Caudillo Politics: A Structural Analysis

Author(s): Eric R. Wolf and Edward C. Hansen

Source: Comparative Studies in Society and History , Jan., 1967, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Jan.,
1967), pp. 168-179
Published by: Cambridge University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/177739

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 CA UDILLO POLITICS: A STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS *

The Latin-American Wars of Independence realized the long-standing hope

of the criollo 1 gentry to rid themselves of Spanish limitations on their eco-
nomic and political activities. From the beginning of the New World colonies,
the Spanish rulers had labored diligently to check the aspirations of the
colonial gentry by limiting their access to both land and status. Grants of
encomienda had yielded up to the colonists use rights to Indian labor and
produce, but not the ownership of land. At the same time, the Crown had
curtailed the ability of criollos to obtain titles of nobility. These limitations
had been supported by the prowess of Spanish arms, effective perhaps even
more in keeping potential competitors at bay in Europe than in exercising
viable military control in the New World. The failure of this ultimate means
of control during the Napoleonic wars finally called into question also con-
tinued Spanish dominance over the American colonies.
In spite of the decline of Spanish power, however, the New World planter
class proved too weak numerically and too lacking in cohesion to oust the
Peninsular forces by its own unaided efforts. To gain their own independence
they were therefore forced into political alliances with the numerically strong
and highly mobile - yet at the same time economically, socially and politi-
cally disprivileged - social strata of the population which are designated
collectively as mestizos.2 Not without trepidation, criollo leaders armed ele-
ments derived from these propertyless strata and sent them to do battle against
the Spaniards (Wolf, 1955). Success in maintaining the continuing loyalties
of these elements depended largely upon the ability of leaders in building
personal ties of loyalty with their following and in leading them in ventures
of successful pillage.
The emerging pattern had colonial prototypes. Landowners had long main-
tained armed retainers on their own estates. The creation of a colonial army

* Some of the arguments put forward here were first presented in a paper entitled
"Cultural Dimensions of the Caudillo Complex", read by Eric R. Wolf and Edward C.
Hansen at the 63rd Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association,
Detroit, on November 20, 1964, in the symposium on The Presentation of Self in
Hispanic Culture, organized by Anthony Lauria Jr.
I Literally translated, criollo means a person of Spanish ancestry born in the New
World.
2 Literally translated, mestizo means a person of mixed Spanish and Indian ancestry.

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 Caudillo POLITICS 169

had underwritten the creation of such localized militia. In Mexico, for in-
stance, "the viceroy and the military authorities found it convenient that a
militia be at one and the same time the landlord of the men who served under
his command" (Wolf, 1955, 192). The Spanish government had thus con-
tributed paradoxically to the diminution of its own power and to the forma-
tion of many local power centers. Yet the additional step of granting in-
dependent armament both to retainers and to other potential military ele-
ments in the population entailed further risks. Although the alliance of criollos
and mestizos was instrumental in winning the Wars of Independence, granting
arms to the mestizo elements freed these to create their own armed bands.
The mestizos in turn were thus enabled to compete with the criollos for
available wealth. The case of Venezuela, while unique in its extreme mani-
festations, nevertheless demonstrates this new and continent-wide ability of
the mestizos to act on their own behalf. There the royalists were originally
victorious by granting the lianero plainsmen, formerly criollo retainers, pillage
rights against their own masters. Having eliminated their own masters, the
llaneros then turned upon the royalists and massacred them in an effort to
obtain additional loot (Hansen, 1965). In granting independent armament to
the mestizos, therefore, the criollo gentry also sacrificed any chance it might
have had to establish a monopoly of power.
The beneficiaries of this distribution of weaponry were the leaders on
horseback, the caudillos,3 the resultant political system, caudillaje. It came
to be marked by four salient characteristics: (1) the repeated emergence of
armed patron-client sets, cemented by personal ties of dominance and sub-
mission, and by a common desire to obtain wealth by force of arms; (2) the
lack of institutionalized means for succession to offices; (3) the use of violence
in political competition; and (4) the repeated failures of incumbent leaders to
guarantee their tenures as chieftains. This paper is concerned with an analysis
of this political system, and with a search for its causes and consequences.
It also wishes to suggest that this is best accomplished by an understanding of
the system in Latin American terms, rather than in terms of concepts derived
from events in Europe. The broad diffusion of military power among wide
strata of the population differentiates the Latin American experience from
what happened in Europe; caudillaje, as Richard M. Morse has aptly said,
"deranges the predictable interplay of hierarchical class relations" (Morse,
1954, 79).

The Criollo in Politics: "Anarchy" and Alliance

The desire to make use of European models in analyzing the Latin American
experience has also obscured the role of the criollos during the "state of

3 Caudillo is best translated as chieftain. The term derived from the Latin caput, head.
Caudillaje refers to the condition of caudillo competition and rule.

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170 ERIC R. WOLF AND EDWARD C. HANSEN

anarchy" which set in after Independence. Thus numerous historians appear

to be speaking from the European point of view when they see the dominant
political motif of this period in "the quest for stability" (e.g. Worcester and
Schaeffer, 1962, 414). The assumption implicit in such formulations seems to
be that stability would fulfill the same role in commercial development in
Latin America that it had fulfilled in Europe. It may be argued, on the con-
trary, that - far from being anathema to the criollos - anarchy was a natu-
ral condition of their existence.
We must not forget that criollo wealth was ultimately upon the hacienda:

Organized for commercial ends, the hacienda proved strangely hybrid in its
characteristics. It combined in practice features which seem oddly contradictory
in theory. Geared to sell products in a market it yet aimed at having little to sell.
Voracious for land, it deliberately made inefficient use of it. Operating with large
numbers of workers, it nevertheless personalized the relations between worker
and owner. Created to produce a profit, it consumed a large part of its substance
in conspicuous and unproductive displays of wealth. Some writers have called
the institution 'feudal', because it involved the rule of a dominant landowner over
his dependent laborers. But it lacked the legal guarantees of security which com-
pensated the feudal serf for his lack of liberty and self-determination. Others
have called it 'capitalist', and so it was, but strangely different from the commercial
establishments in agriculture with which we are familiar in the modern commer-
cial and industrial world. Half 'feudal', half 'capitalist', caught between past and
future, it exhibited characteristics of both ways of life, as well as their inherent
contradictions. (Wolf, 1958, 204).

The success of this hybrid institution in the period after Independence was
in large measure due to its ability to flourish under anarchic commercial con-
ditions. During this period all industries which had depended upon mercan-
tilist protection were buried under the onslaught of the open market; even
mining, the motor of the colonial economy, ground to a halt. Yet the hacienda
survived and flourished. It could withstand the vagaries of supply and de-
mand, because - in slack periods - it could return to self-sufficiency.
If the hacienda provided a bulwark of defense against the laissez-faire
market, the hacienda system itself militated against the development of a
cohesive political association of hacienda owners. Geared to a stagnant tech-
nology, yet under repeated pressures to expand production, the hacienda
tended to "eat up" land, in order to control the population settled upon the
land. The aim of each hacienda was ultimately to produce crops through the
arithmetic addition of workers, each one of whom - laboring with his tradi-
tional tools - would contribute to increase the sum of produce at the disposal
of the estate. While in some parts of Latin America, notably in the Andes
and in Middle America, the expansionist tendencies of the hacienda could be
directed against Indian communities, in areas without Indians a hacienda
could expand only at the expense of neighboring hacienda. Not surprisingly,
therefore, we find that blood feuds among hacienda owners are a notable

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 Caudillo POLITICS 171

feature of this period: each hacendado's bitterest enemy was potentially his
closest neighbor. In this competition we must find the economic roots of
criollo anarchy.
Such economic determinants of anarchy were reinforced further by social
organizational factors. Competition and conflict on the economic plane could,
to some extent, be compensated for through the workings of kinship. Arnold
Strickon, writing about Argentina (1962), has noted that the criollo kinship
system is radically different from that of other classes in Argentine society,
in its tendency to build up extensive non-unilineal kindreds. He correctly
ascribed this variation to the fact that the different classes have differential
access to strategic resources. He notes, as others have done (e.g. Crow, 1946,
620; Worcester and Schaeffer, 1962, 414), the growth of regional aristocratic
families and their role in national politics. We do not yet possess adequate
data on how such alliances were formed, how many people were involved, and
how much territory they covered. Theoretical considerations, however, lead
us to believe that the organizing power of such alliances must have been
relatively weak. If we assume that hacienda owners favored the maintenance
of large estates through inheritance by primogeniture; if we assume further
that the chances are equal that the chief heir will be either male or female;
and if we postulate that each hacienda owner strives to maximize the number
of his alliances, then it seems unlikely that the number of strategic alliances
based on landed property between a hacendado family of origin and other
hacendado families of procreation will exceed three. The marriage of Father
with Father's Wife creates one such alliance; the marriage of the first-born
son with a woman of another family swells the number to two; and the mar-
riage of the eldest daughter with the first son of a third family brings the
number of strategic alliances to three. These considerations are intended to
yield a measure of insight into the inability of the criollo gentry to form a
wide-ranging network of strategic alliances for political purposes.
Parenthetically, such considerations also throw light on the tendencies of
the Latin American gentry to seclude women. William Goode (1959) has
suggested that every society needs to curb love in order to preserve its social
structure. Cultural restrictions upon love permit rational choices in the con-
struction of alliances, while barring emotions from affecting the choices made.
If kinship alliances concerted by males are crucial to the maintenance of
property, then females become a strategic resource, symbolizing property and
status capable of being joined together. The many strictures placed on the
sexual activities of gentry women in Latin America dispose one to accept
Gilberto Freyre's description of the hacienda Big House as a female's prison
(1963, passim). Such extreme seclusion could be directed toward protecting
women from interclass entanglements with seekers for status and power from
disadvantaged groups, certainly a motive as mestizo aspirants to power be-
came more numerous and important. Yet it also served to reduce the match-

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172 ERIC R. WOLF AND EDWARD C. HANSEN

maker's fear that a hacienda owner's daughter might become involved with
the wrong hacienda owner's son, i.e. a partner in a non-strategic alliance.
Female seclusion may thus be seen as still another indication of the difficulties
involved in concerting alliances among criollo gentry families.
Rivalry over land and limitations on the numbers and kinds of alliances
open to the hacienda owners thus render intelligible both the growth of re-
gional kindreds, and the constant antagonistic relationships between such
kindreds. At the same time, these factors account for the strong opposition
shown by such kindreds to any effort to form a centralized government. Such
a government, once established, would inevitably have possessed greater
power than any kindred alliance, built up from three-family units. Economic
and social organization thus conspired to guarantee the political disunity of
the criollos in the period after Spanish demise.

Rise of the Mestizo

The Wars of Independence initiated a period of political apprenticeship for

the mestizo elements of society. If we view class relations as defined by
differential access to strategic resources, the social position of the mestizo
can be defined simply by his lack of access to such resources. Mestizo was,
in fact, no more than a blanket term for the "dispossessed": Indians forced
out of their communities, manumitted and run-away slaves, illegitimate and
unclaimed offspring of criollos and non-criollo women, and the descendants
of impoverished colonists (Marshall, 1939). During the colonial period such
people had no access to formally allocated social positions; to survive, they
had to live largely by their wits, ferreting out what extra-legal possibilities
existed on the margins or in the interstices of the established order. Most of
these possibilities were opened up in the course of attempts by the criollos to
circumvent the mercantilist controls of the metropolis. From the mestizo
category, therefore, were drawn the cattle rustlers, the buyers and sellers of
clandestine property, the go-betweens and legal middlemen: in short, the
gamut of undercover agents whose illicit transactions made colonial society
work.
Paradoxically, the criollos were thus forced to rely on a category of the
population which they both hated and feared. In a society which demanded
that everyone adhere rigidly to his niche, they were drawn into dependence
on socially mobile elements which called into question the very existence of
that social order. In spite of the fact that the mestizo was the unrecognized
ally of the criollo, the criollo gentry came to cast blame on the mestizo for
precisely those "of their own activities that daily subverted an order of society
they were formally committed to uphold" (Wolf, 1958, 238), an ambivalence
fed continuously by the contradiction between social ideal and reality.

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 Caudillo POLITICS 173

By arming mestizo elements in the course of the War of Independence, the

criollos finally granted the mestizo the means for gaining alternative forms of
wealth and power, wealth and power gained through political endeavor. Al-
ready trained by their colonial experience to be forever on the lookout for
new possibilities not envisaged by the upholders of the established order, and
skilled also through this experience in the manipulation of interpersonal
relationships, the mestizo was now propelled into the political arena arms in
hand. The resultant set of activities was continuous with that of the past: the
advent of the mestizo did not constitute a social revolution; the formation of
armed mestizo bands, captained by their own caudillos, constituted a simple
widening of the range of economic activities in which they had already en-
gaged under the old regime. Political warfare continued mestizo social strategy
through the acquisition of new tactics.

The Caudillo and His Organization

In analyzing the caudillo mode of political organization, we are forced to rely

on materials dealing with caudillos who made their influence felt on the
national level. The available literature deals mainly with the maximal bands,
but sheds little light on how the minimal bands of chieftains and followers
were first formed. The caudillos who emerged into the light of day are thus
all leaders who proved capable of welding a series of structurally similar
minimal bands into a maximal coalition, capable of exercising dominance over
wide regions. The data dealing with such national caudillos, however, permit
some generalizations about the patterns of coalition formation, about the
distribution of wealth by the leader to his band, and about the sources of
political strength and fragility. We are also enabled to make certain com-
parisons between the different problems faced by mestizo and criollo chief-
tains. In our discussion, we shall employ the ethnographic present.
The aim of the caudillo band is to gain wealth; the tactic employed is essen-
tially pillage. For the retainers, correct selection of a leader is paramount. No
retainer can guarantee that he will receive recompense from his leader in
advance, because the band seeks to obtain wealth which is not yet in its
possession. All know that the wealth sought after is finite; only certain re-
sources are "safe game". The band cannot attack with impunity the basic
sources of criollo wealth, such as land; and it cannot sequester, without inter-
national complications, the property of foreign firms operating in the area.
Hence there is not only intense competition for movable resources, but great
skill is required in diagnosing which resources are currently "available" and
which taboo. The exercise of power therefore gives rise to a code which
regulates the mode of access to resources. The code refers to two basic attri-
butes of leadership: first, the interpersonal skills needed to keep the band

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 174 ERIC R. WOLF AND EDWARD C. HANSEN

together; second, the acumen required to cement these relationships through

the correct distribution of wealth. Possession of interpersonal skills is the
initial prerequisite; it suggests to the retainers that the second attribute will
also be fulfilled.
The social idiom in which the first of these attributes is discussed is that
of "masculinity": the social assertion of masculinity constitutes what has
come to be known as machismo (from macho, masculine). According to the
idiom, masculinity is demonstrated in two ways: by the capacity to dominate
females, and by the readiness to use violence. These two capacities are closely
related; both point to antagonistic relations between men. The capacity to
dominate women implies the further capacity to best other men in the com-
petition over females. But the vocabulary of sexual relations, focusing on the
interplay between active and aggressive males and passive, suffering females
also covers situations in which one dominant and agressive male bests another
whose defeat thereby casts him in the role of the submissive and passive
sufferer (Paz, 1961, 65-88). Assertion of masculinity in interpersonal rela-
tions thus implies a social ordering between a dominant leader and a following
which suffers his dominance and admires his prowess. The theme of sexual
competition should also be read against the wider social background, in which
female seclusion on the part of the gentry symbolizes their hold on property
and status. The assertion of masculinity on the part of the caudillo threatens
that monopoly; like the possession of arms, it "threatens to derange the pre-
dictable interplay of hierarchical class relations" (Morse, 1954, 79).
Assertions of dominance are tested in numerous encounters, in which the
potential leader must test himself against other potential claiments.

Although Latin American rural communities are frequently isolated by poor

communication facilities, the local caudillos are thrown into contact from time to
time... occasionally in activities such as drinking, card playing, carousing, and
brawling, a man so stands out that the others automatically accept his authority
and extend to him their loyalties. (Stokes, 1952, 448).

Such situations are charged with potential violence, for in such antagonistic
confrontations, the claimants to victory must be prepared to kill their rivals
and to demonstrate this willingness publicly. For the loser there is no middle
ground; he must submit to the winner, or be killed. Willingness to risk all in
such encounters is further proof of masculinity. The drama involved in such
tests of leadership is illustrated by the following episode in the rise of a
Bolivian caudillo (Crow, 1946, 623):

Mariano Melgarejo, an ignorant and drunken murderer given to the wildest sexual
orgies, ... ran the country from 1864-71. Melgarejo got into power by killing the
country's dictator, Belzui, in the presidential palace. The shooting took place before
a great crowd which had gathered in the plaza to see the meeting of the two rivals.
When BeIzui fell dead into the arms of one of his escorts, Melgarejo strode to the
window and exclaimed: 'Belz(i is dead. Now who are you shouting for?' The mob,
thus prompted, threw of its fear and gave a bestial cry: 'Viva Melgarejo!'

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 Caudillo POLITICS 175

Personal leadership may thus create a successful band; by the same token,
however, the personal nature of leadership also threatens band maintenance.
If the caudillo is killed or dies of natural causes, the band will disintegrate
because there can be no institutionalized successor. The qualities of leader-
ship reside in his person, not in the office. To establish a system of offices it
would have been necessary to reorganize post-Independence society. Attempts
in this direction were continuously thwarted by criollo arms; one has to note
the defeat of the "centralists" in all parts of Latin America.
Proof of masculinity does not yet make a man a caudillo. Men will not
flock to his banner unless he also proves himself capable of organizing a
number of minimal bands into a maximal faction, and demonstrates his
ability to hold the faction together. To this end, the caudillo must weld a
number of lieutenants into a core of "right-hand men" (hombres de con-
fianza). Important in this creation of a core of devoted followers is not merely
assertion of dominance, but also calculated gift-giving to favored individuals
who are expected to reciprocate with loyalty. Such gifts may consist of
movable goods, money, or perquisites such as the right to pillage a given area
or social group. The importance of such gifts is best understood as a presta-
tion of favors defined not merely as objects, but also as attributes of the giver.
Where the receiver cannot respond with a counter-gift which would partake
equally of his own personal attributes, he is expected to respond with loyalty,
that is, he makes a gift of his person for a more or less limited period of time.
The existence of such a core of right-hand men produces its own demonstra-
tion effect. They are living testimony to the largesse of the caudillo aspirant
and to his commitment to grant riches in return for personal support.
To satisfy this desire for riches, the caudillo must exhibit further abilities.
We have already discussed some of the limitations under which the caudillo
labors in acquiring wealth: there are certain groups he may not attack with
impunity. To cast about in quest of riches may stir resistance; resistance may
imply defeat. To be successful, therefore, a caudillo needs what we may call
"access vision", capabilities closely related to the "business acumen" of the
North American entrepreneur. He must be able to diagnose resources which
are available for seizure with a minimum of resistance on the part of their
present owners. He must estimate how much wealth is needed to satisfy his
retainers. He must also control the freelance activities of his followers, such
as cattle rustling and robbery, lest they mobilize the resistance of effective
veto groups. He must be able to estimate correctly the forces at the disposal
of those presently in control of resources; and he must be able to predict the
behavior and power of potential competitors in the seizure of wealth. Nor
can he rest content with initial success in his endeavors. He must continuously
find new sources of wealth which can be distributed to his following, or he
must attach resources which replenish themselves. Initial successes are there-
fore frequently followed by sudden failures: many caudillo ventures end as

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176 ERIC R. WOLF AND EDWARD C. HANSEN

"one-shot" undertakings. The caudillo may be successful in seizing the govern-

ment treasury or the receipts of a custom house; then no other source of
wealth is found, and the faction disintegrates. The more limited the supply
of ready wealth, the more rapid the turnover of caudillos. Thus Bolivia, one
of the most impoverished countries during this period, averaged more than
one violent change of government every year (Crow, 1946, 620).
It follows from this that the caudillo with ties to the criollo gentry possesses
advantages denied to his mestizo counterpart. The criollo may be able to
draw on his own wealth at the beginning of his undertaking; when liquid
wealth grows scarce, he can retrench to provide booty from his own estate.
However much of a burden this may put own resources, it can enable him to
weather a period of scarcity, while the mestizo caudillo requires continuing
abundance.
Such considerations affected even the most successful caudillos, such as
Jose A. Patez and Juan Manuel Rosas. Paez held sway in Venezuela for 33
years (1830-63); Rosas dominated Argentina for twenty years (1829-31,
1835-52). Both owned enormous cattle ranches which furnished large quan-
tities of beef, the staple of the countryside. Both drew their retainers from the
ranks of the fierce cowpunchers of the tall grass prairie, the gauchos in Argen-
tina and the Ilaneros of Venezuela whose mode of livelihood provided ideal
preparation for caudillo warfare. Time and again, both men defeated the at-
tempts of rivals to set up centralized forms of government. Despite the initial
advantages of abundant wealth, their control of "natural" military forces, and
their ability to neutralize a large number of competitors, however, both men
had to beat off numerous armed uprisings, and both ultimately met defeat.
Their cases illustrate the difficulties which beset caudillos operating even
under optimal conditions.

Salient Weaknesses of the Caudillo Organization

The caudillo organization must thus face always the threat of insufficient
"pay-off". At the same time, it is also threatened from within, by the very
nature of the social ties which hold it together. There are, at any one time,
always more men qualified to become caudillos, or aspiring to demonstrate
their capabilities as potential chieftains, than there are caudillos. Such com-
petition necessarily encourages rivalry within the band for the position of
chieftainship. Usually the salient rival is one of the caudillo's own "men of
confidence", a person who is himself a leader of men within the framework
of the maximal band. Latin America's political history during this period is
therefore expectably rife with examples of treachery by influential underlings.
Thus Paiez was betrayed by Monagas, to whom he had granted titular control
over the government, and Rosas by his own General Urquiza (Crow, 1946,
610). In the absence of institutional controls, the caudillo himself can only

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 Caudillo POLITICS 177

guess whether his subordinates are loyal or disloyal. The classic loyalty test
occurs when rivals meet head-on in violent encounter, in a situation of public
confrontation. Such a situation demands that retainers take a stand; they must
"declare themselves" (declararse) for or against one of the protagonists. If
they stand by their leader, their support constitutes a kind of vote of confi-
dence; if they desert him, his career will come to an end. Such votes of con-
fidence take various forms. Rosas' gaucho retainers deserted him on the
field of battle. Garcia Moreno, theocratic caudillo of Ecuador, was assas-
sinated in plain view of his followers; Mexico's Santa Anna was declared
"for"' and "against" repeatedly, during the many crises of his government in
its relations with France and the United States (Worcester and Schaeffer,
1962, 538). A far-sighted caudillo is well advised to plan his route of escape
from the country in advance of the moment when his retainers transfer their
loyalty to another, if he wishes to live to fight another day in an attempt to
return to power.

Caudillaje and Modern Latin America

This paper has presented a model of caudillo organization, and has explored
the causes underlying this political phenomenon. We have seen the reasons
for its emergence in the inability of any socio-economic class to monopolize
sufficiently both wealth and power in order to organize a centralized political
apparatus. Criollos, while endowed with wealth, lacked the economic and
social cohesion to develop the wide-mesh coalitions necessary to control
government. The mestizos, on the other hand, lacked the permanent and
replenishable sources of wealth necessary to support wide-ranging political
activity. In the absence of a framework for institutional politics, Latin Ameri-
can politics became personalized.
In spite of its chaotic appearance, cautdillaje was a true political system,
an organized effort on the part of competing groups to determine who got
what, when and where. For the criollo caudillo, possession of control often
guaranteed a temporary position of preference in dealings with foreign trade
interests; for the mestizo it meant access to a new arena in which to seek
wealth. Given the terms of competition, violence constitutes a predictable
aspect of the system. Leadership can be achieved only through violence;
resources claimed only through violence; and the balance of power between
criollos, mestizos and foreign traders only maintained by veto group violence
against a caudillo who overstepped his bounds. While the endemic threat of
violence rendered uncertain the tenure of any one caudillo, however, in the
end it served to stabilize the system of caudillaje as a whole.
We have argued that the system depended upon a particular balance be-
tween criollos, mestizos, and foreign interests. We are thus arguing implicitly
that the caudillo system could persist only as long as this balance of interests

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178 ERIC R. WOLF AND EDWARD C. HANSEN

prevailed. We would thus take issue with investigators who continue to see in
caudillaje the dominant political system in Latin America down to the present
day (e.g. Tannenbaum, 1962). While much of the code of caudillo behavior
survives - in a continuing idiom of machismo, readiness to use violence,
gift-giving, personalized loyalties - by the 1870's the caudillo system was
giving way to a new political system, the dictatorships of "order and progress".
While these dictatorships exhibited some caudillo features, the dictator func-
tioned with an increasingly centralized governmental machinery, predicated
upon a very different balance of social forces.
The cycle of change from caudillaje to these new dictatorships was trig-
gered by the great European depression of 1873-86, which marked the onset
of protectionism at home and of imperialist expansion abroad. Where over-
seas expansion before this time had been largely characterized by the simple
extraction of goods from the dependent countries and the conversion of these
goods into commodities on the home market, the new imperialists began to
invest heavily in the transformation of certain sectors of production in the
dependent areas. In Latin America, this signalled major changes in the pro-
duction of cash crops; it also resulted in the growth of some light industry,
primarily in urban areas. Most significantly, the hacienda - with its built-in
defenses against the laissez-faire market - became a thing of the past. Large
landed criollo-owned estates might remain intact, but they witnessed a whole-
sale transformation of their plant from labor-intensive hacienda to the mecha-
nized and capital-intensive plantation, complete with railroad spur leading to
the nearest port.
This transformation required the development of credit institutions, the
stabilization of currencies, the improvement and widening of the network of
transportation. In turn, these requirements demanded a modicum of political
stability and an end to anarchic pillage. This need was met by the forging of
alliances between foreign interests and native criollo oligarchies of landowners
and merchants. The stability of such alliances for order and progress could
be guaranteed by the use of foreign armed forces. The local representative of
such an alliance was typically the new dictator, often a caudillo in origin, but
no longer a caudillo in function. His recompense no longer derived from the
systematic pillage of "free" resources; it was furnished by the alliance. In
turn, he functioned as head of an alliance police force, neutralizing forcibly
all threats to the alliance. The prototypical dictator of this type was Porfirio
Diaz who ruled Mexico between 1876-1911. His expressive slogan pan o palo
(bread or club) symbolizes the twin functions of his government: wealth (pan)
to the beneficiaries of the alliance, the use of force (palo) against potential
challengers. Thus while harbors were dredged, industry built, commerce ex-
panded and foreign capital poured into the country, Mexico's prisons were
filled to capacity.
The new balance of power represented by the alliances of order and prog-

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 Caudillo POLITICS 179

ress spelled the end of the caudillo on horseback. On the national level, they
produced dictatorships underwritten by foreign guarantees. At the same time,
they drove the mestizos, deprived of resources which would have enabled
them to participate in the alliance, to seek countervailing coalitions with
groups not hitherto represented in the political process. They turned to the
rural population of the hinterland. Everywhere they raised the slogans of land
reform, popular education and mass participation in politics. In countries
with strong Indian components, these countervailing alliances formed under
the ideological banner of Indianism, a utopian ideology that envisaged a syn-
thesis of the industrial age with the glorious Indian past; elsewhere they
groped towards one form or another of populism (Worsley, 1964, 164-167).
Cast in the organizational form of mass parties like the Peruvian APRA, the
Mexican PRM, or the Bolivian MPR, they substituted for the insurrectionary
caudillo a very different type of leadership, skilled in the management of the
"organizational weapon" employed to synchronize divergent group interests.
Thus politics in modern Latin America is no longer caudillo politics; it is a
many-sided conflict between alliances of order and progress ranged against
populist coalitions.

ERIC R. WOLF

and
EDWARD C. HANSEN

University of Michigan

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