THE EDGE OF POLITICS: THE CAUDILLOS IN LATIN AMERICA AND THE QUESTION OF SOVEREIGNTY

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 sovereignty of the laws. For the liberal imaginary of the end of the century, therefore, the independence of Spain had allowed the birth of a national sovereignty and a new freedom, but their development will be obstructed by the political personalism. This interpretation brought the idea of an historical failure of the liberalism in the Hispanic America. However it wasn't an involutional process, or a violent break with the history of the continent. 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 of 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 new liberal ideas. The absolutly “horizontal” relationship among the followers and the leader was the most evident sign. The single participant to the new popular unity, established by the wideness of the suffrage, felt fully sharer of the life of the new populations, so that the verticality and the gerarchy joined and confused with horizontality and with the belonging to the group without, in this way, any sensation of prevarication and moral and political violence. Therefore the liberalism didn't “get out” from the past and the war became expression of a political area, where violence was a service given to the tradition and continuity