Caudillo

For the documentary film, see Caudillo (film).

1963 Spanish peseta coin with the image of Francisco Franco and inscribed Caudillo de España, Por la Gracia de Dios (Spanish: "Leader of Spain, by the Grace of God")

Caudillo (Spanish pronunciation: [kawˈdiʎo]; Old Spanish: cabdillo, from Latin capitellum, diminutive of caput "head") usually describes a political-military leader at the head of an authoritarian power. The term translates into English as leader or chief, or more pejoratively as warlord, dictator or strongman. Caudillo was the term used to refer to the charismatic populist leaders among the people. Caudillos have had an immense impact upon the history of Latin America.

The term originally referred to military power: Indibilis and Mandonius, Viriathus, Almanzor (sometimes in the modern historiography), Don Pelayo and other fighters of the Reconquista, even Simón Bolivar, Francisco Franco and Juan Perón, but in hispanic America another sense has developed: the caudillo lawyer and politician Jorge Eliécer Gaitán was honored with the title "Caudillo of The Colombian People" (and other nuances with a significance mostly demagogic) and even without state responsibilities like cacique in Spain and oligarchical–plutocratic power.

Origin

The related caudillismo is a cultural phenomenon that first appeared during the early 19th century in revolutionary South America, as a type of militia leader with a charismatic personality and enough of a populist program of generic future reforms to gain broad sympathy, at least at the outset, among the common people. Effective caudillismo depends on a personality cult.

The root of caudillismo lies in Spanish colonial policy of supplementing small cadres of professional, full-time soldiers with large militia forces recruited from local populations to maintain public order. Militiamen held civilian occupations but assembled at regular times for drill and inspection. Their salary from the Crown was a token; their reward was in prestige, primarily because of the fuero militar ("military privilege"), that exempted them from certain taxes and obligatory community work assignments (compare the feudal corvée), and more significantly, exempted them from criminal or civil prosecution. Away from colonial capitals, the militias were at the service of the criollo landowners.

Leadership

Charismatic image

Gaining of support

Juan Manuel de Rosas, Argentine caudillo, c. 1841 by Cayetano Descalzi

In the upheavals of the decades of revolution and its aftermath, leaders who were able to draw to themselves bands of loyal followers and keep them well armed and otherwise well cared for could assume the title of "general". Caudillos began to attain this power in the course of the Spanish American wars of independence, where the militias did much of the fighting and earned a heroic reputation. The caudillos used their small armed bands to overthrow the vulnerable newly independent states in South America. These caudillos were not always welcome, but they were not publicly condemned either. Some were large landowners (hacendados) who sought to secure their private interests, but more typically they began as vigilantes keeping the local peace for the hacienda, then gained independence of action and developed an anti-oligarchic public stance and finished by supporting an acquiescent establishment that included the Catholic Church.

Government structure

Since the caudillo typically held power by controlling a patronage network that brooked no rival structure, some caudillos took up an anti-clerical stand. Many of the caudillos used their newly gained power, which was unchecked because it was extra-constitutional, to promote their own wealth and interests. At the height of caudillismo, as in Venezuela, the national army was rendered superfluous by the personal armies of the caudillos: in 1872 Venezuela's federal troops were dismissed entirely.