Conservative Parties

Latin American conservative parties have been important political forces throughout the region since their formation during the 1830s and 1840s. Organized in response to the exigencies of republicanism, and in opposition to social, economic, and political reform, they struggled for power against rival liberal parties during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Toward the end of the century, conservative and liberal elites achieved a modus vivendi in most parts of Latin America, first because their frequently bloody struggles had clearly harmed national interests, and second because leaders of both parties believed civil order would lead to progress.

Conservatives described the era of consensus as one of "national" or "progressive" conservatism. Liberals termed it a time of "conservative liberalism." In both instances all but the most doctrinaire found they could compromise ideological differences on a platform accentuating economic progress and social order.

Elite accommodation prevailed in Latin America until the early twentieth century, when a traditionally quiescent citizenry began to demand both a meaningful voice in political affairs and substantive social reform. The awakening of a constituency that historically had been passive, respectful of authority, and accepting of elite governance, destroyed conservative-liberal consensus and brought with it political ferment and partisan realignment. Conservatives were especially hard-pressed to recast their political message so as to maintain their constituencies.

The modernization of traditional party platforms came too late in Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina, where revolutionary change either destroyed the old parties or rendered them powerless. Elsewhere conservative parties either passed out of existence or shrank to insignificance. Only Colombia's and Nicaragua's Conservative parties retained their traditional platforms and remained important forces in national politics. In several countries, notably Chile and Venezuela, young conservatives formed new parties founded on conservative principles but aggressively promoting social reform. In so doing they heeded the call of Pope Pius XI, who in his 1931 encyclical Quadragesimo Anno gave motive force to what would become the Christian Democratic movement. Over the following decades, Christian Democratic parties appeared in most Latin American nations, and where they did not—in Colombia and Nicaragua, for example—existing conservative parties eventually adopted Christian Democratic-like platforms.

Twentieth-century social change thus produced an inexorable shift in the orientation of Latin America's conservative parties. In that they came to embrace reform programs, they stood poles apart from the hidebound organizations of earlier times. But in that their platforms and ideologies were rooted in Roman Catholic social and philosophic teachings, they proclaimed their descent from Latin America's original conservative parties.

CONSERVATIVE PARTY EVOLUTION

The motive force for conservative party formation in Latin America came from liberals who, following European and North American models, proposed ambitious programs of economic and social reform in decades following the wars of independence (1810–1824). Liberals sought to free their respective countries from traditional social constraints of every sort. In economics they pursued free-trade policies; in politics they endorsed a broadening of democracy; and in the social sphere they struck at limitations to individual freedom. Rational, utilitarian-minded liberals were especially intent on lessening the power of the Roman Catholic Church, which they perceived as the chief obstacle to national progress. The church enjoyed special legal privileges, or fueros, inherited from colonial times, and owned considerable property, which liberals believed should be placed at the disposal of individual citizens.

These policies and beliefs did violence to conservative interests and values at every point, driving adherents to organize politically. By 1850, conservative parties had been constituted in virtually all Latin American nations. Party leaders were united in both interest and ideology. Many of them were descended from landowning families favored by economic policies derived from Spanish mercantilism. At the same time, they viewed economic liberalism as a self-serving device promoting the interests of an upwardly mobile creole commercial elite. They saw liberal egalitarianism and democratic premises as both politically motivated and potentially disruptive of social tranquility. And conservatives were scandalized by liberal attacks on the church, which they viewed as both the repository of divinely inspired moral values and a vital social institution in its own right. Confessional Catholics almost to a man, Latin America's first conservatives could not but see liberal reforms as perverse—even atheistic—disruptions of national social hierarchies, and hence productive of social dissolution. Proponents of strong, even monarchical state leadership, they likewise viewed the extreme federalism endorsed by liberals as wrongheaded and antinational.

Conservative attempts to preserve the closed, inegalitarian system of earlier times, and liberal efforts to open it by striking at traditional institutions and beliefs, formed a common theme in civil wars fought throughout Spanish America during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Notable figures emerged to orient and lead the traditionalists. Some, such as Rafael Carrera in Central America, José Antonio Páez in Venezuela, and Juan Manuel de Rosas in Argentina, were military leaders. Others, among them Lucas Alamán in Mexico, Mariano Ospina Rodríguez in Colombia, Gabriel García Moreno in Ecuador, and Diego Portales Palazuelos in Chile, left the fighting to others, concentrating instead on providing their partisans with political, intellectual, and moral leadership. Only Brazil, which existed under a constitutional monarchy until 1889, managed to avoid bloodshed produced by conservative-liberal struggles.

As elites fought over issues of principle and self-interest, Latin America fell farther behind Europe and the United States in economic development. By the latter nineteenth century, the backwardness of the region had become galling to national leaders. Sensitivity to their backwardness, coupled with the appearance of new commercial elites, drove conservatives and liberals to reconcile their differences. For their part, conservatives became convinced that the masses would remain tractable. Having diversified their economic interests, they were no longer threatened by the freeing of national markets to international trade. Meanwhile, the liberals had softened their anticlericalism and had embraced the notion that social order demanded strong, even authoritarian rule. As Spanish America entered the twentieth century, peace springing from elite accommodation reigned everywhere in the region. The bourgeois calm prevailed in Brazil, too, where coffee-based prosperity and the positivist slogan "order and progress" united the new republic's political arbiters.

Latin America's social tranquility did not last past the first decade of the twentieth century. Economic progress had frequently been achieved at the expense of the rank and file, who continued to be, in overwhelming numbers, uneducated peasants having little or no voice in political affairs. Beginning in Mexico in 1910, where rural-based revolution destroyed the political establishment, Latin America woke abruptly from its premodern slumber. Economic change produced increased industrialization and urbanization, which gave rise to new social groups whose members demanded political representation. Their calls produced a plethora of new political parties, most of which employed radical, frequently revolutionary, messages to win constituents.

Conservative party leaders reacted to social and political change in several ways. Some, such as Colombia's Laureano Gómez Castro and Chile's Alberto Edwards Vives, resisted it; they based their political messages on a defense of elitist rule and attacks on liberalism and socialism alike. Elsewhere, in Ecuador, Peru, and Argentina, conservatives joined coalition movements or entered dominant political movements, such as Peru's APRA and Argentina's Peronist Party, coming to constitute right-wing factions in them.

In Nicaragua the Conservatives steadily lost ground to the Liberals over the course of the 1920s, prior to establishment of the Somoza dynasty (1933–1979). Throughout Somoza's regime the Conservative Party remained the leading official opposition in the country, although it splintered into several factions. In the upheavals of the late 1970s Conservatives, led by the editor of La Prensa, Pedro Joaquín Chamorro Cardenal, eventually joined with the Sandinistas to end the Somoza regime. The assassination of Chamorro on 10 January 1978 was a major catalyst in the popular uprising that brought an end to the dynasty.

Most Conservatives broke with the Marxist Sandinistas after 1979. Whereas some joined the CIA-backed Contras, most formed the nucleus of the opposition coalition within Nicaragua that eventually triumphed against the Sandinistas in the 1990 election, when Pedro Chamorro's widow, Violeta Barrios De Chamorro, was elected president.

The most significant conservative response to social change during the twentieth century lay in the formation of Christian Democratic parties. Young conservatives such as Eduardo Frei Montalva in Chile and Rafael Caldera Rodríguez in Venezuela rejected the authoritarianism of the extreme right, the threat to private property posed by the extreme left, and the secularism of doctrinaire liberals. They sought and found theoretical and practical inspiration for an alternative path to social change in the encyclical Rerum Novarum, issued by Pope Leo XIII in 1891 and commemorated by Pius XI forty years later in Quadragesimo Anno. For Frei and the others, Rerum Novarum showed Latin Americans a way of addressing social problems while remaining faithful to their oldest cultural value and moral precepts. In that regard the Christian Democrats remained squarely in the tradition of early-day conservatives such as Lucas Alamán, Mariano Ospina Rodríguez, and Gabriel García Moreno.

Through Christian Democracy, Latin American conservatives found they could embrace non-traditional, progressive solutions of social problems, all the while remaining steadfast in their fundamental political principles.

MODERN PARTY PLATFORMS

At the end of the twentieth century, Latin American conservative parties frequently won presidential elections on political platforms with populist, liberal, and even socialist overtones. Yet on close analysis, those platforms bore clear signs of their conservative character. Party platforms called for social reform within a nonrevolutionary context, whether articulated by Colombia's Social Con-servative Party; Ecuador's National Front conservative coalition, which bore Belisario Betancur and León Febres-cordero to victory during the 1980s; Nicaragua's anti-Somoza and later anti-Sandinista Conservative coalition; Costa Rica's Social Christian Unity Party; or Chile's Christian Democratic Party, whose leaders Rafael Calderón Guardia and Patricio Aylwin Azócar won national elections during the early 1990s. Those platforms stressed harmonious change on behalf of the "common good," a phrase, rooted in Roman Catholic social organicism conveying the belief that societies governed in accord with divine law are harmonious ones in which human beings enjoy justice of a distributive character. Modern conservative party platforms endorsed the notion that the social function of property takes precedence over its private function—a reversal of earlier conservatives' intransigent defense of the individual's right to private property.

A final, notable plank in modern conservative party platforms permitted them to support social order while opposing authoritarian or quasi-authoritarian forms of government. That opposition was justified through the principle of subsidiarity, which is rooted in corporatist theory and which holds that individuals and groups have a natural right to autonomy within the state. Mexico's Partido de Acción Nacional (PAN) bases its opposition to the hegemonic Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) on the principle of subsidiarity.

Late-twentieth-century conservative party politicians employed the idiom of religion, morality, and virtue, coupled with explicit or implicit condemnation of relativism, moral laxness, and the loss of ethical standards. In so doing they presented to their respective electorates a modern version of the historic conservative condemnation of secularism, which they blamed for the decline of public and private virtue. Whereas the left has had major presidential victories in Venezuela, Argentina, and Bolivia in the early twenty-first century, center-right parties continue to win important elections. In 2006 Felipe Calderón of the PAN won a very close race in Mexico, promising to maintain economic stability. Another conservative, Álvaro Uribe, who won Colombia's presidential race in 2002 and 2006, gained popularity by taking a strong stance against rebels.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Harold E. Davis touches on Conservative Party development in his Latin American Thought: A Historical Introduction (1972), as does James D. Henderson in Conservative Thought in Twentieth Century Latin America (1988). A useful anthology of writings by Latin American conservatives is Pensamiento conservador, 1815–1898 (1978), edited by José Luis Romero. Romero's El pensamiento político de la derecha latinoamericana (1970) stands as of 2007 as the only attempt to survey nineteenth-century Latin American conservatism. Harold E. Davis, Latin American Social Thought: The History of Its Development Since Independence, with Selected Readings (1963), contains samples of nineteenth- and twentieth-century conservative writing in English translation. The process of late-nineteenth-century conservative-liberal accommodation is treated in Charles A. Hale, "Political and Social Ideas, 1870–1930," in The Cambridge History of Latin America, vol. 4 (1986), edited by Leslie Bethel. Hale also deals extensively with conservative-liberal reconciliation in The Transformation of Liberalism in Late Nineteenth-Century Mexico (1989). Eduardo Frei Montalva, Aún es tiempo (1942), is an early statement of progressive conservativism. Venezuelan Christian Democratic leader Rafael Caldera suggests the progressive thrust of most modern conservative thought in his Ideario: La democracia cristiana en América Latina (1970). Heinrich A. Rommen, The State in Catholic Thought: A Treatise in Political Philosophy (1969), is an excellent starting point for those wishing to understand the ideological foundations of Latin American political conservatism, while Noël O'Sullivan, Conservatism (1976), treats the subject within the context of post-Enlightenment Western politics.

Additional Bibliography

Deutsch, Sandra McGee. Las Derechas: The Extreme Right in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, 1890–1939. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999.

Fowler, William, and Humberto Morales Moreno, eds. El conservadurismo mexicano en el siglo XIX. Puebla, Mexico: Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, 1999.

Middlebrook, Kevin J., ed. Conservative Parties, the Right, and Democracy in Latin America. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.

Pereira, Teresa. El Partido Conservador, 1930–1965: Ideas, figuras y actitudes. Santiago: Fundación Mario Góngora, 1994.

                                       James D. Henderson