tune with these convictions, most governments sought to reduce the size and influence of the existing standing armies and favor the militia. Nevertheless, debates around the military forces were intense, and in the following decades, the prevailing arrangements combined both institutions in very unstable patterns.
Controversies around this issue started early on in the new polities. Thus, for example, in the Mexican Constitutional Congress of 1822, a passionate exchange took place between those who favored militia and the supporters of a strong standing army. Their arguments touched upon various matters, from the danger of an eventual invasion on the part of the Spaniards to the problems posed by fiscal restrictions, among others. They also reflected different opinions regarding armed citizenship, clearly illustrated in the opposite views put forward by deputies Carlos María Bustamante and Pedro Lanuza. In support of the militia, the former said, “Some people believe that only the professional soldier can repel with glory the foreign invader: this is a misunderstanding that I must put right: the militia soldier is a man with powerful ties; he is a citizen, a father, a family man; he is a man who appreciates his dignity, more so when he is in view of the enemy, because he then assesses what he may win and lose.” Lanuza, in turn, claimed militia were only good to “preserve order, guard prisoners in jail, escort a convict … or go after a petty thief.” National defense should be in the hands of the professional army: “to defend a military post, prevent a landing, attack a battle line, observe discipline and master the art of war; that belongs to soldiers and only to soldiers.”3
This Congress finally decided in favor of reducing the professional forces and building up the militia; it also introduced a change in name: instead of “national” they became “civic” militia, thus stressing the new values in circulation. This decision was never truly enforced; Emperor Agustín de Iturbide (May 1822 to March 1823) counted on the standing army for support and strove to concentrate military power in the hands of professionals. The militia, however, did not vanish from the scene, and after the fall of the emperor and the proclamation of the republic, in 1827 the national Congress passed new regulations that gave the militia a key role in defending both the nation as a whole and each one of the states from external enemies.
During the same decade of the 1820s, militia were organized and regulated in several other places, such as Chile, Peru, New Granada, and most of the states of the United Provinces (part of the former Viceroyalty of the River Plate) and of the Central American confederation, among others. Ecuador established them in 1830 after its separation from Colombia as an autonomous state, while in Costa Rica, in 1834, the existing militias were reorganized and, with no standing army, they became the sole military force in the country.
In the following decades, the situation varied greatly from place to place, and while in certain areas, militia practically disappeared for some time—only to come back to life again later—in others, they remained a key military resource throughout the century. In fact, there was a widespread endorsement of the principle of armed citizenship, materialized in this mostly locally based institution that, besides the generic term milicias, could also go under different names, such as cuerpos cívicos, guardias cívicas, and the later favorite guardias nacionales, among others. Standing armies, in turn, shared the scene almost everywhere, and despite intense political disputes over their military organization, by midcentury most countries had settled for this double-tiered system, not unlike the United States’ “dual army tradition.”4
Although these arrangements usually proved quite unstable, they persisted for decades, with militias and professional forces playing different and oftentimes competing roles both in military matters and in the political life of the Spanish American republics. Of the two, only the militias were understood, in normative terms, as the embodiment of the people in arms, the guardians of popular sovereignty, and therefore as safeguards of the republican polity. In some cases, they also became bulwarks of state or provincial autonomy. These legitimating values were not the only bases for the importance of the militia, and other, more practical matters also played a part in the perpetuation of the institution until the last decades of the nineteenth century.
An Army of Citizens
Throughout Spanish America, the militia that took shape after the demise of the colonial order followed comparable patterns of organization, and by midcentury, despite the strongly local nature of these forces, they showed striking similarities in their basic structure, functions, and forms of action.
By definition, the militia was basically formed by the citizens. In fact, and not unlike potential voters, conditions for recruitment were highly inclusive: in most cases, all free adult male nationals had to enroll. There were local exceptions and restrictions, but the prevailing regulations opened the way to the inclusion of large sectors of the male population. The close association between the citizen in arms and the citizen voter can be traced to both the Anglo-Saxon and the French traditions, but the former model of the citizen–property owner never took root in the new republics. There were few exceptions to this general rule. Thus, in the 1840s, the ideal of a militia integrated by men with some means, who could pay for their arms and uniforms, was put forward in Venezuela and Peru, but with only very limited success. In fact, property or literacy requirements were less frequently demanded than in the case of voters; moreover, as mentioned in chapter 2, in some cases, belonging to the militia opened the way to the right of suffrage, regardless of other conditions. Age, sex, place of residence, and nationality were the main conditions for enrollment, which was generally but not always mandatory. Other, more specific, limitations included the exemption of certain trades and professions whose members were deemed nonexpendable, like public employees, journeymen in times of harvest, teachers and doctors, among others.
Ethnic considerations were seldom included, but in some cases, indigenous people were subject to special regulations. Thus, when and where they were subject to some kind of special taxes (successors to the colonial tributo), they were usually exempted from military duties. Such was the case, for example, with the militia and army regulations passed in Ecuador in 1835, which were applied in the following decades until the abolition of that sort of taxation in 1857. At the time, peasants and artisans were strongly represented in these forces, while the formal exemption of indígenas did not prevent their individual or, more often, collective participation in areas densely populated by indigenous communities, like Otavalo and Ibarra. In Guatemala, in turn, the indigenous population was in some periods and areas formally excluded from service in the militia, but some groups became an important presence during the war of 1826 to 1829, and later on, in the armies under the control of the successful political and military leader, Rafael Caldera. In the case of Mexico, Guy Thomson has perceptively described the involvement of indigenous communities in the National Guard, and has convincingly argued that “Nahua and Zapotec National Guard companies from the Sierra de Puebla and the Sierra de Ixtlán contributed importantly to the triumph of the Liberals over Conservatives in the Three Years War (1857–1860), to the defeat of the European intervention, to the rise of Porfirio Díaz, to his consolidation in power, and to his eventual demise in 1911.”5
Even when and where enrollment was mandatory, not all men served. Exemptions and exceptions abounded, as did the hiring of replacements—not always permitted. Almost everywhere, the great majority of the recruits came from the lower and working classes, both urban and rural. These were often coerced into enlisting, but they could also enter the service as part of their broader political commitments. In the words of the Mexican liberal leader José María Luis Mora, “en ellas entraron las personas menos apreciables por su educación y principios.”6 This picture is rather incomplete, as the militia included other types as well, and not all those who had the required resources or connections to avoid it actually escaped their duty. Young well-to-do men with political aspirations were attracted by a prestigious republican institution, which was both a useful platform for building partisan networks and a crucial road of access to military resources. Also, politically minded men from the urban and rural middling sectors sometimes joined the ranks, and often ended up in commanding positions of different sorts.
Recruitment took place at the local level. Men were nominally incorporated to the regiment in their place of residence; they had to take part in regular training exercises and eventually go into effective service—usually remunerated. Militia duty was supposed to remain limited in time and restricted geographically, except during emergencies (wars, for example), when troops could be taken far away from their places of origin and kept for longer periods in the field.
In the early days after independence, militia companies were organized according to the colonial criteria based on social and ethnic categories, but soon afterward, those divisions were left behind in favor of a more egalitarian model based on the place of residence. Companies included all men within their area of coverage. This pattern was in tune with the new republican values that sought to erase the Old Regime sociopolitical order and claimed political equality for all citizens. At the same time, residence patterns usually entailed social and ethnic affinities among dwellers of the same district, like in the case of urban popular neighborhoods and indigenous villages, so that militia units often reproduced such uniformity.
Presumably, all members of the militia were equals, free citizens only temporarily subject to relations of subordination. In fact, however, the institution was strongly hierarchical, both at the overall level of command and within each regimental unit. The egalitarian principles prevailed on paper, and regulations often prescribed the election of commanders by the rank-and-file members of a company. This provision was quite important, for example, in the case of indigenous communities in Mexico, where that choice was done in accordance with local traditions and practices, as well as in some areas with strong local leaderships. In other cases, however, this procedure was overlooked, nonexistent, or only applied to the lower echelons of the noncommissioned officers, so that superior officers were appointed from above—by the political or military authorities. In this regard, a widespread image associates militia commanders with large landowners, hacendados, or other socially powerful men who led their retinue (mainly workers linked by ties of patronage to their bosses) organized as militia units ready to play the military game, particularly in the rural areas. This picture may apply to some specific cases, but it is hardly valid to portray the prevailing complex nature of the militia organization of command.
Like the electoral networks, militia constituted hierarchical organizations with a broad base held together by vertical links of obedience and loyalty to chiefs and commanders, as well as by horizontal bonds of male comradeship and esprit de corps among their members. At the regiment level, commanders were key figures in defining and keeping these internal hierarchies as well as in weaving the connections with the larger military and political networks. They could come from different walks of life, but generally, the possession of some amount of political and social capital was a necessary asset, and different partisan groups competed to fill in the higher posts with their candidates. Military experience also counted. In fact, ascent by merit within the militia was also possible, even for men coming from lower social ranks. The main attribute, however, was the connection to local or regional networks of political power, where these forces had their roots and their main field of action. The chain of command could go all the way up to the president of the republic—as chief commander of all the armed forces—but more often than not the actual control of the militia was in the hands of municipal and provincial authorities. Commanders, therefore, stemmed from those webs of power.
An Army for the States
The militia was born as a colonial parochial body, and despite the institutional transformations introduced in the republican era, it remained deeply rooted in the local or regional political conditions. Its forces responded to regional leaders, governors, and comandantes, which operated with a great degree of autonomy vis-à-vis the central government. This situation was not just the result of political practices; it was firmly grounded in ideas and principles related to the quest for a decentralized state pattern. Therefore, attempts at shifting the control of these military resources in favor of a centralized authority usually failed, with few exceptions. Even when and where milicias became the Guardia Nacional, a presumably nationalized institution, it did not easily relinquish its former autonomy. In many cases, this army of citizens designed to defend freedom in the face of any tyrant also became an army of the states that protected their autonomy from the despotism that could be exerted by national authorities.
Thus, for example, in Mexico, the militia came to stand as a pillar of federalism. In accordance with the Constitution of 1824, the regulations of 1827 established the militia as the military force of the states, so that each state had to define its organization and functions. Before 1830, Jalisco, Michoacán, Oaxaca, Puebla, San Luis Potosí, Veracruz, Yucatán, Zacatecas, and the state of Mexico, all had their own militia. This arrangement was soon challenged by those in favor of the consolidation of a central authority, and during the 1830s and early 1840s these forces were alternatively reduced, partially dissolved, recreated once again, and so on, in successive attempts at diminishing or increasing the military power of the states. The invasion of United States’ forces in 1846 led to the organization of the National Guard with uneven results in the different states, and in the following decade, the situation was again very volatile, with new legislation for and against these forces, and heated public debates on those matters. While centralizing conservatives favored the standing army, the liberals stood for locally organized militia. Many states struggled to keep these active, and after the Ayutla revolution (1854–55) and the War of Reform (1857–61), the successful liberals reorganized the armed forces, reduced the standing army, and expanded and regularized the National Guard as a state-based citizen army. This arrangement proved rather fragile during the French invasion (1862–67) and was once more adjusted to enhance the role of the professionals, under a national central command. By 1884, the government of Porfirio Díaz, who had commanded the National Guard of his own state and had profited from this position to fight and win the revolution that led him to the presidency in 1877, subordinated the institution to his now favorite military force, the standing army.
At the other end of the subcontinent, in the territories of the former Viceroyalty of the River Plate, between the 1820s and the early 1850s, each of the different provinces—held together as a confederation—had their own military setup, which usually included a militia and sometimes also professional forces. The constitution of 1853 gave shape to a federal Argentine republic and devised a national defense system that included a standing army and a National Guard. Although the latter formally depended upon the former, and both were under the supreme command of the president, the provincial governments were in charge of organizing the Guard on a regular basis. In fact, governors and other local authorities usually controlled these forces, which were deeply rooted in the provincial political ground. The situation led to a sustained fragmentation of military power, and to passionate debates as well as recurrent conflicts on who had the right to summon, mobilize, and exercise effective dominion over these forces. Very much like in Mexico, in Argentina the provinces claimed that control over their own citizen armies was the guarantee against the despotic tendencies of the national government. Those who were in favor of consolidating a centralized state, in turn, demanded that the Guard be entirely subordinated to the federal authorities. This controversy was long-lived, and only by the last decades of the century, was the dual system gradually replaced by a more concentrated military arrangement.
Colombia is another good example of the militia as a pillar of regional, provincial, and local power, and there are several others.7 In most countries, the formation of a national government was a contested proposition; the persistence of strong regional authorities and a widespread resistance to the centralized state model were behind many of the political conflicts of these decades. Federalism was the institutional response to these de facto situations, but even when such schemes were formally adopted to allow for the distribution of authority between the center and the different parts, disputes about their share of effective power were the rule. And in most of these disputes, the militia played a key symbolic and material role: they were a stronghold against despotism as well as an indispensable resource from which to engage in armed conflict.
In these matters, the United States was a leading case. The Constitution had opened the way to the establishment of a dual military system consisting of a small regular army controlled by the federal government and the militia maintained by the states. Controversies over the relative importance of both institutions were commonplace in the first decades after independence and a matter of recurrent strife between federalists on the one side and antifederalists, and later republicans, on the other. After the war of 1812, the existence of a professional army was no longer in question, but it remained relatively small until the Mexican war when Congress authorized the expansion of these regular forces, while voluntary and state militia played a subordinate role in the conflict. In the following decades, the states insisted on their need to keep their own, relatively autonomous militia, and it was these forces from the Southern states that formed the initial core of the Confederation army. Nothing remained the same after that terrible confrontation, and the federal government became stronger and more powerful, not least in military matters; although the dual system persisted, the terms of the equation had changed for good. Spanish Americans were well aware of these developments in the United States, and they resorted to different moments of that history to sustain their arguments both in favor of and against states’ control over the militia, reinforcement of the standing army, or concentration of military power in the hands of the national government. That example was particularly pertinent to those republics that chose the federal system of organization, very much on the pattern of their northern neighbor, where the militia came to embody not just the principle of armed citizenship but also the right of the states to have their own military forces.
Fragmentation
The coexistence of two formal institutions, the standing army and the militia, led to the fragmentation of military power. This situation was not only the consequence of the failure to unite them under a single command; it was the result of a combination of ideas, norms, and practices regarding the use of force and the defense of the polity that nurtured that coexistence and reproduced the unstable arrangements that prevailed for decades. Disputes erupted between those who insisted on the role of a decentralized militia in the polity and on the benefits of a fragmented military power and those who strove to strengthen a unified standing army and ensure its supremacy. Even though the existing professional armies also showed signs of internal divisions, collusion with local interests, and tendencies to insubordination, their advocates considered them to be more adequate than decentralized militia to secure the monopoly of violence in the hands of a single authority.8 In that direction, they pushed forward for a systematic improvement of the army in terms of its discipline, hierarchical structure, and technical equipment, and for the subordination of militia to a unified, central command. The controversy lasted for decades, and it overlapped with other issues regarding the shape and features of the state in the republics.
In that context, the most frequent scenario was one of competition and hostility between professional and citizens’ armies. There were various sources of friction, besides the already mentioned fact that they stemmed from distinctive traditions and responded to different ways of understanding the use of force in the polity. They also differed in their main functions, at least on paper. The existence of rules that prescribed the relationships between the two institutions did not suffice to guarantee a smooth partnership or a regulated subordination. The militia was usually defined as an auxiliary force whose movements and actions were restricted to a relatively limited geographical area. Only under special circumstances could it be moved to more distant locations and assume extra duties that were not too different from those of the standing army. In practice, these limitations were often overlooked, so that there are numerous examples of disputes between them regarding their respective duties and jurisdictions.
Tensions also resulted from the practical and symbolic distinctions between soldiers of the regular army and militiamen. Soldiers were associated with the figure of the “mercenary,” while militiamen carried the aura of the citizen. Socially, furthermore, the former were considered to be either too poor to earn a living otherwise or outlaws recruited by force. They also had different rights and obligations. Soldiers entered permanent service as subordinates in a tight organization where they had to obey orders and go wherever sent. Militia, in turn, were formed by citizens with the obligation to enroll, participate in periodical military training, and eventually serve and then just for short periods of time, in locations close to home. They frequently—though not always—had a say in the selection of their commanders. Finally, soldiers were often explicitly excluded from the right to vote, while militia were not.
These differences should not hide the many actual similarities and connections between the two. At the level of militia commanders, the situation varied greatly, as in some places standing army officers were excluded from their ranks, while in others, on the contrary, the highest levels were assigned to professionals, who could thus rotate from one force to the other. As for the rank and file, the militia, like the army, mainly recruited men from the popular classes. In the field, their rights were frequently ignored and they received similar punishments to those inflicted on soldiers. Even so, contemporaries insisted on making the distinction between the two. The violation of the principles upon which the militia was supposed to function was a matter of recurrent public denunciations. Furthermore, the rhetoric of the armed citizen played an important part in the political life of the republics, not just for the elites. And militias came to function as networks whose role went well beyond their specific military purpose.
The conflict-ridden coexistence of these institutions was further complicated by the existence of the so-called irregular forces, which shared the military scene in several places and for relatively extended periods. Many of these organizations, like the “guerrillas” in the Peruvian sierra or the montoneras in Argentina, among others, considered themselves to embody the principle of armed citizenship and acted in the name of their rights to defend freedom and combat despotism. In fact, they operated very much like the militia and often intervened in political struggles as allied forces to partisan groups of different sorts, not necessarily “irregular,” and in different combinations with formal professional and citizens’ armies. In Argentina, for example, the leaders of these montoneras were usually former militia or National Guard commanders, who organized their men following that same pattern and acted in the name of their rights to the use of force. It was their enemies who labeled them as “irregulars” to question their claim to legitimacy. In the case of Peru, Cecilia Méndez has shown that “guerrillas” in the sierras “consisted of irregular armies of civilians, usually organized by their local authorities, which operated as auxiliary forces to the regular army”9—very much like militia in other areas.
These formal distinctions among the different types of military forces fail to account for the actual, rather messy coexistence, of armies that often did not quite qualify in any of the prescribed categories but “constituted … a continuum of war [military] practices,” with no clear-cut lines of separation.10
Patriotic Liturgy
The militia was a vital part of the military system of the Spanish American nations-in-the-making and shared with the standing army the responsibility for their defense, both from internal and external enemies. Yet, as the embodiment of the citizens in arms, the institution had other important functions in the political life of these republics. Its role was particularly visible in three dimensions thereof: civic and patriotic liturgy, party politics and electoral practices, and revolutions.
Armed citizenship was a standard topic of republican rhetoric and symbolism. Militias materialized this principle, and therefore they were often hailed for their patriotism and civic virtues. Their companies participated regularly in public ceremonies and patriotic rituals, and the authorities praised them as guardians of freedom and representatives of the best republican values. Examples abound. Guy Thomson has perceptively shown the role played between the 1840s and 1880 by the National Guard of an indigenous community in the Mexican Sierra del Norte de Puebla on such ceremonial occasions. He also described the many connections the militia established with other organizations, like the juntas patrióticas and the musical cuerpos filarmónicos, in the collective celebrations of national and local festivities. These practices were deeply enmeshed in community customs recovered in the new context. Also in Mexico, according to Pedro Santoni, after the war with the United States, the federal government decided in 1848 to honor the so-called polko battalions of the National Guard for their brave performance during that conflict, and made this commemoration the center of patriotic rituals for many years to come.
In a very different setting, that of Chile in the 1830s, a new political regime introduced important modifications in the military organization of the country, and the National Guard, renamed Guardia Cívica became—in the words of James Wood—“one of the lead actors in the symbolic representation of order put on display by the new regime during national holidays.”11 On September 17, 1830, the guards participated in the celebration of Independence Day with a military parade, and the following year, the event culminated in a reenactment of a decisive battle against the Spanish, a patriotic ritual that was from then on repeated on the same date as a regular feature of those festivities. Government officials and military commanders did not spare words to honor the guards as bulwarks of liberty and order.
Similar displays of rhetoric may be found in most places in Spanish America. Thus, for example, in 1854 the governor of the Cartagena province in Colombia addressed the National Guard with the following words:
Armed citizens! I salute you in the name of the province of Cartagena, as the loyal representatives of its valor and patriotism.… You have offered and spontaneously provided [your help], just like the sons of Athens, Sparta and Rome did in past heroic times.… Armed citizens! Let this be your war cry: Long live the Constitution! Long live the Republic!12
And in Argentina, this type of speech as well as the parading of militia and national guards on patriotic festivities and civic occasions was a recurrent feature throughout the country and during most of the century.
Such lofty words of praise could easily change into sour accusations when militia contingents contested the current authorities or their superior officers and participated in rebellious actions against them. Also, when whole groups used their military empowerment to question the existing social and political order, like during the Caste War in the Huasteca, so well explored by Michael Ducey, among others. Quite often, even when the official language courted the institution, other voices of alarm expressed doubts regarding the virtuous nature of the citizens in arms. Thus, for example, at the same time that in the 1830s, after the armed conflicts of the previous decade, the Chilean regime strove to turn the Civic Guard into a symbol of order and union, critics mistrusted the citizens in arms, who could, they argued, easily engage in disorderly practices. Also, the fact that the government resorted to the guards as a voting force elicited negative reactions from groups outside the official party. On many other occasions, in different places, the partisan engagement of militia and, even more, the active participation of these men in rebellions and revolutions, triggered intense debates on their nature and their potential virtues and vices.
Electoral Engagement
On June 4, 1836, in Santiago de Chile, the opposition newspaper El Barómetro denounced the “emptiness” of popular suffrage during the electoral campaign for the reelection of President Prieto, and added: “A sad and embarrassing example of this truth is the custom that one observes in our towns … of bringing together at the time of a vote all the civic corps and veteran officers in order to distribute printed lists of candidates to them.”13 Three decades later, in the Argentine province of Tucumán, legislators of the opposition Club Sarmiento accused the government of “calling each one of the ‘jefes’ and commanders of the provincial National Guard to work for the candidature of Elizalde [the official favorite] under the threat of destitution of their respective posts.”14 These are just two examples of a very widespread practice: the active involvement of the militia and the National Guard in elections, and more generally, in partisan politics.
By definition, the citizens of these republics enjoyed two basic political rights, the suffrage and the right to bear arms, which for the most part were broadly extended among the male population. There was, therefore, a basic normative connection between voters and militiamen. In practice, moreover, although participation in the militia probably involved more people than voting, both attracted basically the same kind of people, with a strong representation of men belonging to the popular classes who were thus included in local political and partisan networks.
The militia convened citizens and assembled them according to the organizational and hierarchical criteria of the force. This structure could be productively put to use for purposes beyond their specific military duties, not least among them those related to electoral practices. While professional soldiers were often legally banned from the vote, these citizens in arms, on the contrary, often kept their rights even while on duty. Thus, the men participated collectively as disciplined voters at the polls, and they could make use of their armed skills in the violent displays that were typical on such occasions. Their sheer presence put pressure on the potential voters; it was also a dissuading factor for those who could not compete with militiamen in their use of force. Militia commanders and officers, who were themselves usually connected to partisan groups, operated inside the force to “produce” votes and to impose their men in the field. Such actions surely included coercion from the top, but there are many examples of a more multifaceted relationship between leaders and the following, whereby the militarized space of the militia was part of larger partisan networks whose rank-and-file members were not just unconditional subordinates.
The participation of these forces in elections did not necessarily mean support for the current official candidates. Militia and the National Guard were not strictly government forces. Deeply rooted in the local political world, their battalions could be in the opposition to candidacies supported by the central or “national” authorities, but also within the regional and local scenes, they could respond to different partisan groups in competition. The power to appoint commanders and organize the forces was a key instrument for the control of their electoral performance, and therefore, where governors had that right, they operated swiftly to ensure their own men were in charge. Yet this maneuvering did not guarantee the tight domination of every battalion, and because all partisan groups strove to gain influence upon them through sympathetic commanding officers, their electoral behavior could prove contrary to the interests of their official bosses.
Chile offers an interesting example of the electoral weight of a National Guard controlled from above. In 1830, the military and political success of the party that strove for the consolidation of a centralized authority favored the concentration of power in the hands of the national government. Among the important institutional reforms introduced by the new administration, under the leadership of Diego Portales, the reorganization of the military had decisive political consequences. The National Guard gained a privileged role in the regime; it was expanded and restructured to enforce order and discipline among the ranks, now firmly under the command of officers appointed by and loyal to the national authorities. It also became a means of exerting control over the members of the working classes, and artisans were a key presence in most battalions of the urban areas.
In those years, the Guard also became a fundamental player in the electoral game. In this case, the official candidates could count on the votes cast by these “citizens in arms” in the different parts of the country. The opposition complained, but the system proved efficient for those already in power—at least until the late 1840s. A first visible attempt at gaining the favor of the guards to compete against an official presidential candidate took place on the occasion of the elections of 1846. The followers of Ramón Freire put into circulation the newssheet El Guardia Nacional to attract the attention of the rank-and-file citizens in arms, with meager results. The incumbent, Francisco Bulnes, was reelected by a large majority. On the day of the election, however, there were tumultuous protests in Valparaíso, a city where three years later the opposition candidate won the seat as representative in Congress against the name put forward by the government. Presumably, some guards had disobeyed their orders, a fact that led to increasing unease regarding the voting power of these men in arms who could eventually go their own way. In fact, in the years that followed, this tendency was further accentuated with the increasing mobilization of the liberal party, the rise of certain radical groups within it, and the creation of the Sociedad de la Igualdad, which put forward an egalitarian agenda that included a strong appeal to the workers, particularly the artisans—with limited success. The mobilization of opposition groups was intense but short-lived, and it went beyond the electoral disputes to tread the roads of armed insurrection, finally defeated by government forces with the participation of the National Guard. Nevertheless, concern about the potential for subordination within the institution prompted the authorities to better articulate it with an increasingly robust professional army.
In neighboring Argentina, after the constitution of the federal republic in 1853, the Guard was also a relevant electoral actor, but in a rather different direction from the Chilean case. At least until the 1880s, the recently created federal government did not control that force, which was basically managed by the provincial authorities. The governors named their own men to command the battalions and tried to make sure that they could count on them and their rank and file during elections. Between 1863 and 1877, enrollment in the National Guard was a requisite for voters, so that commanders could easily manipulate the granting of certificates in order to suit their partisan interests. Also, actual guards on duty could vote, and they also participated in the organization and control of the space around the polling stations. Not always, however, the current provincial authorities could effectively depend upon the Guard, whose battalions often changed sides, or joined the ranks of a partisan group that did not respond to the official candidates. The federal government also tried to influence the designation of commanders and to gain the favor of those already in charge, as well as to negotiate with the provincial administrations the control of the force. Throughout this period, therefore, the National Guard was a key political player, which did not respond to a single institutional or political authority; rather, its power both in military and partisan matters was fragmented. In each province, and sometimes in different areas within a province, it was enmeshed in the local networks of political action. Regional alliances were also frequent, but a unified command was almost out of the question. This situation exceeded the electoral game and reached its most stirring effects when the partisan strife led to armed confrontation and revolutions.
Revolutions
The deployment of armed resources was a regular feature of Spanish American politics. In the form of revolutions and levantamientos (uprisings) of various kinds, political actors resorted to military force to question, challenge, and eventually depose those in power. This was not an exceptional move; rather, it was an accepted way of political intervention.
Throughout the nineteenth century, most countries experienced frequent actions of this sort, successful and unsuccessful. In Mexico, for example, more than 1,500 pronunciamientos were staged between 1821, when the Plan de Iguala proclaimed independence, and 1876, when the Plan de Tuxtepec opened the road to power for Porfirio Díaz. These were manifestos put forward to question, formulate demands to, and put pressure upon the authorities, and very often—though not always—culminated in a military action against them. In Argentina, at the other end of the subcontinent, a nineteenth-century observer counted 117 levantamientos between 1862 and 1868, and many more both national and local took place during the rest of the century. Chile, in turn, saw less of this type of actions, but all the same, four full-fledged armed interventions were launched to contest the national authorities in 1829–30, 1851, 1859, and 1891. And Colombia experienced on average a major war every seven years. The rest of the Spanish American republics have a similar record.15
The story has been told many times, from different viewpoints, and has led scholars and other observers to put forward various interpretations of such widespread use of force and display of armed resources in the political life of the region. Until recent years, most of them cast a condemning eye on these recurrent practices, considered to be the result of retrograde political habits and an obstacle in the road to modernization. In a pioneer critique to those perceptions included in an edited book published in 2000, Rebecca Earle called for a rejection of the prevailing accounts of the nineteenth century in Latin America as a “period of epic chaos,” and on the basis of the essays included in the volume, proposed that “elections, pronunciamientos and revolt should perhaps be seen as part of the normal, if problematic, functioning of nineteenth century politics.”16 Since then, scholars have revisited this topic under new light and have tried to understand revolutions and other forms of armed confrontations in context.
Within the republican framework adopted by the Spanish American polities, the figure of the citizen-in-arms had a central place among the values and the institutions of self-government as it was adopted after independence. From then on and for most of the century, as we have seen, citizens—as guardians of popular sovereignty—had the right and the obligation to bear arms in defense of freedom and in the face of any abuses of power. The right to insurrection was grounded in the theory of natural rights—which was widely accepted at the time and had precedence over positive law—and it opened the way to challenge the existing authorities on the charge of alleged despotism and to the deployment of armed resources to back this challenge. In republican terms, acting against a despotic authority was a not only a right but also an obligation, a civic duty.
Spanish American revolutions were often grounded in that right. In tune with the use of the concept of revolution that was quite widespread at the time, revolutionaries called for the restoration of some lost liberties and demanded to return to an institutional order presumably infringed by a despotic government.17 In this context, revolutions were not seen as a rupture. In the political road to power, where elections played a prominent legal role, the military mobilization of the people could follow, considered to be a legitimate step in a continuum of available political actions that could culminate in a levantamiento. Elections, moreover, were among the more frequent explicit motives behind such confrontations. Rebels denounced official manipulation and fraud to justify the use of force, which could also be grounded on other claims related to the exercise of government power and the need to defend rights and liberties.
The limits of what could count as legitimate were, however, always in dispute. Thus, armed revolts that put forward social demands and confronted the existing social system defied the established limits, and although their promoters could use the language of republican citizenship to express their claims, they actually challenged the accepted protocols of political revolutions.
The term revolution, in turn, experienced important variations throughout the century, but for most of the time, it had a positive connotation related to popular reaction against despotism or tyranny. Those who launched these actions usually claimed that their particular armed rebellion was, in fact, a revolution, while their enemies questioned that claim and used more negatively charged terms, such as rebellion or insurrection against the legitimate authorities. This positive connotation of the concept of revolution associated with the notion resistance to despotism did not always prevail, however, and in the last decades of the century it gained new meanings that implied radical change rather than the search for the “restoration” of lost liberties.
In any case, revolutions in different forms and under various names became a regular feature of Spanish American politics. The contrast in this regard with the United States—the main model for republican polity for nineteenth-century Latin Americans—is worth exploring.18 The northern nation also witnessed rebellions that resorted to arguments not so different from the ones used by its neighbors to the south. The best-known examples are the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794, the Fries’s Rebellion of 1800, the Baltimore Riot in 1812, the Dorr Rebellion of 1842, and the post–Civil War insurgencies in the Southern states. These few armed actions posing demands to the established powers did not generate large-scale revolts, they elicited strong disapproval from various quarters, and they were easily subdued. A different question arises, however, with the Civil War, which may itself be considered a case of internal rebellion, where—by the way—militia played a significant role, particularly in the formation of the Confederate army. This challenge escalated into a full-fledged civil war with no equivalent in the Spanish American republics. None of the revolutions in the south reached the scale—in terms of duration, geographical reach, and number of casualties—of that conflict, in a country that had previously known only a handful of such events. Thus, the highly coveted political stability reached in the United States after some initial fears was suddenly shattered by a conflict that evoked the volatile and strongly despised Spanish American “anarchy” and exposed the fragility of the republic’s political order. The outcome of the war, and the measures taken by the Lincoln administration during the conflict, strengthened the federal government, and in the end, made any actions against it very hard to sustain. In fact, a wave of insurrections in the Southern states during Reconstruction “did not seek to overthrow the federal government.… Rather, their objective was to remove the Republican state governments … and replace them with Democratic ones.”19
Not all revolutions in the Spanish American republics demanded the fall of the central government either, and although some of them acquired national scope, many more took place at the local and regional levels. In all cases, however, revolutions involved political actors who resorted to military means in order to dispute their claims, and were ready to fight their opponents not just in elections but also through the use of force. Most of these events were preceded by a public declaration of some sort, which stated the causes that had led their leaders to action, and proposed a plan for the future. Thus, for example, in Mexico, from the failed localized revolt of San Luis Potosí in 1837 to the very successful uprising headed by Porfirio Díaz in Mexico in 1876, most of the armed confrontations of the century followed a pronunciamiento. On April 14, 1837, in the city of San Luis Potosí, under the title “Long live the Federation!” a group of “officers and citizens” proclaimed their opposition to the current government. The first point of their declaration stated that “the independence of the nation, which is the most sacred object of all Mexicans, finds itself threatened in different ways, and most particularly by our ancient rulers,” and after enumerating the evidence to back that claim, the sixth and last point declared that: “For this reason the Mexican nation finds itself in a state of complete disarray as a result of the absence of laws that may safeguard individual guarantees and national liberties; and thus the undersigned hereby pronounce of the reestablishment of the federal system.” That was, indeed, their main proclaimed objective, to restore the “popular federal system that was adopted freely and spontaneously by the nation in the year of 1824.” Almost forty years later, the Plan de Tuxtepec, of January 10, 1876, was launched to protest the recent reelection of Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada to the presidency, and stated the main causes for the pronouncement: that the national government had abused the political system, “despising and violating norms and laws”; that suffrage had “become a farce”; that democracy was mocked, and the sovereignty of the states had been repeatedly infringed by the federal authorities, among others. Thus, “in the name of an insulted society and the vilified Mexican people, we raise the banner of war against our common oppressors.”20
In Argentina, in turn, two examples from very different political actors may illustrate the shared terms of the proclamas that preceded revolutions. In this case, both ended up in failure: the rebellion, in 1863, of the montoneras in the northwest, against the central government then headed by Bartolomé Mitre, and the one headed by Mitre himself, in 1874, after losing an election that he claimed was rigged by the current authorities. In the first case, General Ángel Vicente Peñaloza, “Chacho,” summoned the people, and particularly the “Guardias Nacionales,” to “combat … the evils that afflict our patria and repel with noble efforts its oppressing tyrants” and “to reconquer our sacred rights and liberties.” Mitre, in turn, issued in 1874 a manifesto when the revolution was already in motion. He explained that, no matter how hard he had tried to avoid resorting to arms, the systematic exercise of fraud to bend the result of the elections had left him no choice. The revolution was the only possible way to reclaim the usurped rights and the suppressed public liberties. In fact, he wrote, “the revolution was a right and a necessity and not to carry it through … would amount to a dishonor that would prove that we were incapable and unworthy of keeping and deserving the lost liberties.”21
The basic arguments were, as illustrated by these examples—only a few among many more—very similar, and all of them pointed to the inevitability of resorting to arms when the authorities violated the people’s public liberties and rights. It was the honorable thing to do. The use of force in regular politics was deeply enmeshed in an intricate web of norms and practices whose contours responded to widely accepted, albeit variable, rules of the political game. In that context, armed confrontations took place as part of a competitive political life driven by struggles for power and by disagreements over the territorial and institutional shaping of the republics. Political actors resorted to all recognized means available in order to dispute their claims—from elections to personal lobbying, the war of words through the press, the mobilization of followers in public demonstrations of various sorts, and so on—and they were ready to fight their opponents also through the use of force—a move that was not necessarily considered illegitimate. At the same time, if resorting to violence could count as legitimate, the outcome of an armed confrontation did not suffice to grant legitimacy to the victors, and these had to validate their titles at the polls, as well as in the realm of “public opinion.” Thus, revolutions were embedded in republican politics and belonged to the usual repertoire of most political players.
The armed option required military resources, both technical and human. The fragmentation of military forces—particu-larly the double-tiered arrangement of a standing army and militia with deep local roots—was at the heart of the system, and its persistence was strongly upheld by important figures of the ruling cadres as well as by wider sectors of the population. Most political networks included some connection with and control of armed resources. The militia fitted well within this framework. In normative terms, they represented the people in arms. In practice, these forces were locally based; they responded to regional caudillos, provincial governors, and local commanders, and were scarcely controlled by the central governments. Therefore, revolutionaries usually made use of such resources, which did not preclude their resorting also to the professional armies. Partisanship ran through both types of military institutions, so that these confrontations could easily pit different militia battalions or army regiments against each other. National authorities sought to subordinate the standing army—or at least to ensure its loyalty. But almost by definition the militia challenged all attempts at monopolizing military force at the center. By the last quarter of the century, this situation was vigorously addressed in most of the Spanish America nations: as part of the drive to strengthen state power, militia and National Guards were either eliminated or put under the tight control of increasingly centralized standing armies.
Until then, however, most uprisings involved both types of armies, plus the “irregular” forces that often joined in the struggles. They also recruited the cooperation of sectors of the population who were not enlisted, but participated in both material and symbolic collaboration with the rebels. Money was raised among sympathizers, friends in public office, and eventually, also by confiscating enemy property. Public demonstrations of support adopted different forms and tried to convey the popularity of the cause. In this regard, newspapers and other published materials played a crucial role by promoting, advertising, and seeking to legitimize the event. On the other side, the challenged authorities not only resorted to the military forces they could control but also tried to mobilize the population to question and censor the rebels’ credentials. Despite the strong feelings seemingly put in motion by all these movements, and regardless of how much blood was spilled on and around the battlefields, later punishments of the defeated party were usually relatively mild; the victors were lenient with the troops, and the leadership could be penalized with exile, proscription, and sometimes prison, often shortened by periodic amnesties. The application of the death penalty was truly exceptional.
In short, revolutions were not just military undertakings; rather, they were a political move embedded in republican traditions and practices. They were, however, always considered out of the ordinary, not the normal development of institutional life but one that required explicit and convincing arguments to justify them. Criticism of such practices did not only stem from those challenged on each occasion but also from publicists who saw these events as the expression of anarchy, archaic political habits, the negative influence of caudillos and caciques, and as a deeply ingrained constraint to modernity. These views have profoundly influenced the later understanding of revolutions, so that for a long time, scholars have seen them under that light, overlooking the actual place they had in nineteenth-century republican politics.
Such interpretations are strongly influenced by a widespread vision of Latin America as a basically violent region of the world—both today and in the past. Within that framework, nineteenth-century revolutions are conventionally portrayed as the most obvious expressions of the collective violence that permeated the political life of the period. While in a modern polity the use of force is presumably eradicated from civil society and located exclusively in the realm of the state, the persistence of various forms of violence in the Spanish American republics appears as an archaic obstacle to the progressive road leading from a traditional to a modern society. Yet in those republics, as we have seen, political violence was not merely a relic from the past or an atavistic reaction against modernization. Although some expressions of collective action experienced in those decades of rapid social, economic, cultural, and political change may fit that picture, most of them did not. In fact, it was modernization itself that introduced new forms of political violence into the scene. Rather than casting a contemporary condemning eye on such forms and using “violence” as an essential and value-charged notion, therefore, this chapter has tried to disaggregate the concept and to understand specific violent practices in historical context. This context was always in flux, and by the end of the century, new perceptions and considerations on violence came together with changes in its prevailing forms of representation that were in tune with the broader political mood of the incoming era.
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