“Autocratic Liberalism and Democratic Conservatism in Nineteenth-Century Guatemala”

“AUTOCRATIC LIBERALISM AND DEMOCRATIC CONSERVATISM IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY GUATEMALA” Blake D. Pattridge Babson College Introduction For almost a century, generations of historians of Latin America uncritically accepted late nineteenth-century accounts which claimed that earlier Conservative, caudillo-led governments impeded progress in the region until the rise of westernizing Liberal regimes embraced the northAtlantic economic system and thereby ushered in an era of unprecedented political and material improvements.1 E. Bradford Burns’ essay The Poverty of Progress, published in 1980, quickly became the most famous and compelling interpretive challenge to this dominant narrative. Subsequent historians have provided even more intensively researched and documented analyses questioning the purportedly anti-democratic nature of the caudillo governments as well as the supposedly enlightened and egalitarian practices of the early and later Liberal governments in Latin America.2 This effort to challenge assumptions about nineteenthcentury liberalism and conservatism also has important implications for contemporary political and economic issues, debates, and conflicts in Latin America. This essay aims to contribute to a more nuanced interpretation of nineteenth-century Latin America and thereby implicitly challenges any reductive attempts to summarily categorize what are in reality diverse sets of political and economic visions for Latin America. Background and Historiography A central element in Guatemala’s socioeconomic and political changes during the nineteenth century was the country’s sole institution of higher education, the University of San Carlos. Throughout this period, the University trained social, governmental, and economic leaders from Guatemala and elsewhere in Central America. San Carlos was, in fact, the premier University in all of Central America, training elites from throughout the region. This contribution to elite formation meant that the school had a profound impact on developments in the isthmus. After independence, like other universities throughout Latin America , San Carlos became a pawn in the battle between pro-Church Conservatives and anti-clerical Liberals. Throughout the colonial period the Roman Catholic Church had dominated higher education in Guatemala, but some political and intellectual leaders had come to believe that the Church’s power ought to be reduced. In the decades surrounding the 1821 C  2012 Southeastern Council on Latin American Studies and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 3 The Latin Americanist, March 2012 separation from Spain the institution educated leading figures of both political persuasions. Mariano Gálvez viewed San Carlos as a bastion of Conservative values and in 1832 replaced it with the Liberal-oriented Academy of Sciences. With the ascendancy of Rafael Carrera in 1840, however, Conservatives resurrected the University. The central historiographical issue in the century after independence involves San Carlos’ plight under the respective Liberal and Conservative governments in the post-independence period. The pervasive influence of the dominant Liberal historiographical tradition persuaded most authors that the University languished under Church-dominated Conservative rule and fared much better under the Liberals. In this light, Conservative policies emerged as reactionary and opposed to progress. Ralph Lee Woodward Jr., for example, contends that in the Carrera era the University of San Carlos existed essentially as “a bastion of outmoded values and ideas” and that it struggled just to stay afloat. In his eyes the University’s character merely reflected the pro-clerical, aristocratic philosophy that regained control in the Carrera-dominated country. Augusto Cazali Avila, the leading Guatemalan expert on the history of the University during the Republican period, agrees that San Carlos during the Conservative era “deserved the later bitter criticisms of the triumphant Liberals of 1871.” And although Roberto Hernández maintains that the University “received a new lease on life” under the Conservatives, nevertheless, he too believes that the University prospered more fully under the later Liberals. He claims their reforms paved the way for University autonomy after 1945.3 Chester Lloyd Jones, meanwhile, contends that Liberal policies only meant governmental rather than Church control over the University, and that the institution fared better under the Church’s direction. Jones writes: The University of San Carlos Borromeo before the Liberals came into power had sunk to a low ebb. Even by the standards of the 1870s it was far from an advanced institution. Its endowment was dissipated, its faculty poorly trained and more poorly paid, and its attendance low, but it was...