The new republics

Las nuevas repúblicas: caudillos, reformas y fronteras

1826–1898. The first decades of independence were hard.

Draft: not yet checked against its sources.

What happened

The first decades of independence were hard. Gran Colombia and the Central American federation broke up; civil wars between liberals and conservatives, strongmen (caudillos) and foreign interventions marked Mexico, Argentina and Colombia. Mexico lost half its territory to the United States in 1848 and fought off a French-backed empire in the 1860s under Benito Juárez. From the 1870s stronger states built railways, exported beef, nitrate, coffee and silver, took land from Indigenous peoples on the pampas and in Yucatán, and in Argentina and Uruguay welcomed millions of European immigrants. Slavery ended in Cuba only in 1886, and Cuba's independence war of 1895 led to the Spanish-American War of 1898.

Its events

1. 1847: Andrés Bello's grammar for Americans
2. February 1879–April 1884: The War of the Pacific

Sources

1. Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) — US National Archives
2. Cronología de la abolición en España — Universitat de Barcelona