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The Spanish-American Tradition of Representation and its European Roots*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2009

François-Xavier Guerra
François-Xavier Guerra
Affiliation:
Proffessor of Latin American History, University of Paris I (Sorbonne)
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Extract

In the field of modern political regimes, Spanish America holds a very special and, in some respects, paradoxical place. Indeed, even today, actual political life is very far from reflecting not only the constitutional clauses but even certain rules generally accepted in Western democracies. Political regimes are often ephemeral and dictatorships frequently interrupt institutional continuity. Pronunciamientos, coups d'état, rebellions and revolutions have been common means of coming to power, at least as common as elections. The political stage has often been occupied by particular human types: caudillos, caciques, charismatic leaders, guerrillas, revolutionaries…

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Articles
Information
Journal of Latin American Studies , Volume 26 , Issue 1 , February 1994 , pp. 1 - 35
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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References

1 One could, for example, cite the Mexican mutinies against the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767, the revolt of the Comuneros of New Granada in 1781 or, for various reasons, the uprising of Tupac Amaru in the Andes in 1780–2.

2 In 1795 the Venezuelan elites remained strongly opposed to the regime of gracias al sacar which enabled those classified as men of colour to buy privileges from the Crown which conferred on them the status of whites and granted them access to privileged corporate bodies.

3 It was preceded by numerous constitutional texts from the rebellious provinces in the New World and particularly by the Venezuelan Constitution of 1811. However, these texts were very short-lived and the influence of the 1812 Cadiz Constitution can be seen very clearly in those which came after them, especially on the question of electoral provisions.

4 See Guerra, F. X., Modernidad e Independencias: Ensayos sobre las Revoluciones Hispánicas (Madrid, 1992), chs. III and VIIGoogle Scholar. This community of political references did not end after 1810, following the establishment of autonomous Spanish-American juntas. On the one hand, because it was precisely within the framework of the 1812 Constitution that ‘royalist’ Spanish America – Mexico, Central America and Peru – first experienced a modern political regime. On the other, because even those in favour of independence followed very closely the debates in the Cortes and found in them inspiration for their own texts.

6 On these issues, see Artola, Miguel, La España de Fernando VII (Madrid, 1968)Google Scholar, de Velasco, Angel Martínez, La formatión de la Junta Central (Pamplona, 1972)Google Scholar and Suárez, Federico, El proceso de convocatoria de las Cortes (Pamplona, 1982)Google Scholar.

6 ‘Real Orden’, Seville, 22 Jan. 1809. AHN, Madrid, State, 54, D, 71.

7 For these elections, see Guerra, Modernidad e Independencia, ch. VI.

8 A vecino was the inhabitant of a city or town who enjoyed the full rights of citizenship: residence conditions, ownership of an established house, no stain on the reputation.

9 For an analysis of elections in Spain, see Sidera, Pilar Chavarri, La electión de diputados a las Cortes generatesy extraordinarias (1810–1813) (Madrid, 1988)Google Scholar.

10 See Constitutión politica de la Monarquia española, Cadiz, 18 March 1812. According to article 29, only those of African descent were excluded.

11 The basic territorial structure of Spanish and New World society in modern times were the municipios, whether small or large. What are called provinces were, in fact, aside from being the various administrative structures drawn up by the Crown, the regions dependent on a major city.

12 The only exception to this rule were the 1822 elections in Mexico to Iturbide's Constituent Congress of the Mexican Empire, in which a virtually universal suffrage laid down by the Cadiz Constitution was combined with representation by ‘classes’, socio-professional categories and estates. See Alamán, Lucas, Historia de México (1849–52) (6th edn, México, 1972), vol. V, pp. 308ffGoogle Scholar.

13 The term ‘popular party’ precisely depicts this meaning.

14 The previous paragraphs summarise ideas expressed since 1808–9 in the newspapers Semanario Patriótico and El Espectador Sevillano.

15 Everyone remembered those of Tupac Amaru II in the Andes and more recent slave rebellion in Santo Domingo.

16 Bosquejo ligerísimo de la Revolution de México, desde el grito de Iguala hasta la proclamatión imperial de Iturbide … por un verdadero americano (Philadelphia, 1822), p. 212.

17 Alamán, Historia de México, vol. V, p. 463.

18 On this discussion and the use of these terms, see Covo, Jacqueline, Les ideées de la ‘Réforme’ au Mexique (1855–1861) (Lille, 1982), vol. I, pp. 163–9Google Scholar.

19 Constitution of New Granada and Venezuela, Cucata, 1821, article 10 in Otero, Luis Mariñas, Las Constituciones de Venezuela (Madrid, 1965), p. 199Google Scholar.

20 Covo, Les ideées, p. 163.

21 See, for example, the description of the estate-stratified nature of Venezuelan soiety and the qualities – dignitas and honour – which defined its governing group, in de García Pelayo, Graciela Soriano, Venezuela 1810–1830: Aspectos desatendidos de dos décadas (Caracas, 1988), pp. 40–65Google Scholar. Germán Colmenares makes similar remarks about the criteria which shaped this de facto nobility, in ‘La Ley y el orden social: fundamento profano y fundamento divino’, Cabiers des Amériques Latines, No. 10 (1990), pp. 49–63.

22 In his Historia de Belgrano Mitre still used terms such as the ‘aristocratic sector of society’, from which patriots came and the ‘populace’ which had been ‘the great reserve of the revolution’ since 1806, to describe the actors in the May Revolution, as quoted by Botana, Natalio, La libertad política y su historia (Buenos Aires, 1991), p. 53Google Scholar.

23 The model of the Cadiz Constitutions, with its parish, district and provincial elections, was much copied in the New World. Sometimes an additional level was added, or when only two were stipulated, conditions related to wealth or education for those eligible in the last level were added. The electoral provisions of the Cadiz Constitution were extremely detailed and took five whole chapters (articles 34–103).

24 ‘Acta de la Junta electoral de San Luis Potosí’, 4 July 1813, AGN, Mexico, History, vol. 445, document XIV, f. 1.

25 de Argüelles, Agustín, Discurso preliminar a la Constitutión de 1812, reissue (Madrid, 1989), p. 84Google Scholar.

26 The fact that the New World had never before the time of the revolution put forward estate-based representation did not prevent society from regarding itself as consisting of corporate bodies and estates. In the summer of 1808, ‘the cabildo of Mexico convoked the metropolitan capital, all other cities and ecclesiastical and noble estates’ to a general Congress of the realm (Acta from the cabildo of Mexico, 19 July 1808). Those who in fact participated were the following: the viceroy, the audiencia and the archbishop; canons and inquisitors, prelates of religious orders, Mexico City's ayuntamiento, deputies from the ayuntamiento of Jalapa, governors from the Indian partialidades of San Juan and Santiago, heads of offices from the viceregal bureaucracy and several clerks, a few titled individuals and prominent vecinos (Junta General celebrada en México, El nueve de Agosto de mil ochocientos ocho presidida por Exmo Señor Vlrrey D. Josef de Yturrigaray, AGN, Viceroyalty, Parties, vol. 22).

27 See, for example, El Espectador Sevillano, Seville, 1809, ‘Continúa la Questión IV sobre elecciones’, pp. 281ff. and also Argüelles, Discurso preliminar, p. 85.

28 Thus, the 1912 Cádiz Constitution stipulated 1830 as the date when literacy would become a condition for the exercise of sovereignty (see articles 25 and 26).

29 In these elections, all the vecinos voted indirectly for a certain number of cabildo ‘deputies and síndicos personeros’. See Novísima Recopilación de las Leyes de España, mandada formar por el Señor Don Carlos IV (Madrid, 1804), book VII, title XVIII, laws I–IV.

30 See, for example, the Constitution of Cundinamarca (Colombia), 30 March 1811, article 13, in Vargas, Diego Uribe, Las Constituciones de Colombia (Madrid, 1977), vol. I, p. 316Google Scholar.

31 This continuity has been correctly emphasised by Bushnell, D., in his pioneering article, ‘El Sufragio en la Argentina y en Colombia hasta 1835’, Revista del Instituto de Historia del Derecho, Buenos Aires, No. 19 (1968)Google Scholar.

32 For the whole set of references in the various constitutions of the time, see Guerra, F. X., ‘Les avatars de la représentation au XIXe siècle’, in Couffignal, Georges (ed.), Réinventer la démocratie: Le deéfi latinoaméricain (Paris, 1992), pp. 49–84Google Scholar.

33 This is the reason (because they were considered tainted by slavery) that the Cadiz Constitution excluded those of African descent from citizenship. Domestic servants, public debtors, and those who had received a judicial sentence, as well as those who did not have ‘a source of employment, trade or known means of livelihood’ or who had been tried in a criminal court, had their citizenship suspended (articles 18–25).

34 See, for example, El Espectador Sevillano, Seville, 1809, ‘Continúa la Questión IV sobre elecciones’, p. 281.

35 The most notable exception to this rule was the 1811 Venezuelan Constitution which laid down rising tax and education requirements for different voting levels. See the federal Constitution of the United States of Venezuela, 21. XII. 1811, articles 26 and 28, in Mariñas Otero, Las Constituciones, pp. 131–2. This peculiarity can perhaps be explained by the inordinately aristocratic nature of Venezuelan society at the time.

36 The correspondence between Jovellanos and Lord Holland is, in this regard, extremely clear.

37 On this question, see Pons, André, ‘Blanco White et la crise du Monde hispanique, 1808–1814’, unpublished Thèse d'Etat, University of Paris III, 1990, 4 volsGoogle Scholar.

38 For the latter's influence in Mexico, see, for example, Hale, Charles A., The Transformation of Liberalism in Late Nineteenth-Century Mexico (Princeton, 1989)Google Scholar.

39 Mariano Otero, for example, referred to disorderly primary elections, not to assert the claim for free suffrage, but to indulge in conjectures about the low degree of representativeness of elected deputies. See Otero, Mariano, ‘personal voting’, in the 1847 Mexican constituent Congress, in Ramírez, Felipe Tena, Leyes fundamentals de México (Mexico, 1967), p. 460Google Scholar.

40 See, for example, the Constitution of Venezuela, Angostura, 1819, title IV, article 11, in Mariñas Otero, Las Constituciones, p. 168, and the ‘Ley Fundamental de la Unión de los pueblos de Colombia’, Cucuta, 1821, title III, ibid., pp. 200ff.

41 Simón Bolívar, Speech to the Congress of Angostura, 15 Feb. 1819, in Bolívar, Simón, Escritos políticos, ed. by Soriano, Graciela (Madrid, 1975), PP. 117–18Google Scholar.

42 In Mexico in 1891, for example, the cientíificos' Liberal Union favoured restricted but effective suffrage rather than a theoretically universal suffrage controlled in fact by the president. Their campaign was no more successful than a similar one favoured in 1909 by members of the Democratic Party.

43 See the Constitution of 1857, section IV, in Tena Ramírez, Leyes Fundamentales, pp. 606ff.

44 See Bushnell, ‘El sufragio’, footnote 46.

45 On such electoral issues in Peru from i860 to 1919, see Luna, Pablo F., ‘Etat, Fiscalité et finances au Pérou à la fin des années vingt. La gestion du “Civilisme” et le régime des onze années d' Augusto B. Leguia’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Paris VII, 1991, vol. II, §IV, chs. 1 and 11Google Scholar.

46 Article 11, in Mariñas Otero, Las Constituciones, p. 280.

47 These allowed voting by peons and day labourers as long as they met all remaining conditions. See Ramírez, Matías Tagle, ‘Los fundamentos censatarios del sistema politico chileno en el siglo XIX’, unpublished paper to the IVth Venezuelan Congress of History, Caracas, 1988Google Scholar, Historia Potítca de América Latina en los siglos XIX y XX.

48 Chilean political debate on electoral issues focused more on the autonomy of elections than on the integrity of the vote. It was one more episode in the struggle against the executive to establish a parliamentary system.

49 See the analysis of this debate in Covo, Les idées, especially pp. 160ff.

50 Constitution of 1867, article 13, No. 23 in Mariñas Otero, Las Constitutiones, p. 328.

51 ‘The elector's vote will be given in full and public session of the appropriate Junta; the latter will inscribe it in the register book….’, Constitution of 1881, article 13, No. 22, ibid., p. 350.

52 This area is extremely complex, because it involves the permanence or otherwise of electoral rolls, the need for individuals to register and a series of problems relating to the few criteria for disqualification still enforced.

53 Argentina at the end of the nineteenth century featured an entire panoply of all these procedures combined with extreme sophistication. See, for example, Botana, Natalio, El orden conservador: La político argentina entre 1880 y 1915 (Buenos Aires, 1985)Google Scholar.

54 That is why attempts to cleanse such systems generally appealed to an autonomous body for reviewing mandates (national electoral Juntas, the Supreme court, etc.). See, for example, on Peru, Luna, Etat, Fiscalité, vol. II, §4, ch. 1.

55 See Guerra, F. X., he Mexique de I'Ancien Régime à la Révolution (Paris, 1985), vol. I, ch. 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

56 Studies on electoral participation are few because most recent historical trends underestimate political history. Such studies are difficult to make, because fraud and various voting irregularities make it necessary to carry out tedious searching in order to obtain significant results.

67 For a full justification of this statement, see Guerra, ‘Le s avatars’, p. 51, footnote 2.

68 See Tagle Ramirez, ‘Los fundamentos censatatarios’.

69 See Guerra, F. X., ‘Les élections législatives de la révolution mexicaine, 1912’, Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez, vol. X (1974), pp. 421–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Botana, El orden conservador.

60 Julio V. González, speech to the Chamber of Senators, 1 Feb. 1912, quoted by Botana, El orden conservador, p. 174.

61 There are certainly differences between these groups, the main one being between formal groups with a legally recognised existence and those without it, such as kinship groups, although the existence of these was known to everyone and the law itself tried to balance them (see, for example, Novisima Recopilacion, book VII, title XVIII, law II, No. 8). For a typology of these groups and for other developments concerning the old politics, see Guerra, F. X., ‘Pour une nouvelle histoire politique: Acteurs sociaux et acteurs politiques’, in Structures et cultures des sociétés ibéro-américaines (Paris, 1990), pp. 245–60Google Scholar.

62 This is the case with the grand Hispanic legal codes: from the previously cited Novísima Recopilación to the Recopiación de Leyes de los Reynos de Indias.

63 As soon as non-individual actors are considered, the analysis points to explicit or hidden forms of pactismo. This is what happens in modern systems when, for example, trade unions or professional organisations recognised by the state gain in importance. Negotiations between these different actors and between them and the state lead in reality to pacts established by negotiation, which are given official status subsequently through laws decreed through legal political representation.

64 Diccionario de la Lingua castellana en que se explica el verdadero sentido de las voces, su naturaleza y calidad, con las frases o modos de hablar, los proverbios o refranes y otras cosas convenientes al uso de la lengua, Madrid, 1737. Facsimile edition, reissue, Diccionario de Autoridades (Madrid, 1990), vol. III, p. 584.

65 Ibid., vol. II, p. 292.

66 Ibid.

67 Ibid., vol. III, p. 392. The dictionary goes on to list different types of procuradores of a variety of communities, ‘procurador de Cortes’, ‘procurador de pobres’, ‘procurador general’, ‘de las municipalidades’, etc.

68 Ibid.

69 Ibid., vol. Ill, p. 584.

70 Instructions for elections in Spain and the New World for deputies to the future Cortes decreed in Jan. 1810 by the Regency Council placed much emphasis on the fact that powers and instructions given to Deputies had to be full and without any restrictions whatsoever, since it was a question of choosing the Nation's reprepresentatives, not its delegates.

71 Semanario patriótico, 17 Aug. 1809, p. 251.

72 Diccionario de Autoridades, vol. Ill, p. 475.

73 See the treaties which put an end to Indian rebellions in nineteenth-century Mexico. Reina, Leticia, Las rebeliones campesinas en México (Mexico, 1980)Google Scholar.

74 This fear was well justified, since, like the medieval cities to which they bore resemblance, nineteenth-century cities in the New World were riven by rivalries between great families and their hereditary hatreds.

75 Demelas, Marie-Danielle, L'invention politique: Les Andes au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1992)Google Scholar, expands with great skill on this type of behaviour in Andean elections.

76 Either because its existence was not recognised, or because control of the voting process by the authorities made its expression difficult.

77 Constitution of Apatzingán, 22 Oct. 1814, article 8, in Ernesto de la Torre Villar, La Constitutión de Apatzingán y los creadores del Estado mexicano (Mexico, 1964), p. 381.

78 The three elements appeared very frequently together. Most nineteenth-century caudillos drew their strength from their belonging to a region, a strength based on implicit pacts with local social actors; the bulk of their military forces were also recruited there. There were, however, some cases where one or other of these features was less marked.

79 In the trials of ringleaders or in the propaganda published by the authorities, there was always an attempt to present events as the result of the action of certain individuals who played on the good faith and ignorance of a loyal people.

80 These mechanisms were evident whenever there was popular participation in the creation of juntas during the independence period, but also in later events, such as Iturbide's proclamation as Mexican emperor.

81 Jouhaud, Charles, Mazarinades: La Fronde de mots (Paris, 1985)Google Scholar.

82 ‘Representation […] Name likewise given to comedy or tragedy represented on the stage’, Diccionario de Autoridades, vol. Ill, p. 584.

83 Sábato, Hilda, Participatión político y espacio público en Buenos Aires, 1850–1880: Algunas hipótesis, pre-publication of the Centre for Social Research on the State and Public Administration (Buenos Aires, 1989)Google Scholar.