Not so much criminals as the foundations of the rule of law -- that is what has infiltrated the United States from Latin America. That seems to be a major thread running through Greg Grandin's wonderful new history of the hemisphere, America, Ame'rica: A New History of the New World. It's a book you can dive back into repeatedly, not to mention fantasize about someone compacting it into a short slideshow for the benefit of the President of the United States.
British settler colonists in North America had their preachers and writers, but those individuals had a tendency to pretend Native Americans were not real, did not exist, perhaps never had existed, or simply didn't count for much on empty land, or didn't count because they were to be pushed out or eliminated rather than lived with. Spain, in contrast, generated a tremendous raging debate between supporters and denouncers of its killing, robbery, theft, enslavement, and terrorizing of indigenous people. Spain broke new ground, according to Grandin, in producing criticism of its own atrocities as it conquered South America.
In very rough terms this is similar to the contrast between U.S. media noncoverage of the genocide in Gaza and Israeli media's inclusion of denunciations of the same. It's one thing to live where you can't escape drunk country musicians singing about being free, and perhaps something else to live where you can hear voices saying some of the things that most need saying. In both cases, the brutal atrocities go on, but in one there are seeds of some future change planted.
Voices like those of Francisco de Vitoria and Bartolome' de Las Casas laid foundations for modern international law, but did so very differently from Dutch and English writers. The Spanish tradition is at least as tied up in religion as the English, and has certainly needed to evolve during these past four or five hundred years. But Grandin identifies a basis for a future pluralistic society even in the belief that populations were diverse yet all descended from Adam and Eve. One can also, I think, see in the tradition of public confessions something of a precursor of truth and reconciliation commissions. In Latin America, unlike the North, dying conquistadores in the sixteenth century commonly confessed their part in the Conquest and paid restitution. NB: They did not admit to having strayed from proper conquest behavior into illicit atrocities. Rather, they admitted to participation in a Conquest understood to have been wrong and evil in its totality.
Seen from a perspective that includes Latin America, Las Casas -- who went beyond Erasmus, Moore, or anybody else -- begins to look like the father of international legal standards applied equally to all of humanity, not to mention of self-determination and governance by the consent of the governed. He got there first. He drew the logical conclusions, such as the abolition of slavery. And he acted on those conclusions to as great an extent and for as long as perhaps any other person who has lived.
The world was not, even in the seventeenth century, strictly separated into different legal traditions. The English read Las Casas, but they often read him with an eye to understanding how evil the Spanish were in contrast to the English, or in order to get ideas for how to themselves be more evil toward the Irish. Perhaps they could have read him more in order to do as Las Casas recommended, more in order to outgrow dehumanization and division. Defining certain people as not really people was a skill that increased in English culture as colonization and slavery expanded.
Hugo Grotius read Vitoria, but -- like Aquinas before him and like all "just war" theory -- Grotius was after excuses for wars. War might be regulated, but not banned. John Locke drew heavily on Spanish writers like Juan de Mariana and Jose' de Acosta, but he reached his own conclusions, including that land could be taken from anyone not farming it. For a great many years, Spanish writers denounced war and slavery as parts of the Conquest, whereas Locke, Smith, Hume, et alia, at best wrote rules to regulate such evils as war and slavery, leaving us to this day with a culture that hardly murmurs about the crime of war but chatters endlessly about "possible war crimes" -- almost always only mysteriously "possible," never verified.
Francisco de Miranda (1750-1816) and Simà à ï ? ? à ? ï ? ? ï ? ? à ? ï ? ? ï ? ?n Bolà à ? ï ? ? ï ? ? à ï ? ? à ? ï ? ? ï ? ? à ? ï ? ? ï ? ? à ï ? ? à ? ï ? ? ï ? ? à ? ï ? ? ï ? ?var (1783-1830) sought a confederacy of independent nations in Latin America. The United States served as a partial inspiration but was not of much actual help. Thomas Jefferson's house, just down the road from mine, had numerous books by Las Casas and other Spanish writers in it, yet he flipped their views upside down, declaring that "white" nations had the right to control non-white peoples in lands they claimed and to deny access to other "white" nations. He called this "a kind of international law for America." The United States has sought its own unique "international law" from that day to this.
The Doctrine of Discovery -- the idea that a European nation can claim any land not yet claimed by other European nations, regardless of what people already live there -- dates back to the fifteenth century and the Catholic church, but it was put into U.S. law in 1823, the same year as Monroe's fateful "Doctrine" speech. It was put there by Monroe's lifelong friend, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall. The United States considered itself, perhaps alone outside of Europe, as possessing the same discovery privileges as European nations. Perhaps coincidentally, in December 2022 almost every nation on Earth signed an agreement to set aside 30% of the Earth's land and sea for wildlife by the year 2030. The exceptions were only the United States and the Vatican, not the nations of Latin America.
While the U.S. had broken free of British rule, and thereby rid itself of a mother country moving rapidly toward the abolition of slavery, movements for independence from Spain in South America generally sought freedom from slavery as well as from foreign empire. The U.S. tradition of slave-owners like Patrick Henry making speeches about being metaphorically enslaved was a northern hypocrisy where revolution was a rich man's game. Moves for independence in the south were to some extent more of a popular revolt. They were, at the very least, not a revolt to maintain slavery or to expand empire, and not to combine numerous colonies into one, at least not immediately. Rather, Bolivarianism amounted to a push to create simultaneously several free and independent nations, some through violence and some without it. By the early nineteenth century, there were nine of them, newly independent, or 10 counting Haiti.
Latin America was not yet called Latin America and was not some sort of flawless paradise. Wealth extremes (greater than in the U.S. of that day, though not than the U.S. of this day) and all kinds of cruelty persisted. But, not only was slavery being abolished, but something else of great potential was being created. Numerous new nations jointly developed means of nonviolently, legalistically, arbitrating boundary disputes -- dealing nation to nation as equals and not enemies.
Bolivar proposed a Congress in Panama among sister nations that would
- agree to mutual defense,
- condemn Spain for the suffering it had caused in the New World (has the U.S. done that yet with regard to England?),
- promote the independence of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Canary Islands, and the Philippines (the U.S. was supporting Spanish rule over Cuba as more likely to lead to later U.S. rule over Cuba),
- repudiate the doctrines of discovery and conquest,
- abolish slavery,
- recognize Haiti, and
- legalize agreed upon borders.
Here we see an early version of the League of Nations or the United Nations just beginning to come into being.
Slavery had already been ended -- and without a horrific U.S.-style Civil War -- in Chile, Bolivia, and parts of Mexico. Central America ended it in 1824. Colombia and Venezuela were ending it, but it persisted in Peru and Brazil.
In taking up such matters of domestic policy at an international gathering like the Panama Congress of 1826, something else -- another grave evil in the world, one that afflicts the United States -- was being prevented from ever being born in Latin America. This evil is the passionate aversion to anyone outside a nation having any say over what that nation does. When you read the Constitutions of various European nations today that describe transferring power to international institutions, you can just feel the veins bursting in the faces of outraged U.S. politicians. In 1826, vicious fury burst forth at the very idea that the United States would send anyone to a Congress in Panama to sit with potentially non-white people to decide anything about the sacred U.S. right to enslave human beings. In the words of Grandin, this "jolted the Age of Jackson into existence." It hasn't let up much since. The U.S. would later reject a League of Nations as one among equals and only join a United Nations over which it held a veto.
By 1844, Latin American statesmen had been working on theories and plans for international law for decades, and Juan Bautista Alberdi gave the name "American International Law" to a set of principles that included rejection of the doctrines of discovery and conquest, equality of nations despite their size, non-intervention, usi possidetis, and impartial arbitration. Alberdi also wrote a book in 1870, available free online in English, called The Crime of War. This is a book filled with hundreds of pages arguing almost the identical arguments that war abolitionists use today. It's an outlawry book a half century before the movement to outlaw war. It's a book making the case for neutrality (see page 262) perhaps a century before the power of neutrality was widely appreciated and a 150 years before it disastrously ceased to be. Latin American nations continued for years to push such a vision on the United States.
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