ABSTRACT
The term “caudillismo,” in the broadest sense, refers to the early 19th-century Latin American experience of militarist and regionalist political strife. Caudillismo erupted between the breakdown of the Spanish Colonial Empire in the 1820s and the consolidation of stable elite nation-states by the 1870s. Sometimes, the term is taken to mean this half-century historical period itself or (in adjectival form, “caudillistic”) to describe varied social or political aspects of 19th-century instability. With varying intensity and timing, all the new republics suffered stretches of caudillistic internal warfare, with the important exceptions of Chile and Brazil. Yet unlike the massively destructive U.S. Civil War, caudillismo was generally an intermittent and low-level form of armed conflict.
