Exploiters Closer to Home

If you’re at all familiar with the story of independence in South America, you likely know the name Simón Bolívar. The liberator-turned-dictator was almost single-handedly responsible for liberating the northwestern quarter of the South American continent.

But Bolívar wasn’t the only man trying to make a career out of kicking the Spaniards out. His southern counterpart, a man with bushier sideburns if portraits are an accurate source of information, was José de San Martín, liberator of Peru (sort of), Argentina, and Chile. (READ MORE from Aubrey Gulick: What Made Rome, Rome?)

When Columbus sailed the ocean blue and landed south of Florida, he encountered indigenous tribes who were centuries behind the Europeans in terms of civilization. Even the Mayans in Mexico were living in ancient Egyptian times in terms of the West.

That, of course, posed a difficult question: How do you interact with a civilization more than a thousand years behind you? The solution most Europeans adopted was colonization.

Unfortunately, just over 300 years after the Spaniards had landed on the South American coast, things were less than ideal. While the more religious-minded Spaniards had attempted evangelization, plenty of opportunists had seen potential — exploitation was easy in the New World. What these opportunistic colonists didn’t consider (or simply didn’t concern themselves with) was that, eventually, exploitation always backfires. (READ MORE from Aubrey Gulick: The Kansas Prelude to America’s Deadliest War)

When the 19th century dawned, the newest fad, whether you were in Italy, France, or North America, was to overthrow the current government and establish one that could more accurately represent the needs of the people. The nature of those revolutions and their difference is a topic deserving of volumes. But South Americans didn’t get tomes explaining nuances, what they got was snippets of news that told them that now was a perfect time to overthrow their Spanish overlords.

What is fascinating about the story of South American independence is that it isn’t the story of North American independence. Bolivar and San Martín studied what had happened in the 13 colonies, but it doesn’t seem to have occurred to them that the organic uprising that occurred there was fundamentally different from the one they would impose on South America.

San Martín, who had been born in modern-day Argentina but spent most of his life in Spain, sensed revolution from the other side of the Atlantic. He sailed back to Argentina to liberate it, a goal he accomplished in 1816. (READ MORE: Scott McKay’s King of the Jungle, Episode 2: An Unexpected Paradise)

He didn’t want Spanish neighbors, so on Feb. 12, 1817, he led a small army of 6,000 men over the Andes. By the time it reached Chile, he had lost a third of his army but still outnumbered the Spaniards. The battle was decisive. A year later, the Spanish empire had left Chile and one of San Martín’s underlings — a Chilean/Irish general named Bernardo O’Higgins — became the new country’s Supreme Dictator.

But wait. Dictator? Didn’t the Chileans want freedom? Perhaps. But the problem was that the Chileans themselves hadn’t revolted. Like the people of France, they never had the opportunity to define what “we the people” want. The result was exploitation — from exploiters closer to home.

This article originally appeared on Aubrey’s Substack, Pilgrim’s Way, on Feb. 12, 2024.

The post Exploiters Closer to Home appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.