*The Aztecs were the dominant empire of what is now southern central Mexico, with their capital at what is now Mexico City.  Beginning around 1300, they began to conquer and subdue their neighbours, eventually conquering a large empire, in part because their religion required frequent human sacrifice, and people often preferred to sacrifice prisoners of war rather than local people.  They had a highly hierarchical society with a rigid class structure and a powerful military.  When the Spanish arrived, they were initially welcomed as possible gods or emissaries of the god Quetzalcoatl.  In 1521, the Spanish, under Hernando Cortez, arrived, allied with a subject tribe that wanted to be free of their Aztec rulers, took over Tenochtitlan, and made war with their guns against bows and arrows.  They also brought smallpox, which the Indians had never encountered, and to which they had no immunity—throughout the Americas, between 30 and 90% of all the Indians died of European diseases).  The Aztecs were rapidly defeated.

*The Aztecs, incidentally, introduced the Spanish (and thus Europe) to corn, the tomato, and chocolate.

*The major empire of South America was that of the Inca, in the Andes, in what is now Peru, and parts of Bolivia, Chile, and Ecuador.  The Inca domesticated the llama, built roads across their Empire, created impressive irrigation systems, and built a vast empire while peacefully assimilating the empires around them.  They did this partly through the mita system of taxation which required labour rather than money be paid.  However, the empire did not last long.  It was created in 1438, and continually expanded, in part because Inca religious practises required that while a dead emperor’s oldest son got the title of emperor, all the wealth from the dead emperor’s lands went to the other descendents to take care of them and to take care of their father in the afterlife, so the new emperor had to expand the kingdom to get his own land for wealth.  The Inca also offered human sacrifices, although not as much as the Aztec did.  The Inca were conquered by Francisco Pizarro in 1532.  Legend has it that the Inca cursed their old capital of Cuzco, so that the Spanish could not have children there.  This is why the capital was moved to Lima.  There may be some truth to this—Cuzco is not on the altiplano, but it is close, and is very high, and the lower oxygen results in lower birth rates in general, especially in those unaccustomed to it (like Europeans).  The Spanish took the place of the Inca emperors for most of the Empire, and kept the mita system in place for their own use.  The Catholic Church used the main Incan languages (Quechua and Aymara) to spread the gospel in South America, and this is one reason that some Incan languages survive today.

*In the 1500s and 1600s, the Spanish, and later the French, English, and Dutch claimed the various islands of the Caribbean, and the Portuguese claimed Brazil.  This was due, in part, to the Treaty of Tordesillas.  Drawn in 1493, and adjusted in 1495, by Pope Alexander VI, it divided the world between Spain and Portugal, the two main exploring nations in the world at the time. It gave Brazil, Africa, and India the Portugal, and the rest of Latin America and parts of Asia (like the Philippines) to Spain.  Everyone else go left out.

*The Spanish came to the New World for God, Gold, and Glory, and they got it all.

*The Catholic Church came with Spain, and converted the Indians of Central and South America to Roman Catholicism, often by force and slavery, but effectively nonetheless (although some elements of native religions and African religions were transferred into Latin American Catholicism, with many old gods finding a new form in one saint or another).  Paraguay was for centuries a colony of the Jesuit Order as much as it was of Spain.

*There was glory in the New World, too, for those who would win it.  Latin America was divided, eventually, into Viceroyalties, governed by Viceroys (in place of the King).  The major ones were New Spain (Mexico and the rest of Central America), New Granada (Ecuador and Columbia), Peru (Peru and Chile), La Plata (Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and parts of Bolivia), and Brazil.

*Most of Spanish America was granted to the conquistadors (conquerors) as encomiendas and haciendas.  Encominedas were cities that belonged completely to their owner, and whose people could be used as he pleased.  Haciendas were vast estates, often the size of modern provinces; again, the inhabitants were under the control of the hacendo (owner (also known as the padron)), who had the power of life and death over them.  These could be run as farms, but were mostly used as ranches, and were not very economically efficient—they only meant to be self-sufficient, and to produce enough money to buy the owner some luxuries for showing off to the other hacendos.  In short, only a few people owned almost all the land in Central and South America, and they were immensely powerful.

*To work these farms, and their mines, the Spanish enslaved the Indians, and also imported many African slaves to Central and South America, and especially to the Caribbean.

*The Spaniards also found gold, or at least silver, beyond their wildest dreams.  The greatest mine in the world was at Potosi, in modern Bolivia.  Worked by thousands of Indian slaves (under a relic of the mita system), it turned out more silver than the world had ever before seen, producing over 45,000 tons of silver from 1556 to 1783 (worth over 21 trillion US dollars in 2008).  The mine was opened about 1545, and remained valuable until the early 1800s.  The area still produces some tin, but the silver is mostly used up.  Mexico also had a tremendous mine at Zacatecas.  The silver of Peru (in which Potosi was located) and New Spain was famous around the world, and made Spain fabulously wealthy, before destroying the economy through inflation.

*The silver was minted into pesos, each worth eight reales (royals).  The pesos were also called dollars (which is where the US dollar gets its name), and were often cut up to make change.  They were usually cut into eight pieces, or bits, which is why a quarter is still sometimes called two bits.

*Although the Spanish and Portuguese colonised most of Central and South America, they had to share the smaller islands of the Caribbean.  The English, French, and Dutch (and a few other nations) claimed some of the islands there, mostly for growing sugar and other tropical crops.  These islands were mostly populated by slaves, and eventually, when the smaller islands ran out of room to raise food, the English settlers of Barbados colonised Jamaica and later South Carolina to offer them supplies.  These islands were so rich that England and France were more willing to part with their vast colonies in North America than their West Indian Islands.

*In time, the people of Latin America grew tired of Spanish rule.  The Indians people had been enslaved, as had the African, for centuries, but even the Europeans in Latin America resented the fact that white people born in the New World (Creoles) were seen as second-class citizens in Spain itself, and even in the colonies when new Viceroys, governors, and other officials were appointed from Spain (peninsulares).  Many people particularly hated the hacienda system, which left so many people at the mercy of so few.

*The first place to seek independence from Europe, however, was Haiti, where the slave population, led by François Toussaint-L’Ouverture, a black soldier whose parents were slaves, led a slave revolt against the French.  The war lasted from 1794 to 1804, and eventually Toussaint-L’Ouverture was captured and died in prison, but the revolt succeeded—the largest successful slave revolt in world history.

*On 16 September 1810, a Mexican Creole priest named Father Miguel Hidalgo began Mexico’s war for independence when Spain was conquered by France under Napoleon Bonaparte.  Father Hidalgo built an odd mixture of liberals who wanted complete independence and conservatives who wanted Mexico to be free of Napoleon, but to have its old king (or someone in his family) back.  The war lasted until 1824, when Mexico became free.  Mexico briefly had its own emperor, a general who had fought to free the nation, then a long series of presidents, then a series of dictatorships under Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna.

*Throughout the early 1800s, the rest of Hispanic America fought for its independence, with such leaders as Simon Bolivar of Venezuela, Antonio Jose de Sucre of Bolivia, Jose de San Martin of Argentina, and Bernardo O’Higgins of Chile leading the way.  Bolivia was named after Bolivar, and its capital, Sucre, was named after its first president.  Most of these nations began as democratic countries, loosely modelled on the United States, which was seen as an example of how to win independence from a great European empire.  Many of their constitutions also incorporated elements of the Code Napoleon, another revolutionary system of government.

*Brazil did not have a major was for independence.  Instead, when Napoleon captured Portugal, the entire Portuguese royal family went to Brazil. Eventually King John VI went home, but his son, Prince Pedro stayed in Brazil.  In 1821, the Portuguese assembly voted to dissolve Brazil’s central government, and to place all its provinces under direct rule from Lisbon, reducing local power significantly.  The people of Brazil opposed this, and eventually rebelled, and Prince Pedro became their leader.  In 1822, Pedro declared independence from Portugal, and was named Emperor of Brazil.  There were a few years of guerrilla fighting and minor skirmishes, but Brazil’s independence came relatively peacefully, and it remained an Empire under Dom Pedro and his heirs for 67 years, when the monarchy was overthrown in 1889, in part because many landowners opposed Dom Pedro II’s abolition of slavery.

*Most of the Hispanic American nations abolished slavery shortly after independence.

*For the most part, the revolutions of Latin America did not end the systems of land use that oppressed so many people.  In most cases, large areas of land were still owned by a few padrons, and the common people worked in a situation not much better than serfdom—and this is still the case in some parts of South America.

*Besides having the natural oligarchic tendencies of the hacienda system, Latin America had the cultural remnants of the highly structured Aztec and Inca empires, and the social hierarchy of Spain, which was still nearly feudal in nature.  Despite attempts to create democratic states, most countries in Latin America were dominated by a small group of wealth landowners, important church officials, and high-ranking military officers.  In the end, most countries in the region ended up as dictatorships in fact (if not in name).  In Latin America these dictators were often known as caudillos (originally a term for a militia officer).  They sometimes worked together as oligarchic juntas.

*Latin America has been famous for its wars, as military elites in various nations went to war with one another over all sorts of issues.

*Mexico lost a great deal of its territory under the dictatorship of Santa Anna, first in the Texan War of Independence (1836) and later in the Mexican-American War (1846-1848), although this was partly due to US aggression as much as it was to bad Mexican policy (although Mexico did pursue some pretty poor policies under Santa Anna).

*Mexico was also invaded by the French in 1862, and, despite an early defeat on 5 May 1862, took over the country.  In 1864, Napoleon III offered the Empire of Mexico to Maximillian of Habsburg, who had been offered it before by Mexicans who wanted a monarchy.  He accepted it, and ruled as emperor for 3 years.  However, the French withdrew in 1866 after being threatened by the United States and by Mexican rebels, and in 1867, Maximillian, who had stayed, was captured and executed, despite his wife’s efforts to get help from a number of European leaders, including her brother-in-law, the Emperor of Austria, and the Pope.

*The bloodiest conflict in Latin American history was the War of the Triple Alliance, fought by Paraguay against Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay, over exactly where their mutual borders lay (particularly once Paraguay invaded Brazil’s Mato Grosso to prove its point).  Paraguay lost over half its total population between 1864 and 1870.  In 1871, of the 221,000 people left in Paraguay, only 28,000 were men.  It also lost large stretches of territory (to Argentina and Brazil) which it has never recovered.  It is generally seen as a futile war, but some people, especially in Paraguay, see it as a small country standing up for itself against bigger ones.

*1879-1884, Chile fought the Pacific War against Peru and Bolivia over part of the Atacama Desert.  The region was valuable for the bird guano, useful for its sodium nitrate and saltpetre, useful in gunpowder and fertiliser.  Part of the problem was that national boundaries had never really been settled when the nations won independence from Spain.  As part of the compromise that drew the boundaries in 1866, Bolivia got most of the territory, but Chilean companies had a 25-year fixed low tax rate.  Bolivia raised taxes against this agreement in 1878, and in 1879, threatened to seize and auction off the assets of a Chilean company that wouldn’t pay.  On 14 February, the day of the auction, the Chilean navy seized the port of Antofagasta, where the auction was to take place.  On 1 March, Bolivia declared war on Chile.  Bolivia thought its chances were good—it had a secret alliance with Peru that it called into play.  Bolivia also hoped Argentina would help, but it did not.  In the end, Chile beat both nations, as it had better and more modern weapons.  Peru and Bolivia both lost land in the war, and Bolivia became landlocked as a result (which they still resent).  Chile got rich at first, but most of its nitrate companies were backed by the British, and in the end, the British supported a coup that overthrew the Chileno government only a few years later.

*In 1898-1900, the US helped Cuba gain its independence from Spain, but at the cost of Cuba largely coming under the control of the USA (thanks in part to the Platt Amendment to Cuba’s constitution), which many Cubans resented. 

*At the dawn of the 20th century, Latin America was theoretically independent and democratic, but most power was concentrated in the hands of a few large landowners, military leaders, and Church officials.  Many countries were also dominated by foreign investors, despite the theoretical protection of the Monroe Doctrine.