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PROLOGUE
Understanding post-independence Latin America requires understanding its earlier history.
In addition to nomadic hunter-gatherers and semi-sedentary agriculturalists, three complex civilizations emerged, founded on sophisticated agricultural and irrigation systems. Maya city-states flourished from c. 250 to 900 AD in Mesoamerica. After 1400 the Aztecs of central Mexico and the Inka of the Andes built large, centralized empires.
After 1492 Spanish and Portuguese colonizers conquered these peoples. But while their populations declined by up to 90%, largely due to European diseases, indigenous peoples and their cultures continued to influence the region. Latin American societies were and are mestizo (mixed), shaped by indigenous, Iberian, and African influences.
Colonial society was exploitative and unequal. The small elite consisted at first of the conquistadores and the remnants of the indigenous nobility, later joined by wealthy Iberian merchants and those in the business of gold and silver mining and plantation agriculture; professionals and skilled artisans were the bulk of the small middle class. Some 90% of society consisted of indigenous workers and enslaved people of African descent.
Responding to local conditions, colonial officials often selectively enforced Spanish and Portuguese policies. Over the course of the eighteenth century, both crowns imposed reforms, seeking to stimulate production and trade and improve colonial defenses and law enforcement against smuggling and piracy by the British and French, with the goals of strengthening colonial rule and raising tax revenues. Colonial economies prospered, but the benefits flowed to the monarchies and colonial elites. Indigenous and African-descended people faced deepening racial prejudice, the poor saw their tax burdens increase, and criollos (American-born people of Iberian descent) resented how Iberian-born peninsulares monopolized administrative posts and commercial privileges. At the dawn of the nineteenth century, protests began to mount.