South America: Economics and Politics - The Wise World Traveler: Becoming a Part of All that You Meet - page 311

population, the greater the likelihood that wealth will be concentrated in the fewest hands.
Again, the greater the concentration of wealth, the less the likelihood of free, open, and
contested elections. And still again, the greater the concentration of wealth, the more likely
the threat of political violence. Or as Ortega y Gasset puts it, “Violence is none other than
reason exasperated.” [278]
The “southern crescent” of the Andes makes the point. In that region Peru, Ecuador,
and Bolivia are flashpoints of violence. In 2004 an angry mob in a small city in Bolivia's
high plains lynched the mayor and set his body on fire for allegedly misusing public funds.
The same fate befell the mayor of a small town in the Peruvian highland. [279]
Peru's indigenous population “has long suffered exclusion and profound social in-
justice.” The Peruvian Commission on Truth and Injustice estimates that from 1980 to
2000, 75 percent of 69,000 victims were of indigenous descent, “most of them from Peru's
poorest regions.” The racial and economic divisions in South America are captured in the
remarks of a beauty pageant contestant in Bolivia: “I'm from the other side of the country,
and we are tall, and we are white people, and we know English.” [280]
WHO WERE THE MEN ON HORSEBACK?
South America's wars for independence began along the Atlantic coast in 1807 in today's
Argentina and Uruguay. Proclaiming the ideals of the French Revolution—liberty, equality,
and fraternity—Napoleon marched into Spain and, with cynical attention to ideals, placed
his brother Joseph on the Spanish throne. The administrative web that bound Spanish
colonies to Spain was severed. The viceroys appointed by the former royal court continued
to claim power, but rival claimants to authority were on the ground and at the ready.
Spain in the New World was a cauldron of rival claimants to power and boiling an-
imosities: the church and great landowners versus merchants in the port cities, military of-
ficers born in Spain ( peninsulares) given power by birthright versus officers born in the
New World ( criollas) and denied power and promotion by their birth. Two military forces
were in New World contention: American-born militias versus loyalist troops dispatched
from Spain. Each was commanded by both peninsulares and criollas . Also in the cauldron
was an ambitious Great Britain seeking to extend its empire. It invaded Buenos Aires in
1806-07 and was expelled by the Argentines not long thereafter. And last were claimants
to power organized along fault lines of ideology: liberals—mostly young, educated, and
middle class—who pledged themselves to fight for democracy versus conservatives seek-
ing to preserve their privileges by upholding the status quo.
The opening shots of revolution were fired in Argentina in 1810. Armies fought in
Peru, Chile, Bolivia, and Argentina, sometimes scaling the Andean heights as they moved
across those countries. Whether great men compel events or great events bring forth the