How the Iberian Colonial System crippled Latin America

They came not as founders but as harvesters of other men’s fields. Across the horizon of the New World, the white sails of Castile and Portugal carried more than explorers. They carried contracts from kings, blessings from popes, and a hunger that would not end until the land itself was bled dry. They brought no charter for a free people, no plan for towns and assemblies. They came with ledgers, swords, and the sign of the cross bound to the crown to turn continents into royal treasuries.

In Potosí’s silver veins and Brazil’s sugar plantations, the Iberian pattern was set: take all that could be taken, ship it home, and leave nothing behind but a shell. The Treaty of Tordesillas had divided the New World between them, and with papal sanction they set about dividing its people into laborers, converts, and corpses. This was not colonization in the name of civilization. It was extracted in the name of the empire.

From birth, Latin America’s institutions were designed to obey, not to govern. Authority belonged to viceroys, bishops, and captains, not to citizens. Wealth flowed upward into the hands of a few families, while the masses lived under the twin guardians of altar and saber. Independence changed the uniforms but not the order. The generals replaced the governors, the priests remained at the heart of power, and the people were still spectators in their own destiny.

The chains forged in the sixteenth century were more than iron. They were habits, hierarchies, and a view of the world that placed the many beneath the few. That colonial poison still runs in the veins of Latin America today, shaping its politics, its economics, and its spirit. The task of the present is to name that inheritance for what it is and to see whether the chains can finally be broken.

The Spanish and Portuguese empires did not come to the Americas to plant the seeds of self-government. They came to reap the riches of lands already cultivated, mined, and inhabited. From the first expeditions, the crown’s orders were clear: secure the gold, secure the silver, secure the souls. The conquest was as much a business venture as it was a holy war.

To make the land yield what the crown demanded, the Spanish perfected the encomienda system. Under this arrangement, conquistadors and colonial elites were granted the “right” to the labor and tribute of indigenous communities in exchange for a nominal promise to provide protection and Christian instruction. In practice, it was slavery under another name. The encomienda bound entire villages to their appointed master, stripping them of freedom and forcing them to work mines, fields, and workshops.

In the high Andes, this system took on a specific and even more lethal form: the mita. The Inca had used a rotational labor draft for public works, but the Spaniards twisted it into a mechanism for mass death. Now it was not building roads or temples that the draft served, but feeding the silver mines of Potosí. Entire communities were forced to send a set quota of men for mine labor, often hundreds of miles from home. The conditions underground were so brutal that life expectancy was measured in months, and whole generations of Andean people were crippled or killed in the process.

On the coasts and in the lowlands, Portuguese and Spanish planters carved the land into vast estates where African slaves and native workers harvested sugar, cacao, and coffee for shipment overseas. The Iberian model was never about building balanced economies or fostering self-reliance. It was about monoculture and monopoly. Madrid and Lisbon dictated what could be grown, mined, or manufactured, and who could profit from it. All trade flowed through the crown’s appointed merchants, guarded by fleets of warships to keep out competitors. Colonies were not even allowed to trade freely with each other; the empire’s wealth had to move along the narrow arteries back to Europe.

Every layer of colonial society was built to serve this extraction. Governors, viceroys, and audiencia judges were appointed from Spain or Portugal and served at the pleasure of the crown. No local legislature could overrule them. Even the Church’s sprawling network of missions, parishes, and monasteries doubled as agents of economic control, collecting tithes, holding vast tracts of land, and enforcing loyalty to the imperial order.

This was not colonization in the sense of building new societies. It was the deliberate construction of a machine whose only purpose was to drain the land and its people for the benefit of a distant capital. The blueprint they left behind ensured that when independence came, it would not sweep away the old order. It would simply place the levers of the machine into new hands.

In the Spanish and Portuguese Americas, the Catholic Church was not merely a moral guide. It was a co-ruler of the colonies, bound to the crown through the Patronato Real, a legal arrangement granting the monarchs power to appoint bishops, control ecclesiastical revenues, and direct missionary work. Faith and empire were fused into a single machine, and from the moment the first mission bells rang, the gospel was preached with the authority of the king.

The Church’s mission was to convert, but conversion was inseparable from governance. Baptism was not only a sacrament but a political act, making the convert a subject of the crown, liable for tribute, labor drafts, and obedience to colonial law. Priests served as census takers, tax collectors, and intermediaries between indigenous communities and imperial authorities. In this way, they became both shepherds and overseers, blending spiritual guidance with administrative control.

Economically, the Church was a giant. Monasteries, convents, and dioceses owned vast haciendas, cultivated by peons bound by debt or custom. The Jesuit reducciones of Paraguay and the Franciscan missions of California were not only centers of evangelization but also highly organized production systems, harvesting crops, raising livestock, and manufacturing goods for the colonial market. In many towns, the Church was the single largest landowner, with wealth rivaling that of the crown.

Religious authority was inseparable from political power. Bishops sat on colonial councils, advised governors, and could turn excommunication into a political weapon. The Inquisition extended its reach into the Americas, punishing not only heresy but also sedition and resistance to the social order. For indigenous and African peoples, defying the Church’s authority invited both spiritual condemnation and corporal punishment.

Independence did not dissolve this power. In many new republics, constitutions were written under the Church’s influence, declaring Catholicism the state religion. Priests still blessed armies, counseled presidents, and resisted secular reforms. Well into the twentieth century, the Church remained a guardian of the old order, ensuring that the hierarchy forged in the sixteenth century endured under new flags. The altar had outlived the crown, but together they had shaped the very foundations of Latin American society.

If the Church was the soul of colonial rule, the military was its iron hand. In the Spanish and Portuguese Americas, armies were not simply instruments of defense. They were the enforcers of the social order, protecting the crown’s authority, guarding the mines and estates, and suppressing any spark of dissent. The officer corps was appointed from Europe, trained in Iberian traditions of centralized command, and loyal first to Madrid or Lisbon, not to the lands they occupied.

The army’s presence was constant and visible. Fortresses lined the ports, protecting the fleets that carried silver, sugar, and slaves to Europe. Garrisons watched over the roads and guarded against indigenous uprisings. Soldiers marched into villages to collect tribute, enforce labor drafts, and ensure the uninterrupted flow of wealth to the crown. The saber was the final guarantor of the altar’s dominion.

When the independence movements erupted in the early nineteenth century, it was military men who took command. Simón Bolívar in the north, José de San Martín in the south, Bernardo O’Higgins in Chile, and countless others were generals before they were statesmen. They liberated their nations with bayonets, and in doing so, they ensured that the new republics were born in the barracks.

The early republics did not inherit civilian traditions of governance. Instead, they fell quickly under the sway of caudillos—strongmen whose authority rested on personal charisma, battlefield reputation, and loyalty from the officer corps. Figures like Juan Manuel de Rosas in Argentina and Antonio López de Santa Anna in Mexico ruled as if the country were their private estate, using patronage and fear to maintain control. Coups became a normal tool of politics, and constitutions were rewritten or ignored to suit the will of the man in uniform.

The caudillo system recreated the colonial hierarchy in a new form. Wealthy landowners and military officers formed a tight alliance to dominate politics, while the rural poor remained voiceless. Legislatures, when allowed to exist, were often ceremonial, dependent on the goodwill of the strongman. The Church, for its part, often blessed these regimes, casting them as defenders of order and faith.

By the twentieth century, Latin America’s political landscape was still shaped by this tradition. Military juntas and dictatorships replaced viceroys, justifying their rule as necessary to preserve order or combat foreign ideologies. In truth, they were the heirs of the colonial garrison state. For centuries, political power in Latin America flowed not from the ballot box but from the barrel of a gun and this ensured that the people were never taught the habits of self-government.

In the centuries of Iberian rule, there was no schoolhouse for liberty in Latin America. In the British colonies of North America, settlers built town halls and held local assemblies, electing representatives to voice their concerns. They served on juries, debated taxes, and learned the habits of self-rule long before independence. In the Spanish and Portuguese Americas, no such tradition took root. Power flowed from the top down, and the common man’s role was to obey, not to govern.

Colonial law made no provision for representative institutions beyond the cabildos  municipal councils that were dominated by the local elite and answered to the crown’s viceroys. Ordinary citizens had no meaningful way to shape policy. Education, where it existed at all, was designed to produce clerics, lawyers, and administrators loyal to the existing order, not citizens trained in the arts of debate and civic responsibility. Literacy itself was a privilege of the upper classes, leaving the vast majority of the population politically mute.

Even after independence, the habits of participation did not emerge. The caudillos and oligarchs who replaced the viceroys had no interest in sharing power, and the Church often reinforced the idea that hierarchy was natural and divinely ordained. Attempts at constitutional government frequently collapsed under the weight of factionalism, coups, and foreign intervention. The idea that the government should be accountable to the people was rarely put into practice, and when it was, it was often short-lived.

The absence of civic institutions meant that the people were unprepared to defend their rights when threatened. Without the reflex of local self-government, communities relied on patrons, generals, or priests to speak on their behalf. This fostered a culture of dependency rather than participation, where loyalty to a strongman was valued more than loyalty to a constitution.

In contrast, the Anglo-American tradition of self-rule had built a citizenry accustomed to exercising political power, capable of resisting central authority, and able to replace leaders without violence. In Latin America, where the colonial blueprint had left no such foundation, the republics stood on sand. They had flags, anthems, and constitutions, but they lacked the lived experience of liberty that gives such symbols meaning.

This was the quietest yet most enduring legacy of Iberian colonialism: not simply that wealth and power remained in the hands of the few, but that the many were never taught to rule themselves. Without that civic muscle, the same patterns of domination that had been set in the sixteenth century could reproduce themselves under any banner.

The political chains of Iberian rule were matched by economic ones. Spain and Portugal never intended to build self-sufficient societies in the Americas. They built supply zones for the empire, vast storehouses of silver, sugar, and other commodities meant to enrich the crown and its merchants. Land, labor, and trade were all organized to feed Europe’s appetite, and when the flags of Spain and Portugal came down, the machinery they had built kept running under new masters.

The backbone of this system was the great estate: the latifundio in Spanish America and the latifúndio in Brazil. These enormous holdings, granted to conquistadors, royal favorites, and the Church, covered millions of acres. They were worked by a captive labor force, peons, sharecroppers, and in Brazil, African slaves, who had no hope of owning the land they farmed. Debt, illiteracy, and legal barriers bound them as securely as chains.

The economy was designed for monoculture and extraction. From Potosí’s silver mines in Bolivia to the sugar mills of Pernambuco, from Venezuelan cacao to Colombian coffee, each region was locked into producing one or two goods dictated by European demand. Such narrow specialization created wealth for a few but left entire provinces at the mercy of harvest failures, market crashes, or the exhaustion of resources.

Colonial trade law made the colonies economic prisoners. Madrid and Lisbon forbade manufacturing that might compete with Europe, forcing even basic goods to be imported. Colonies could not trade freely with each other; everything had to flow through approved ports and official merchants. After independence, the walls came down, but not for the benefit of the people. British traders and bankers quickly stepped in to fill the role once held by Iberian monopolists. By the late nineteenth century, American capital joined them, financing railroads, mines, and plantations designed to export wealth abroad, not unite the nation or enrich its people.

Foreign-built railways were the perfect symbol of this arrangement. In Argentina, British lines ran from cattle ranches to Buenos Aires ports, bypassing towns that might have become centers of local industry. In Peru and Brazil, lines linked mines and plantations to the coast, while the interior remained underdeveloped. Infrastructure served exports, not citizens.

Land reform was rare and violently resisted. The descendants of colonial landowners often held their estates well into the twentieth century, dominating politics as well as the economy. Without land, the rural poor remained tied to the same work their ancestors had done under the crown.

This economic order reinforced the political hierarchy. Concentrated wealth meant concentrated power, and dependency on foreign markets left nations vulnerable to pressure, debt traps, and intervention. Just as in the colonial era, the wealth of the land flowed upward into the hands of the few and outward across the sea. For the majority, the republic brought new flags but the same hunger.

The legacy of the colonial economy was more than poverty. It was a worldview that taught the people they were laborers for someone else’s benefit, not co-owners of their nation’s future. Without economic independence, political independence was a shell, and the chains of empire remained, even if they were no longer gilded with the crown’s seal.

The centuries-old structures of Iberian rule did not vanish with independence. They changed their colors and banners, but their design endured. The altar and the saber still stand, their robes and uniforms altered to match the times. The economic machinery still hums, though the silver ships now sail under corporate flags instead of royal standards. The colonial poison still courses through the political and social bloodstream of Latin America, shaping every generation since the sixteenth century.

Inequality remains as deep as it was under the crown. In countries from Brazil to Honduras, a narrow elite controls the majority of wealth and land. Oxfam estimates that the richest ten percent of Latin Americans hold over seventy percent of the region’s wealth. This is the old latifundio order in modern dress, where power rests in the hands of a few families whose names have echoed through centuries. Just as in the colonial era, the vast majority work to serve the prosperity of a small class, and reforms are either diluted, delayed, or dismantled to protect elite privilege.

The saber still casts its shadow. Coups d’état, once the tool of nineteenth-century caudillos, have never truly left the stage. From the military dictatorships of Chile and Argentina in the 1970s to the ouster of Bolivia’s president in 2019, the army still claims the right to intervene “for the good of the nation.” This is the same paternal logic that justified colonial garrisons: the people cannot be trusted to govern without the watchful eye of the soldier.

The altar, too, retains its influence. In some countries, the Catholic Church still shapes law and policy on education, marriage, and morality. In others, the rapid rise of evangelical Protestantism has created new religious-political alliances. In both cases, the colonial precedent of blending spiritual authority with political power remains intact, as it did under the Patronato Real. The priest may have changed his vestments, but his seat in the halls of power endures.

Economic dependency, the lifeblood of the empire, is equally unchanged. Today the silver of Potosí is replaced by copper from Chile, soy from Brazil, and oil from Venezuela, but the pattern is the same: raw goods leave, manufactured goods arrive, and wealth flows outward. International lenders, corporate boards, and foreign investors have replaced the royal treasuries of Madrid and Lisbon, but the drain continues.

Beneath all of this lies the most enduring legacy of all: a political culture that sees authority as something bestowed from above rather than built from below. The colonial blueprint taught that power belongs to generals, priests, and landowners, not to citizens. This lesson, repeated over centuries, has become a habit  , a reflex that reasserts itself whenever crisis strikes.

Latin America was born in chains, and those chains were not only forged of iron. They were made of habits, hierarchies, and expectations passed from generation to generation. They were cast in the mines of Potosí, hardened on the plantations of Pernambuco, blessed in cathedral aisles, and enforced in the barracks. Until they are broken at their roots, the continent will remain haunted by the empire that gave it birth.

From the first sight of Iberian sails on the horizon, Latin America’s course was set. Spain and Portugal came not to build free nations but to construct engines of extraction, drawing silver from Potosí, sugar from Pernambuco, and tribute from the forced labor of millions. They created a hierarchy where the altar blessed the saber, where power flowed from the crown, where wealth pooled in the hands of a few, and where the many were taught only to serve.

Independence changed the flags but not the framework. The latifundio still dominated the countryside, the army still stood as the final arbiter of politics, and the Church still moved in step with the state. Foreign merchants and financiers simply replaced the royal treasuries, ensuring the flow of wealth outward. The political culture remained centralized and hierarchical, modeled on the viceroyalty rather than the village council.

This legacy was not only institutional but cultural. Centuries of rule from above fostered a reflex to seek authority in patrons, generals, or priests. The exclusion of the majority from governance meant that when constitutions were introduced, they rested on populations denied both the habit and the right of civic participation. Economies built on monoculture and export dependency reinforced the dominance of landowners and merchants, tying prosperity to foreign markets and leaving nations vulnerable to external pressures.

The colonial poison still runs in the veins of Latin America because it was built into the very bones of its society. Concentrated land ownership, economic dependency, the fusion of religious and political authority, and the military’s role as guardian of order are not merely remnants of the past; they are the structural pillars of the present. They have survived revolutions, republics, dictatorships, and democratic experiments, changing their outward form while preserving their essence.

Latin America was born in chains, and those chains were forged from law, land, faith, and force. They have endured because they were designed to endure, built not for the flourishing of nations but for the service of the empire. It is in this continuity, unbroken for centuries, that the reason for the region’s enduring condition is found.