Chapter III

the Political Problem

The caudillos: their action—Revolutions—Divorce between written Constitutions and political life—The future parties—The bureaucracy.

The development of the Ibero-American democracies differs considerably from the admirable spirit of their political charters. The latter include all the principles of government applied by the great European nations: the equilibrium of powers, natural rights, a liberal suffrage, and representative assemblies, but the reality contradicts the idealism of the statutes imported from Europe. The traditions of the prevailing race, in fact, have created simple and barbarous systems of government. The caudillo is the pivot of this political system: leader of a party, of a social group, or a family whose important relations make it powerful, he enforces his tyrannical will upon the multitude. In him resides the power of government and the law. On his permanent action depends the internal order of the State, its economic development, and the national organisation. His authority is inviolable, superior to the Constitution and its laws.

All the history of America, and the inheritance of the Spaniard and the Indian, has ended in the exaltation of the caudillo. Government by caciques, absolute masters, like the caudillos themselves, is very ancient in Spain, as was shown by Joaquin Costa in his analysis of the foundations of Spanish politics. In each province, in each city, was a central personage in whom justice and might were incarnated; admired by the crowd, obeyed by opinion, enforcing his manners and his ideas. The American Indians obeyed caciques, and the first conquerors quickly saw that by winning over the local chiefs they would at the same time subject the native populations. The existence of the caudillos may also be explained by territorial influences. It has been written that the desert is monotheistic; over its arid uniformity one imposing God reigns supreme. It is the same with the steppes, the pampas, and the table-lands of America; vast and monotonous tracts; Paez and Quiroga were divinities of such regions. No other force could limit their authority. Contrasted with the uniform level of mankind which is the work of the plains, their firm chieftainship assumed divine attributes. American revolutions are like the Moorish wars directed by mystic Kaids.

Señor Raphael Salillas writes that in Spain the cacique is a hypertrophy of the political personage; he symbolises the excess of power and of the ambition of Spanish individualism. In America the first conquistadors quarrelled for the supreme authority. The civil wars of the Conquest arose from conflicts between chiefs; none of them could conceive of power as real unless it was unlimited and despotic. After them the all-powerful viceroy, a demi-god in his powers, exercised a similar domination. The South American President, the heir to the traditions of the governors of the colonial epoch, also possesses the maximum of authority; the Constitution confers upon him powers like those of the Czars of Russia.

Power for its own sake is the ideal of such men. The less important chieftains are satisfied by the government of a province; the great leader aspires to rule a republic. Questions of personality are the prevailing characteristics of politics; and despotic rulers abound. When a "Regenerator" usurps the supreme power a "Restorer" appears to dispute it with him; then a "Liberator," and finally a "Defender of the Constitution." The lesser gods fight to their hearts' content, and the democracy accepts the victor, in whom it admires the representative leader, the robust creation of the race. Such a man is not like the character of Ibsen's, who is strong in his isolation; in the caudillo the average characteristics of the nation, its vices and its qualities, are better defined and more strongly accentuated; he obeys his instincts and certain fixed ideas; he conceives of no ideals; he is impressionable and fanatical.

Señor Ayarragarray distinguishes two varieties of caudillo; the cunning and the violent. The latter was above all peculiar to the military period of Ibero-American history. The leader of a band that ravaged like the Huns, he ruled by terror and audacity, enforcing the discipline of the barracks in civil life. The caudillo of the cunning type exercised a more prolonged moral dictatorship; he belongs to a period of transition between the military period and the industrial period. This new master retained the supreme power by lies and subterfuges. A half-civilised tyrant, he used wealth as others used force, and instead of brutally thrusting himself on the people he employed a system of tortuous corruption.

The rule of the caudillos led to presidential government. The Constitutions established assemblies; but tradition triumphed in spite of these theoretical structures. Since the colonial period centralisation and unity have been the American forms of government.

In the person of the President of these democracies resides all the authority which usually devolves upon the public functionaries. He commands the army, multiplies the wheels of administration, and surrounds himself with doctors of law and Prætorian soldiers. The Assemblies obey him; he intervenes in the course of elections, and obtains the Parliamentary majorities that he requires. The upper magistracy is sometimes indocile to the desires of the Government, but in the life of the provinces the judges depend absolutely upon the political leaders. The supreme direction of the finances, the army, the fleet, and the administration in general rests with the President, as before the republican era it belonged to the viceroy.

The parties fight among themselves, not only for power, but to obtain this omnipotent presidency. They realise that the chief of the Executive is the effective agent of all political changes; that ministers and parliaments are only secondary factors in political life. An Argentine sociologist, Señor Joaquin Gonzalez, has said very justly that "each governmental period is characterised by the condition and the worth of the man who presides over it. This presidential system, in default of a solid and elevated political education, has in great measure favoured the return to the personal régime."

To this system correspond the political groups without programmes; men do not struggle for the triumph of ideas, but for that of certain individuals. The consecrated terms lose their traditional meaning. There are civilists who uphold militarism; liberals who strive to increase the presidential authority; nationalists who favour cosmopolitanism; constitutionalists who violate the political charter. The personal system groups conservatives and liberals together. Even in Chili, where the activity of the parties has been unusually continuous, the older parties have split up into shapeless factions. The President establishes his despotic authority over the confusion of these rival groups; he tries to dissolve the small factions, to divide them, in order to rule them.

Without ideals or unity of action the parties are transformed into greedy cliques, which are distinguished by the colour of their favours. As in Byzantium, so in Venezuela, the Blues struggle against the Yellows, while in Uruguay the Whites oppose the Reds, red being the distinctive colour of the Argentine federalists. An aggressive intolerance divides these groups; they gather round their gonfaloniere and their party symbol in irreducible factions. No common interest can reconcile them, not even that of their native country. Each party supports a leader, an interest, a dogma; on the one side a man beholds his own party, the missionaries of truth and culture; the other are his enemies, mercenary and corrupt. Each group believes that it seeks to retain the supremacy in the name of disinterested virtue and patriotism. Rosas used to call his opponents "infamous savages." For the gang in possession of power, the revolutionaries are malefactors; for the latter the ruling party are merely a government of thieves and tyrants. There are gods of good and evil, as in the Oriental theogonies. Educated in the Roman Church, Americans bring into politics the absolutism of religious dogmas; they have no conception of toleration. The dominant party prefers to annihilate its adversaries, to realise the complete unanimity of the nation; the hatred of one's opponents is the first duty of the prominent politician. The opposition can hardly pretend to fill a place of influence in the assemblies, or slowly to acquire power. It is only by violence that the parties can emerge from the condition of ostracism in which they are held by the faction in power, and it is by violence that they return to that condition. Apart from the rule of the caudillos the political lie is triumphant; the freedom of the suffrage is only a platonic promise inscribed in the Constitution; the elections are the work of the Government; there is no public opinion. Journalism, almost always opportunist, merely reflects the indecision of the parties. Political statutes and social conditions contradict each other; the former proclaim equality, and there are many races; there is universal suffrage, and the races are illiterate; liberty and despotic rulers enforce an arbitrary power. By means of the prefects and governors the President directs the elections, supports this or that candidate, and even chooses his successor. He is the supreme elector.

The representative assemblies become veritable bureaucratic institutions; deputies and senators accept the orders of the President. According to Señor L. A. de Herrera, two castes are in process of formation, "on the one hand the oligarchies, which possess the supreme power in defiance of the public will, and on the other the citizens, who are deprived of all participation in the government." Frequent revolutions and pronunciamentos, according to Spanish tradition, disturb the ruling class in the exercise of power; these superficial movements cannot be compared to the great crises of European history, which result in the disappearance of a political system or bring about the advent of a new social class. They are merely the result of the perpetual conflict between the caudillos; the leaders and the oligarchies change, but the system, with its secular vices, remains.

The South American revolutions may be regarded as a necessary form of political activity: in Venezuela fifty-two important revolts have broken out within a century. The victorious party tries to destroy the other groups; revolution thus represents a political weapon to those parties which are deprived of the suffrage. It corresponds to the protests of European minorities, to the anarchical strikes of the proletariat, to the great public meetings of England, in which the opposing parties attack the Government. It is to the excessive simplicity of the political system, in which opinion has no other means of expression than the tyranny of oligarchies on the one hand and the rebellion of the vanquished on the other, that the interminable and sanguinary conflicts of Spanish America are due. These internal wars continually retard the economic development of the State and decrease its stability; they ruin the foreign credit of the republics, prepare the way for humiliating interventions, and give rise to tyrannies; but it must not be forgotten that revolution, in these democracies without law and without real suffrage, has often been the only means of defending liberty. Against the tyrants even conservative spirits have revolted, and rebellion has become reaction.

For the rest, the civil wars have lost their former character. They used to symbolise the return to primeval chaos; vagabond multitudes, armed bands, desolated the fields and burned the towns. Assassination, theft, the devastation of property and estates, war without mercy, fire, and all the powers of destruction were in revolt against the feeble foundations of nationality.

As by the inverse selection of the Spanish Inquisition, the most intelligent and the most cultivated perished. Brutal horsemen occupied the cities in which Spanish civilisation had attained its apogee. Sarmiento has described the assault on the nomad wagons which bore the national penates across the Argentine pampas in a sort of Tartar Odyssey amid the infinite desolation of the plains. Even when the social classes were organised and the economic interests defined the rivality of the leaders continued, and politics remained personal. However, civil war is already no longer the brutal onset of men with neither law nor faith, no longer an irruption of outlaws. The drama has replaced the epic; the conflict of passions and interests succeeds to the battles of semi-divine personages, proud of their tragic mission. Men buy votes; electoral committees falsify the suffrage, as in the United States, by force of money.

Thus the plutocracy conquers the benches of Congress.

If the continent spontaneously creates dictators then is all the ambitious structure of American politics—parliaments, ministers, and municipalities—merely a delusive invention?

In some States in which the economic life is intense, as in the Argentine, Chili, Brazil, and Uruguay, benevolent despotism does not mark the high-water limit of national development; there new parties are forming themselves, and the caudillos will soon disappear. Dr. Ingegnieros foresees the creation in the Argentine of new political groups, with financial tendencies. The rural class which rules in the provinces and possesses the great mass of the national wealth, which is derived from stock-raising and agriculture, and the commercial and industrial middle-class of the cities, will form, like the Tories and Whigs in England, the two parties of the future. Once the secondary parties have disappeared, the two great political organisations will prevail alone.

This transformation of the old groups is logical. In the colonial period the conflict for the possession of power took place within the narrow limits of public life; the Spaniards were in the majority in the audiencas, the courts, and the Creoles in the cabildos, the municipalities. The former upheld religious intolerance, economic monopoly, and the exclusive and universal empire of the metropolis; the latter endeavoured to obtain economic and political equality, the abolition of privileges, and a national government. After the revolution these divisions grew more complex; federalism and unity, religious quarrels, and sometimes the mutual hostility of the different castes, divided men into shifting groups. Politics became the warfare of irreducible clans. In the organised nations of the south the dissensions gradually lost their importance, and a general indifference succeeded to the old theological hatreds. Federals and municipalists were still fighting, but the original bitterness of their antagonism was dead. On the other hand, the castes were progressively becoming confounded by intermarriage.

However, the economic factors persisted, and their importance has increased as towns and industries have developed. Financial questions will in future divide the citizens of those democracies which have become plainly industrial; the agrarians will oppose the manufacturers and the free-traders the protectionists. Like the republicans and democrats of the United States, certain groups will favour imperialism and others neutrality. The group which would stimulate Yankee or German influence will be opposed by another, the partisan of Italian or French activity.

Already in Cuba there are some who favour annexation by the United States, while others demand complete autonomy. Some politicians would agree to immigration without reserve or restriction, while others, the nationalists, would defend the integrity of their inheritance against foreign invasion. America, like modern France, will have its métèques; they will be the Europeans, the Yankees, and the yellow races.

Apart from the southern nations there has as yet been no formation of classes or social interests. None of the problems which agitate Europe—extension of the suffrage, proportional representation, municipal autonomy—have any immediate importance among them. The State is the necessary guardian, a kind of social providence whence derive riches, strength, and progress. To weaken this influence would be to encourage internal disorder; only those Constitutions have been of use in America which have reinforced the central power against the attacks of a perpetual anarchy.

The progress of these democracies is the work of foreign capital, and when political anarchy prevails credit collapses. Governments which ensure peace and paternal tyrants are therefore preferable to demagogues. A young Venezuelan critic, Señor Machado Hernandez, having studied the history of his country, rent as it has been by revolutions, considers that the best form of government for America is that which reinforces the attributions of the executive and establishes a dictatorship. In place of the Swiss referendum and the federal organisation of the United States autocracy is, it seems to us, the only practical practical means of government.

To increase the duration of the presidency in order to avoid the too frequent conflicts of parties; to simplify the political machine, which transforms the increasingly numerous parliaments into mere bureaucratic institutions; to prolong the mandate of senators and deputies, so that the life of the people shall not be disturbed by continual elections; in short, to surrender the ingenuous dogmas of the political statutes in favour of concrete reforms: such would appear to be the ideal which in Tropical America—in Mexico, Peru, and Bolivia—would arrest the destructive action of revolutions.

It is obvious that a president furnished with a strong authority may quickly become a tyrant, but in these nations is not political power always a semi-dictatorship which is tolerated? The head of the State governs for four years according to the term of the Constitution, but his action is continued by his successor. The real duration of his political action is twenty years.

If a tutelary president is necessary it is none the less essential to oppose his autocracy by a moderative power which would recall, in its constitution, the life-Senate of Bolivar. One may even conceive of a Senate which would represent the real national interests: a stable body, the union of all the forces of social conservation; a serene assembly untroubled by democratic cravings, in which the clergy, the universities, commerce, the industries, the army, the marine, and the judiciary, might defend the Constitution and tradition against the assaults of demagogy, against too audacious reformers. Garcia-Moreno wished to see the mandate of the senators extended to a term of twelve years.

The quality of the legislative chambers is ineffective in America. In fact, both being elected by the popular vote, and having like electoral majorities, the Lower Chamber always gets its way with the Senate, which represents neither interests nor traditions. There is in reality one uniform assembly artificially divided into two independent bodies. The whole is dominated, there being no conservative institutions as a useful corrective, by the anonymous or Jacobin will of the multitude, which is moved by all sorts of divided interests: the craving for power, provincial pride, and a passion for cabal and intrigue.

A factor of American politics which is as serious as the periodical revolutions is the development of the bureaucracy.

In the still simple life of the nation the organs of the public administration are complicated in the most exaggerated manner. The budget supports a sterile class recruited principally among the Creoles, who prefer the security of officialism to the conquest of the soil. Energy and hope diminish with the almost infinite increase of the "budgetivores."

Foreigners monopolise trade and industry, and thus acquire property in the soil which has been inherited by a race of Americans without energy.

A North American observer[1] writes that the great fortunes of the Argentines of American extraction have been made by the ever-increasing value of real estate, and are due to the natural development of the country rather than to their own initiative or enterprise. But the South Americans are on the way to waste these fortunes, and the fortunate colonists from Spain and Italy are gradually replacing them in the social hierarchy.

According to a Mexican statesman, Señor Justo Sierra, the government in South America is an administration of employés, protected by other employés, the army. These nations, which are being invaded by active immigrants, are thus directed by a group of mandarins, and if the young men of these countries are not encouraged in commercial and industrial vocations by a practical education the enriched colonists will expel the Creole from his ancient position. A few writers defend the bureaucracy as the refuge, in the face of the cosmopolitan invasion, of the choice spirits of the nation: writers, artists, and politicians. "If foreigners dispose of the material fortune of the country," says a distinguished young observer, Señor Manuel Galvez, "it is just that we others, Argentines, should dispose of its intellectual fortune." A noble idealism, satisfied by an unreal wealth! But from the point of view of the national life this lack of equilibrium is disturbing. In face of the progress of the victorious foreigners who are making themselves masters of the soil, to shut oneself up in a tower of ivory would be the most complete of renunciations.

In the organisation of the America of the future we must not forget the suggestions of Caliban. Among the innumerable bureaucrats who devour the budgets there will not always be writers worthy of official protection; they will rather be recruited among an indolent youth, restive under any sustained effort.

The encouragement of "choice spirits" must not be confounded with the unjustifiable maintenance of a legion of parasites. The caudillo multiplies functions in order to reward his friends; nepotism prevails in the world of politics.

The great political transformations of the future will be due to the development of the common wealth; new parties will appear and the bureaucracy will have to be considerably diminished.

[1] Cited by J. V. Gonzalez in La Nación, Buenos-Ayres, May 25, 1910.