Why Latin America's Liberators Rejected the U.S. Model

The Fourth of July marks 250 years since the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence. The document announced a revolutionary principle: rights come from being human, not from government. Political authority is legitimate only when it protects those rights and rests on consent.

The American Revolution shaped Latin America's independence leaders, though not as uniformly as the French Revolution or the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Some admired the constitutional order created in the United States. Others doubted it could be reproduced in societies with different histories and political conditions. The great liberators studied the American experience. They interpreted its lessons in distinct ways.

The Spanish American wars of independence lasted from roughly 1809 to 1824, more than three decades after the U.S. declared independence. By then, Latin American leaders could read the Declaration and the Constitution. Their challenge was different.

The United States emerged from 13 colonies with experience in elected assemblies and local government. Spanish America inherited a more centralized colonial system. Its territories were separated by vast distances. Its independence wars were exceptionally destructive. Those conditions help explain why admiration for the American Revolution did not always lead Latin American leaders to embrace the U.S. constitutional model.

Francisco de Miranda, born in Caracas in 1750, occupied a unique place in revolutionary history. As a Spanish army officer, he fought in the 1781 Siege of Pensacola and later met George Washington, Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. He also participated in the French Revolution, rising to general, and was nearly executed during the Jacobin Terror.

That experience revealed an essential difference between the two revolutions. A republic could proclaim liberty yet still descend into violence when political power ceased to recognize legal limits. Miranda drew a clear conclusion: he admired representative government, freedom of the press, religious liberty and an independent judiciary.

Simón Bolívar had a more ambivalent view of the United States. In his 1819 Address at Angostura, he acknowledged the success of the U.S. constitutional system. He rejected the idea that it could simply be copied in Spanish America.

Laws and institutions, he argued, had to correspond to the conditions of each society. Geography, customs and political experience all mattered. Bolívar feared that a weak federal government would be unable to hold together territories already divided by war and regional rivalries.

His concerns were not unfounded. The independence struggle had weakened institutions throughout Spanish America. Military commanders exercised enormous power. Conflicts among provinces made national unity difficult.

Bolívar's search for stability gradually led him toward centralized authority, exposing a contradiction in his legacy. He liberated nations from Spanish rule. He grew increasingly doubtful that political liberty could survive without a strong executive.

Near the end of his life, his skepticism extended to the United States itself. In a 1829 letter to British diplomat Patrick Campbell, he warned that the United States appeared destined to bring misery to the Americas in the name of liberty. His statement reflected a growing fear that the new power in the north might eventually dominate the republics to the south.

Manuel Belgrano, one of the principal leaders of Argentine independence, was among the strongest Latin American admirers of George Washington. He regarded Washington as a model of public morality. He was especially impressed that the victorious general did not convert military success into permanent personal rule.