Il margine della politica: i caudillos in America Latina e il problema del fondamento della sovranità

The observation of Latin American policy of the 19th century gives us the image of anarchy and irrationality of the new republics. This view survived until the end of the century and contributed to build a new historical version of the independence: the emancipating movement had been betrayed by a new political actor, the caudillo, whose power, arbitrary and personal, used to limit the soveregnity of the laws. All the process that goes from the imperial crisis to the birth of the independent republics has got its own logic and rationality: the informality of political life in Latin American States and the institutional “disorder” which characterized them was the fruit of the survival of political structures typical of the colonial age and, moreover, of the crisis of the empire. The violence of the regime was, therefore, a political formality,a receptacle of the new liberal ideas. Therefore liberalism did not emerge from the past and war became part of a geographical area, where violence went hand in hand with tradition.