Spanish American wars of independence

The Spanish American wars of independence (Spanish: Guerras de independencia hispanoamericanas) were a series of early 19th-century conflicts across the Spanish Empire that resulted in new independent nation states in the Americas. They began shortly after the outbreak of the Peninsular War, part of the broader Napoleonic Wars.

The process unfolded in two main phases. First, the Spanish Crown broke up, beginning in Spain in 1808 with the French invasion, the Spanish uprising against the Bonapartes, the vacancy of the throne, and the emergence of juntas later replicated in America. This unfolded as it did because sovereignty reverted vertically, from the Crown down to the cabildos (town councils, or ayuntamientos), the monarchy's basic cellular units. Second, beginning in 1810, attempts at reconstruction failed and developed into wars in their own right: the Cortes of Cádiz sought a pan-Hispanic state, King Ferdinand VII sought to recover the Spanish Crown he had ceded to Napoleon Bonaparte, and in the Americas Simón Bolívar, Agustín de Iturbide and others tried to build large states, such as the Federation of the Andes or the First Mexican Empire. Strictly in terms of military campaigns, they ran from sporadic clashes such as the battle at Chacaltaya in 1809 (present-day Bolivia) to the Battle of Tampico in 1829 (present-day Mexico). The result was the fragmentation of the Hispanic world into multiple states that largely reconstituted the old Spanish administrative boundaries under uti possidetis.

The conflicts were multilateral, involving many factions traditionally grouped into two broad camps: Royalists, who favored continued rule by the Monarchy of Spain, and Patriots, who supported independent monarchies or republics, either united or separate from one another. They were fought as both irregular warfare and conventional warfare. Some historians argue that they began as localized civil wars that spread as secessionist wars for general independence. Under a typology based on whether or not the belligerents constitute a State, they were mixed wars, combining elements of civil wars between political factions, wars between states, and wars between empires. The independence of most of Spanish America produced new national boundaries that followed the colonial provinces and formed the basis of contemporary Hispanic America.

The Spanish Empire dissolved in the region and new states emerged. The new republics abandoned the Inquisition and noble titles, but slavery was not immediately abolished, and total abolition came only in the 1850s in most countries. Criollos and mestizos replaced Spanish-born officials in most political offices, and Criollos stayed at the top of a social structure that kept traditional features culturally, if not legally. For almost a century, conservatives and liberals fought to reverse or deepen these changes. Spaniards were also subject to forced displacement, during the war and later through expulsion laws meant to consolidate independence.

The wars followed the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) and unfolded alongside Brazil's own path to independence. Spanish America and Brazil shared a trigger: Napoleon's invasion of Iberia, which in 1807 forced the Portuguese royal family to flee to Brazil. More broadly, they drew on Enlightenment ideas of popular sovereignty behind the Atlantic Revolutions. The more direct cause was the crisis within Spain, which resulted in new independent states in the post-Napoleonic world. Cuba and Puerto Rico remained under Spanish rule until the 1898 Spanish–American War. Under Monroe Doctrine, this reconfiguration culminated in the modern states of Latin America. More recently, decolonial currents have proposed reorganizing Latin American states into Abya Yala, a plurinational project criticized as Balkanization.