Rumours of War: Civil Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Latin America (review)

Rumours of War: Civil Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Latin America. Edited by REBECCA EARLE. Nineteenth-Century Latin America. London: Institute of Latin American Studies, University of London, 2000 . Tables. Bibliography. Index. xii, 195 pp. Paper.

Historians have traditionally viewed the numerous civil wars and pronunciamientos that afflicted nineteenth-century Latin America as "purposeless tragedies" largely manufactured by "the blind obedience of individual soldiers to a charismatic leader" (p. 3 ). The eight essays in the volume under review suggest otherwise. They make clear that such conflicts were inherent to the region's political culture, that participants often understood the wars' ideological context, and that a wide array of factors (that is, regional, social, economic, geographic) need to be considered to explain their origins.

The book's first four articles examine Latin America's civil wars in broad terms. Frank Safford lays out some common hypotheses concerning nineteenth-century political stability. He also sketches the various types of civil conflict, looks at the relationship between elite recruitment and popular mobilization, and traces the way in which geography and technological innovations helped shape internal conflict in the region.

Next, Carlos Malamud's sweeping review of the rebellions that flourished in Argentina between 1810 and 1905 suggests that electoral fraud often bred armed conflict. He notes that the debility of the state and its repressive apparatus insured that such uprisings recurred. By the early 1900 s, however, revolts began to be dealt with more harshly due to the growing potency of the state and changing international conditions.

Will Fowler's survey of civil conflict in Mexico challenges conventional wisdom by arguing that most rebellions from the time of independence in 1821 to the mid-1850 s did not significantly contribute to the country's instability. Most Mexicans, he argues, remained unaffected by the revolts. Of the 12 uprisings that had a crucial effect on national politics, only the 1832 rebellion against General Anastasio Bustamante's regime and the 1854-55 Ayutla Revolt involved large-scale fighting on a national scale.

Darío Euraque's historiographical essay first examines the character of civil conflict in Honduras and suggests that the electoral system contributed to such strife. The article also notes that recent scholarly writings about Honduras are starting to address the questions concerning politics and civil war raised in R. G. Williams's States and Social Evolution: Coffee and the Rise of National Governments in Central America (1994 ) and Lowell Gundmundson's and Héctor Lindo-Fuentes's Central America, 1821-1871: Liberalism before Liberal Reform (1995 ).

The remaining articles provide an in-depth examination of four specific conflicts. John Chasteen's insightful essay examines the civil war that erupted between 1835 and 1840 in the Brazilian province of Pará. He shows how the movement's leader, a radical priest and journalist named João Batista Campos, forged an alliance that cut across racial and class lines to fuel anti-Portuguese nativist sentiment.

Rebecca Earle's essay explores Colombia's War of the Supremes (1839-41). After identifying the role of religion, the power of regionalism, and the political ambitions of southern Colombia's most influential caudillo as possible causes for its origin, she suggests that the war became more than a conflict among and for elites. Earle remarks that a broad public became interested in these issues and supported the rebellion to fulfill their particular interests.

Elena Plaza examines how participants in Venezuela's so-called 1859-63 Federal or Long War interpreted the term "federation." She argues that few civilian elites understood the concept, and that the strongmen who led the guerrilla war and their supporters construed its meaning differently. For the former "federation" signified a defense of the principle of regional autonomy and a collection of moral and social demands, but the latter conceived it as "an abstract term that signified only the continuing failure to fulfill the promises of social equality" (p. 149 ) made...