Spanish American wars of independence

• 1. Introduction

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  The Spanish American wars of independence did not begin with a single gunshot or a signed declaration. They began with an absence: the absence of a king. In 1808, Napoleon Bonaparte forced the Spanish royal family to abdicate, installed his brother Joseph on the throne, and set off a chain reaction across an ocean. Across the Atlantic, from New Spain in the north to the Río de la Plata in the south, cities began forming local councils called juntas. Most of those councils swore loyalty to the captive Ferdinand VII. Almost none of them intended revolution. Yet by 1825, most of Spanish America was free. How a continent-wide struggle began as a civil war fought in the name of a king, and ended with the dissolution of an empire, is a story of power vacuums, racial tension, military improvisation, and the slow collapse of a dynasty that could no longer hold itself together.

• 2. Cracks in the Empire

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  Long before Napoleon arrived, Spain had been quietly dismantling the loyalty of its own subjects. The Bourbon Reforms of the mid-eighteenth century changed the very language used to describe Spanish overseas territories: what had once been called "kingdoms" with independent standing became "colonies" subordinate to the crown. The crown then reversed a long-standing practice that had allowed Spanish Americans born in the New World, the Criollos, to hold royal offices. Peninsular-born appointees flooded in to replace them. That change, more than any ideological shift, bred resentment among the colonial elite.

  The crown also moved against the Catholic Church, which functioned as one of the largest economic institutions in colonial Spanish America. It owned vast tracts of land and served as the primary lender to the landowning class. A financial crisis in 1804 pushed the crown to call in church debts, mainly mortgages owed by elite hacienda owners. The Act of Consolidation threatened the church's capital and pushed many wealthy Criollos toward bankruptcy in the same stroke. William B. Taylor has argued that by attacking the parish priests who had long served as the natural local representatives of the king, the crown undermined its own legitimacy.

  Lower clergy were among the first to join the insurgency. In Mexico, priests Miguel Hidalgo and José María Morelos became leading figures in the independence movement. In some regions, the Bourbon Reforms did generate positive effects, improving local economies in places like Cuba, Río de la Plata, and New Spain. But in others, they produced open revolt: the Revolt of the Comuneros in New Granada, and the Rebellion of Túpac Amaru II in Peru, both preceded the wars of independence by decades and were part of the political background that made them possible.

• 3. The Juntas and the King's Name

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  On the 25th of September 1808, Spanish provinces established the Supreme Central and Governmental Junta of Spain and the Indies as an emergency government in the absence of a king. The plan gave each peninsula kingdom two representatives, and each overseas kingdom just one. Quito and Chuquisaca, which considered themselves capitals of kingdoms in their own right, resented being folded into larger viceroyalties. By 1809, both had formed their own short-lived juntas in protest.

  The Supreme Central Junta collapsed after the Battle of Ocaña. French forces swept through southern Spain and the Junta took refuge in the island-city of Cádiz, replaced by a five-man council called the Regency. The Regency then convened the Cortes of Cádiz, the first national assembly to claim sovereignty in Spain, which opened its session on the 24th of September 1810 inside the building now known as the Real Teatro de las Cortes, under the siege of the French army.

  In the Americas, the collapse of the Junta triggered a new wave of local councils in 1810. Most Spanish Americans, as historians R.A. Humphreys and John Lynch observed, showed "little interest in outright independence; indeed there was widespread support for the Spanish Central Junta formed to lead the resistance against the French." The creation of these juntas nevertheless gave those who did favor independence a public and relatively safe space to promote their ideas. The proponents of independence called themselves Patriots. Venezuela and New Granada declared independence in 1811; Paraguay did so on 14 and the 15th of May of the same year. Areas like Río de la Plata and Chile maintained de facto independence but did not formally declare it until 1816 and 1818 respectively, a delay some historians attribute to what they call the "mask of Ferdinand VII": Patriot leaders claiming loyalty to the deposed monarch to prepare their populations for the idea of full separation.

• 4. Civil War and Social Fracture

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  On the 19th of April 1810, the Junta Suprema de Caracas was formed, setting the stage for a decade and a half of conflict. What followed was not a clean fight between patriots and loyalists but a civil war in which class, race, and regional rivalry scrambled political allegiances constantly.

  In Mexico, the junta movement had been stopped early by a coalition of peninsular merchants and officials. Resistance took the form of a peasant rebellion under Miguel Hidalgo, a priest originally part of a circle of liberal intellectuals in Querétaro. After their conspiracy was discovered, Hidalgo turned to the rural people of the Mexican Bajío, whose grievances about years of poor harvests quickly overshadowed any political ideology. Hidalgo's forces massacred hundreds of Criollos and Peninsulares who had taken refuge in the Alhóndiga de Granaditas in Guanajuato. Hidalgo was captured and executed in 1811.

  In Venezuela, the Spanish immigrant José Tomás Boves recruited from the Llaneros, the mixed-race slave and plains people, and built a powerful royalist army by targeting the white landowning class. Boves and his followers largely ignored their Spanish commanders and had no real interest in restoring the crown. They sought to hold power for themselves. Meanwhile, Simón Bolívar instituted a policy of war to the death during his Admirable Campaign, under which even neutral Peninsulares would be killed, while Spanish Americans who supported the royalists would be spared, in an attempt to drive a wedge between the two groups. That policy helped provoke the violent royalist reaction under Boves.

  Royalism and patriotism were not stable identities. The Venezuelan Llaneros switched to the Patriot banner once urban centers became securely royalist after 1815. In Mexico, it was ultimately the royal army that brought about that nation's independence. Spain sent 10,500 troops and nearly sixty ships to pacify Venezuela and retake New Granada in 1815, but Europeans formed only about a tenth of royalist armies across Spanish America overall. By 1820, Pablo Morillo, the expeditionary commander for South America, reported only 2,000 European soldiers remaining in his force. At the Battle of Ayacucho, less than one percent of the royalist forces were European.

• 5. The Armies That Crossed the Andes

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  José de San Martín became governor of the Province of Cuyo as early as 1814 and immediately began building what would become the Army of the Andes. He received crucial political and material support in 1816 when Juan Martín de Pueyrredón became Supreme Director of the United Provinces. In January 1817, ignoring an injunction from the congress of the Río de la Plata, San Martín and General Bernardo O'Higgins Riquelme led that army over the Andes and seized northern and central Chile by the 10th of February. With support from a fleet commanded by the former British naval officer Thomas Cochrane, Chile was secured. San Martín was declared "Protector of the Country" on the 28th of July 1821 after his army entered Lima, which the royalist Viceroy La Serna had abandoned on the 8th of July to reinforce positions in the highlands.

  In the north, Bolívar devised a parallel plan in 1819: cross the Andes and liberate New Granada. He assembled an improvised force of Llanero guerrillas, New Granadan exiles led by Santander, and British recruits, then led them from June to July through flooded plains and mountain passes approaching 4,000 meters. A quarter of the British Legion died, along with many of his Llanero soldiers. But by August, Bolívar controlled Bogotá and its treasury. At the Battle of Carabobo on the 24th of June 1821, his Gran Colombian forces defeated the royalists and secured Venezuelan independence, with the exception of the fortress at Puerto Cabello.

  The final act came in Peru. An internecine conflict between the royalist commanders La Serna and General Pedro Antonio Olañeta weakened the royalist position from within. La Serna lost effective control of half his best army by early 1824. On the 9th of December 1824, at the Battle of Ayacucho, the combined Patriot forces under Bolívar and Sucre destroyed La Serna's numerically superior but largely inexperienced army. The last royalist holdout on the continent surrendered when Olañeta died at Tumusla on the 2nd of April 1825. Sucre proclaimed Upper Peru's independence on the 6th of August in the city that now bears his name.

• 6. Women in the Wars

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  Manuela Sáenz was a long-term companion and confidante of Simón Bolívar, served as secretary of his archive, saved his life on two separate occasions, and nursed wounded soldiers. Some historians believe she participated directly in battles. Bolívar made Sáenz a Colonel of the Colombian Army, a decision that caused controversy because no women held rank in the army at the time. She came to be known across Hispanic America as the "mother of feminism and women's emancipation and equal rights."

  Juana Azurduy de Padilla, a mixed-race woman, fought for independence in the Río de la Plata region and was posthumously promoted to the rank of general by Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. Javiera Carrera used her family's influence in Chile to organize groups of women who advocated for independence, and sewed the first Chilean flag. She was imprisoned multiple times for her involvement.

  Marquita Sanchez, also known as Madame Mendeville, documented her own experiences as a female activist during the Argentine Independence War, recording both personal accounts and accounts of battles central to the Argentine military campaign. Women who joined the independence cause did so across many roles: as political organizers, spies, informants, suppliers of food and materials, and sometimes as combatants. The majority assumed supportive roles such as fundraising and nursing. For many of these women, independence meant something specific: the possibility of equal rights and freedom from legally enforced subordination, rather than a simple change of government.

• 7. What Independence Left Behind

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  The wars lasted roughly fifteen years by strict military reckoning, from the 1809 Battle of Chacaltaya in present-day Bolivia to the 1829 Battle of Tampico in Mexico. The royalist Pincheira brothers held out as outlaws in Patagonia until they were defeated in 1832. Spain did not formally renounce sovereignty over continental America until 1836. Cuba and Puerto Rico remained under Spanish rule until 1898.

  The economic damage was severe and lasting. The wars destroyed the de facto trade networks of the Spanish Empire, including the Manila galleons and Spanish treasure fleets. After independence, trade among the new nations fell below what it had been in the colonial period. Protective tariffs for manufacturing, including textile production, were dropped permanently, and foreign imports displaced local products. Cities like Valdivia, which depended on seaborne trade, collapsed into depression as the intracolonial system broke apart. New nations took on foreign loans to rebuild, particularly from European creditors, which deepened their debt rather than enabling recovery. Spanish America entered the world economy primarily as an exporter of raw materials and an importer of finished goods.

  Slavery was not immediately abolished in most of the new states. In areas where it was a major labor source, such as Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, and Argentina, emancipation proceeded in steps over three decades, typically beginning with free-womb laws and programs for compensated emancipation. By the early 1850s, slavery had been abolished across the independent nations of Spanish America. The Criollo elite, meanwhile, retained control of the social structure. Conservatives and liberals spent nearly a century fighting to either hold in place or dismantle the changes the independence wars had set in motion. The formal system of the Inquisition and noble titles was abolished, but many of the underlying hierarchies were not.