Latin American Political Thought Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Latin American thinkers have always engaged themselves with the main intellectual currents emanating first from Europe and later from the United States, adapting them to their particular societies. After securing independence from Spain and Portugal, the region confronted the challenges associated with nation-building, while liberal and conservative parties, founded in many countries, provided contrasting views. Early Latin American liberalism was infused with notions of republicanism and constitutionalism but gave them a philosophical foundation that generally departed from traditional social contract theory. Juan Bautista Alberdi, Argentina’s most notable liberal thinker, argues in his Bases y puntos de partida para la constitución política de la República Argentina (1852) that each nation receives from God a particular nature and character, and therefore the role of legislators is to discover and reflect those traits in their constitutions.

In the final decades of the nineteenth century, ideas associated with European positivism swept the region. Order and progress became appealing principles to nations embarked in state building. Positivism provided a secular rationale for the government of the enlightened and educated, and while positivists had strong republican feelings, they rejected demands for universal suffrage and unfettered democracy with the argument that illiterate and poorly educated masses could not possibly serve as the foundation for a well-designed order. In Mexico, positivist thinkers known as Los Científicos (The Scientists) provided both the legitimizing ideology and the technocratic cadre for the despotic Porfirio Díaz regime (1884–1911). Benjamin Constant Botelho, founder of the Sociedade Positivista do Brasil, became influential among the military circles that eventually deposed the emperor and established the republic in Brazil. In Peru and Chile, positivist thinkers advocated in favor of strengthening public education.

Latin American Political Thought In The Twentieth Century

The advent of the twentieth century brought new ideas to the region. The influx of European workers, the rejection of the consumer ism and materialism that many thought characteristic of the United States, and the examples of the Mexican and Russian revolutions, among other factors, generated an unprecedented outburst of intellectual activity. In a clear rejection of the scientific outlook and faith in material progress of positivism, a number of influential thinkers advocated spiritual revival and humanistic values. In Cuba, José Martí offered a new foundation for Latin American nationalism based on a spiritual attitude toward life. But it was the Uruguayan José Enrique Rodó who personified this idealist outlook that ended up influencing so many of his contemporary fellow writers. In his memorable Ariel, Rodó confronted the materialism and utilitarianism of Caliban (that the United States represents) to the idealism and classical values and virtues embodied by Ariel. This contrast between the crass materialism of the north and the spiritual ideals of the south became a powerful undertow that influenced writers in the region such as José Ingenieros in Argentina, Antonio Caso in Mexico, and Alejandro Deústua in Peru.

While some found comfort in Ariel’s humanism, others embraced the emergent ideologies of anarchism and socialism. Latin American anarchism, influenced by Italian and Spanish anarcho-syndicalism, is rightly credited with creating the labor movement in the region. One of the most influential anarchists was the Peruvian Manuel González Prada, who harshly criticized his nation’s politics for being corrupt and out of touch with common citizens. His famous indictment in Pájinas Libres (1894), “Peru today is a sick organism: wherever you poke your finger, pus erupts,” put into words the feelings of disaffection prevalent among many Peruvian intellectuals in the wake of their country’s military defeat in the War of the Pacific (1879–1884). Other prominent anarchists were Mexican Ricardo Flores Magón, Argentine Alberto Ghiraldo, Brazilian Avelino Fóscolo, and Colombian Vicente Rojas Lizcano (aka Biófilo Panclasta).

Socialism, Aprismo, And Liberation Theology

Socialist thought also emerged with force during this period, and one of the most original thinkers in this tradition was Peruvian José Carlos Mariátegui. After a short exile in Europe, Mariátegui founded the Peruvian Socialist Party and began to develop a Marxism that was dramatically at odds with the Soviet orthodoxy. In 7 Ensayos de Interpretación de la Realidad Peruana and El Problema de las Razas en América Latina, Mar iátegui argued that the indigenous problem in Peru was essentially a social and economic problem, not a racial one, thus rejecting Soviet demands for independent indigenous republics. While less devoted to intellectual production, Luis Emilio Recabarren in Chile, Astrojildo Pereira in Brazil, and Aníbal Ponce in Argentina were also instrumental in developing socialist thought in the region. Julio Antonio Mella from Cuba deserves special mention for he, like Mariátegui, also clashed with the Soviets over policy disagreements. One of Mella’s pamphlets, Los Nuevos Libertadores (1924), stresses that the main challenge socialists face is to adapt their doctrine to their own reality.

Decades later, socialist thought received a significant boost from the Cuban revolution and its most important theoretician, Ernesto “Che” Guevara. In his La Guerra de Guerrilas (1960), Guevara drew on his revolutionary experience to develop a new theory of revolution that came to be known as foquismo. According to this view, a small core (foco) of committed revolutionaries can create the subjective conditions for revolution when the objective conditions are absent. This theory, later expanded by Regis Debray, became an article of faith to many of the guerrilla organizations that sprang up in Latin America and Africa in the 1960s and 1970s.

An important ideological alternative to socialism came from the works of Victor Raúl Haya de la Torre, a Peruvian who founded the Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana in Mexico City in 1924. Haya defined Aprismo (as Haya’s ideas came to be known) as a noncommunist Marxist movement that advocated regional unity to fight American imperialism and a national front of manual and nonmanual workers to demand the progressive nationalization of land and industries. Later on, when campaigning for the 1931 presidency, Haya tempered the most radical aspects of his ideology by proposing a “minimal program” that included state reform, redistribution of wealth, land, and tax reform, as well as free and universal education and social security. Aprismo influenced the programmatic outlook of key Latin American parties such as Venezuela’s Acción Democrática, Costa Rica’s Partido Liberación Nacional, and Bolivia’s Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario.

In more recent years, a highly influential progressive thought emerged from the fusion of Marxism and Catholicism, which came to be known as liberation theology. Leonardo Boff and Gustavo Gutiérrez, a Brazilian and a Peruvian priest, are among the most important representatives of this confluence. Liberation theology argues that salvation is not possible without achieving liberation from unjust social and economic structures. Thus, fighting poverty and adopting a “preferential option for the poor” become imperatives for the Catholic Church’s evangelical mission.

Bibliography:

Bethel, Leslie, ed. Ideas and Ideologies in Twentieth-century Latin America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Jorrín, Miguel, and John D. Martz. Latin American Political Thought and Ideology. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970.
Márquez, Ivan, ed. Contemporary Latin American Social and Political Thought: An Anthology. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008.
Romero, José Luis. Situaciones e ideologías en América Latina. Medellín, Colombia: Editorial universitaria de Antioquía, 2001.

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