ABSTRACT
This chapter shows the complex impact of early Spanish liberalism in Mexico and Peru in the context of the first independence movements. The author highlights the enormous variety of ‘municipalist’ experiences that took place beyond the political project designed at the national level in the Constitution of Cadiz (1812). These experiences were not limited to implementing instructions from the peninsula, but sometimes developed political formulas in which the cooperative tradition was intertwined with inclusive solutions for Indigenous citizens. The text provides a good example of how, in a context far removed from the power of the central state where the latter had a limited capacity to impose homogeneous responses, local communities articulated diverse, even opposing, responses to an external democratising input.
