South America

PAGE CONTENTS:

Rise and Fall of the Inca Sun

Brazil

Ecuador

Venezuela

Rise and Fall of the Inca Sun

by Steve Sampson

Today, Cusco is a Peruvian city of 300,000. But five centuries ago, it was the capital of the Inca Empire, and the Incas worshipped the sun. How did the sun-worshipping Inca Empire rise and fall?

Think "Inca" and you likely think "ancient." But the "ancient Inca" weren't all that far back. The first Inca rulers emerged in Cusco during Europe's Middle Ages. And their empire didn't really get rolling until the early 15th century--just 100 years before the Spanish arrived in South America.

In the course of those 100 years, the Incas built an empire that stretched all the way Ecuador to central Chile--about as long as the stretch between New York and Panama. Yet their empire collapsed as quickly as it was built.

The origins of the Inca--who had no writing system--are shrouded in myth. According to one, the first Inca emperor, Manco Capac, arose from a hole in the ground, married his sister, and established himself and his clan around Cusco. According to another, the sun god Inti ordered Manco Capac and his sister/wife to rise up from the depths of Lake Titicaca, on the Peru-Bolivia border.

In any case, Inca kings traced their lineage back to Manco Capac--and through him to the sun god--and sought to extend their influence beyond Cusco. At first, they simply raided and plundered neighboring kingdoms. Later, they began garrisoning troops in strategic spots and appointing Inca officials to administer "foreign" lands. But none of these were more than a few dozen miles from home.

Around 1438, a new Inca king--Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui--began a rapid imperial expansion. Using military might and diplomatic skill, Pachacuti (meaning "world-shaker") brought much of the Andes mountain range under Inca control. He conquered some rivals, bought fealty from others, and convinced many that resistance was futile. Recalcitrants faced forced resettlement.

Pachacuti's son, Topa Inca Yupanqui, followed in his father's footsteps, conquering new lands in Bolivia and Chile. He also developed a classification system for administering the Inca Empire. Basically, the adult male population was divided into various groups, ranging in size from 100 to 10,000. The groups were then used to divvy up labor and military service.

The Inca didn't demand tribute payments, but they did exact a labor tax known as "mit'a." Under the system, a portion of the peasantry's energies went to public works--from farming, to soldiering, to building and maintaining the system of roads, bridges, and storehouses that connected the empire.

Topa's successor, Huayna Capac, took over around 1493 and kept the empire rolling after the Spanish arrived in South America. Huayna never met the Spanish, but he likely died from one of their diseases. Around 1525, an epidemic struck Cusco--probably either smallpox or measles, relayed from the Spanish by raiders attacking Inca settlements. Huayana and his heir both succumbed.

That led to a succession struggle between two of the emperor's remaining sons: Atahuallpa and Huascar. Atahuallpa's forces captured Huascar, but not before civil war and disease had weakened the empire. Fresh from his victory, Atahuallpa accepted an invite from Francisco Pizarro--newly arrived in Peru with about 180 Spaniards--to attend a feast in his honor. It was an ambush. They kidnapped the Inca emperor and refused to release him even after he raised a massive ransom--24 tons of gold and silver.

When Atahuallpa's supporters killed Huascar, the Spanish used it as an excuse to kill Atahuallpa. The Inca, who at first saw Pizarro as a possible incarnation of one of their gods, soon recognized the Spanish as a threat to the empire. In 1535, a new emperor, Manco Inca, attacked. But the Spanish prevailed, and Manco retreated to a mountainous region outside Cusco. There he established a small Inca state that survived until 1572. Today, 10 million South Americans still speak the Inca language and follow Inca customs.

Steve Sampson
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Brazil

Brazil isn't just sandy beaches, burgeoning cities, and Amazonian jungles. It's the world's fifth largest nation, in both land and people, and has one of the world's ten largest economies.

Scholars don't know much about Brazil's history prior to the arrival of the Portuguese in the 16th century. In fact, long after Portuguese traders set up shop along the coast, vast stretches of Brazil's interior remained terra incognito.

As many as 6 million native people may have lived between the Atlantic and the Andes in 1500. But many were hunters and gatherers, and didn't leave written records. Still, we know that hundreds of indigenous groups called what's now Brazil home. Naturally, some got along better than others, and the conquering Portuguese exploited the rifts.

At first, the Portuguese were more interested in maritime commerce than colonization. They set up trading posts along the coast where ships could load up on "brazilwood," a prized type of hardwood. Eventually, the wood lent its name to the place. But it wasn't long before Brazil began exporting another cash crop: sugar.

European hunger for the sweet stuff fed the growth of a slave-powered plantation economy. Planters first enslaved the native peoples, who died in droves. Then they imported enslaved Africans. Before long, a small white minority controlled a much larger non-white population. The number of mixed-race people began to swell, and the colony's boundaries crept inland, even as the sugar economy soured.

Around 1700, news of gold in the Brazilian hills triggered a rush to mine the shiny stuff, which became a new key export. Two decades later, diamond discoveries fired more prospectors' dreams and helped drive the Portuguese across the continent, until they reached (more or less) the current boundaries of Brazil. As Brazil became a better-defined place, it began to drift away from mother Portugal.

Back in Europe, Napoleon Bonaparte's armies invaded Portugal in 1807, prompting the Portuguese royal family to sail for Brazil. They came to Rio de Janeiro, which became the only New World capital of an Old World empire. In 1821, the king returned to Portugal. But his son, Pedro, stayed on in Brazil as prince regent. He declared Brazil independent in 1822 and became Emperor Pedro I.

Like father, like son. In 1831, Pedro I abdicated in the face of mounting opposition and returned to Portugal, leaving his own son, five-year-old Pedro II, behind. A council of regents ran the country until 1840, when the teenaged emperor officially took the throne. Around the same time, Brazil began to cultivate a new cash crop: coffee.

The caffeinated stuff would buzz--and sometimes crash--the Brazilian economy for nearly 100 years (Brazil is still the world's leading coffee exporter). Pedro II would remain on the throne for almost 50 years, until an 1889 coup sent him packing to Portugal. Republican forces then assumed control of the country, crafted a new constitution, and restyled their nation "the United States of Brazil."

Brazil finally abolished slavery in 1888, just a year before republic-minded military men abolished its monarchy. Obviously, change was on the march. But it wasn't marching as quickly as you might think.

In 1894, the coup's military leaders gave power to civilians--but only a few of them. Voting restrictions barred most folks from the polls, and rich coffee producers built political machines that controlled elections for decades, until the Great Depression crashed the coffee economy.

In 1930, a burgeoning opposition, led by Getúlio Vargas, overthrew the last president minted by the old political machines. Vargas then set out to turn Brazil into a highly centralized Estado Novo ("New State"). He ruled first as head of a provisional government (1930-34), then as appointed president (1934-37), then as dictator (1937-45).

During World War II, Vargas built up industries with U.S. support and sent troops to fight fascists in Europe--even as he ruled dictatorially at home. He also instituted a variety of social welfare programs, from minimum wages to pensions.

The army forced Vargas to resign in 1945, but he won the presidency back in a 1950 election. When the army threatened to overthrow him again in 1954, Vargas committed suicide in the presidential palace.

Meanwhile, Brazil continued to modernize. The next elected president, Juscelino Kubitschek, founded a new capital city, Brasilia, in 1960. (It's now home to more than 2 million people.) He also printed as much money as he needed to build roads and power plants and to fund industrial development projects. Inflation, already a problem, worsened.

Kubitschek's successors failed to fix Brazil's finances, and by 1964, the economy was in trouble. With a crisis looming, and the Cold War at its height, anti-communist military leaders seized power in another coup.

The bad news: they used brutal tactics to silence opposition and root out "undesirables." The good news: Brazil was blessed with its "economic miracle" at the same time. The economy boomed at record rates until the mid-1970s, when the price of oil shot up worldwide. As the economy cooled, the regime began a process of abertura ("opening").

By the early 1980s, Brazil again faced fearsome financial problems, including huge foreign debt and spiraling inflation. Opposition to the regime mounted and eventually brought it down. In 1985, Brazilians got their first civilian president in 20 years. In 1986, they got a new constitution. And in 1989, they got to vote in a direct presidential election--most for the very first time.

Unfortunately, the man they elected proved corrupt and wound up impeached. Thankfully, his vice president succeeded him legally and peacefully. Then, in 1993, a man with an economic plan--Fernando Henrique Cardoso--became finance minister. Under Cardoso's "Real Plan," Brazil instituted a new currency (the real) and took steps to put its financial house in order. The inflation rate tumbled, the economy expanded, and Cardoso became Brazil's next president.

The nation faced another financial crisis in the late 1990s, but its developing democracy survived. After the 2002 presidential race, President Cardoso peacefully transferred power to a political adversary, Luis Inácio Lula da Silva (a.k.a. "Lula"), who won reelection in 2006. Of course, Brazil still faces plenty of problems--from extreme social inequality to deforestation to government corruption--but it also enjoys real hope for the future.

--Steve Sampson

Ecuador

We're looking back at the heated equatorial nation's political past, from the era of the Incas on.

Small, independent states warred back and forth in Ecuador from the 14th to the late 15th century--until the Inca Empire came calling from what's now Peru. By 1500, the Incas had made Ecuador's capital, Quito, their regional capital.

Yet some tribes resisted--or at least resented--Inca rule. When the Spanish arrived in 1534, some locals actually welcomed them as liberators. Others fought them as invaders. Either way, they wound up as Spanish colonial subjects for the next 300 years. To add injury to insult, European diseases, notably measles and smallpox, killed countless native people.

Still, not all of Ecuador was equally exploited. Spanish control was strongest in the central Andean highlands, called the Sierra, including the area around Quito. It was weaker along the Pacific coast, the Costa, where the port city of Guayaquil grew. It was nonexistent in the eastern Amazonian jungles. (The Galapagos Islands, modern Ecuador's other main ecological region, were uninhabited.)

Independence from Spain came in 1822. For the next eight years, Ecuador was part of Gran Colombia, a confederacy that included Colombia and Venezuela.

Then, in 1830, Ecuador seceded and became an independent republic. Already, a rivalry had begun to develop between the Sierra city, Quito, and the Costa port, Guayaquil. Conservative Quito was home to the old landed aristocracy. Wealthy merchants controlled cosmopolitan Guayaquil. Two men, one based in each city, dominated the republic's early years and basically took turns running its government: Quito's Juan José Flores and Guayaquil's Vicente Rocafuerte.

Though rivals, Flores and Rocafuerte also managed to cooperate. After they were gone, Ecuador struggled through a chaotic period until a caudillo (or "strongman") named Gabriel García Moreno took control in 1860.

Staunchly conservative, García Moreno brooked no opposition either to his personal authority or to the authority of the Catholic church. Reasonably effective, he also managed to increase agricultural production and to build roads, schools, and hospitals.

His assassination in 1875 prompted more political chaos. Luckily, Ecuador's economy was caffeinated by booming coffee exports. The boom especially benefited Guayaquil, home of the liberal opposition to García Moreno's conservative successors.

In the late 1890s, a liberal caudillo from the coast, Eloy Alfaro, assumed control. Alfaro and his fellow liberals endeavored to drive a wedge between (Catholic) church and state. They also instituted freedom of the press and other civic reforms. Yet their efforts did little to change the lives of poor peasants and Indians. Alfaro was eventually imprisoned, then burned by a lynch mob in 1912.

After a brief economic upturn during World War I, conditions in Ecuador got bad and stayed that way for decades. The 1920s brought a depression followed by an army coup that changed little more than the names on the government stationery. The 1930s brought the Great Depression, which spoiled Ecuador's agricultural export business. (For a time, it was the world's leading banana exporter.)

The 1940s brought World War II. Ecuador sided with the United States and its allies. But in 1941, while those allies were busy fighting elsewhere, Peru invaded Ecuador and seized Amazonian lands that the two nations had been arguing about for more than a century.

From the end of the war until the 1970s, the most colorful character in Ecuadorian politics was José Maria Velasco Ibarra, who served as president five times but completed only one of his terms. The periods between Velasco Ibarra presidencies generally produced little progress--since Velasco Ibarra regularly reversed programs he didn't start (and sometimes reversed his own to boot).

During the 1970s, an oil boom lifted Ecuador's prospects, and the country became Latin America's second largest exporter (after Venezuela). For the poor, however, the oil boom proved a bust--bringing little reform and much inflation. Then, when the price of oil dropped in the 1980s, so did Ecuador's economy. The nation's finances and federal government have been on a roller-coaster ride practically ever since.

--Steve Sampson

Venezuela

Christopher Columbus set foot in Venezuela way back in 1498. It was his first step onto South America. But, as was often the case, the great explorer wasn't sure where he was. Thinking he had found an island, he called it "Isla Santa."

A new name arrived the following year, when a Spanish expedition led by Alonso de Ojeda and Amerigo Vespucci came upon Lake Maracaibo--South America's largest. Native huts around the lake reminded Vespucci of Venice, so they called the place "Venezuela," or Little Venice.

Of course, the Spanish didn't come for gondola rides. What appealed most about Venezuela, at first, were the pearls the natives wore--along with fables of El Dorado, the legendary city of gold. When the oyster beds were depleted and El Dorado proved chimerical, the Spanish started harvesting people, enslaving indigenous Venezuelans for work elsewhere.

Not surprisingly, the native Venezuelans resented the Spanish slavers, and put up plenty of resistance. For their part, the conquistadors were too busy digging for gold to go to war in any serious way against violent Venezuelans. Over time, a European colony developed, built mostly around cocoa exporting. Yet much of what is now Venezuela remained terra incognita to its Spanish overlords.

Spain's lack of interest in Venezuela eventually helped make it a hotbed of revolutionary activity. In 1810, Venezuela became the first Spanish colony to formally declare its independence. It also gave South America its greatest revolutionary hero, Simón Bolivar, known as "The Liberator."

Bolivar wanted to liberate Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia to build a unified South American nation. In 1821, his forces seized Venezuela from the Spanish for good. While Bolivar kept fighting for his vision of "Gran Colombia," however, other Venezuelans pursued more local goals. Before Bolivar's death in 1830, General José Antonio Páez, Venezuela's first caudillo ("strongman"), had assumed control in the capital, Caracas.

In the years after Bolivar, Venezuelan farmers shifted to a new cash crop--coffee--and quickly got addicted. The country enjoyed a coffee-induced economic high for most of the 1830s, before tumbling prices brought an economic hangover, and political changes, the following decade.

So it would go for most of the next 100 years. A series of strongmen, some more benevolent than others, ruled in succession, their fates always tied to the floating price of coffee beans. In the early 20th century, the economy changed, with the discovery of huge oil reserves around Maracaibo. Around the same time, the consummate caudillo, Juan Vicente Gómez, had his day in the Caribbean sun.

Gómez held power from 1908 until his death in 1935, and he reaped the benefits of Venezuela's petroleum boom. He had the Venezuelan constitution changed six times to suit his needs. Still, a group of students who first organized to oppose him in 1928 managed to get the last laugh on "The Tyrant of the Andes."

Not that Gómez had much difficulty dispatching the student protestors. Many ended up dead or imprisoned. Those who escaped, however, outlived the old dictator, and they returned to build a democracy in Venezuela. After Gómez's death, several lesser dictators strove to follow in the old caudillos' footsteps, but the democratic movement was clearly afoot. Finally, in 1958, Venezuelans went to the polls and chose a civilian government. For president, they elected Rómulo Betancourt, one of "the generation of 1928."

President Betancourt's Democratic Action party held power until 1968, when the people chose to replace Democratic Action with Christian Democrats. A new president, Rafael Caldera, took office, and power passed peacefully from one party to another for the first time in Venezuelan history. It passed back in 1973, with the election of Democratic Action's Carlos Pérez, who nationalized Venezuela's oil industry.

Rich in petroleum reserves, Venezuela had helped found the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). When OPEC embargoed oil in the wake of war between Arabs and Israelis in 1973, Venezuelan crude suddenly sold for four times its previous price. The ensuing oil boom brought big spending, but little real progress on poverty or other entrenched problems. By 1976, income distribution was actually less equitable than it had been in 1960.

Bust followed boom in the late 1970s, and the nation nearly went broke as oil prices plummeted. As the bills piled up, the presidency passed back and forth between the Christian Democrats and Democratic Action, within a fairly stable two-party political system. Unfortunately, neither party could solve the nation's economic problems. By 1988, when former president Carlos Pérez was elected again, the falling price of oil had effectively cut the government's income in half.

Pérez proposed austerity measures, and pressed ahead with free market reforms in the face of protests and labor strikes. Opposition to those reforms culminated in two coup attempts in 1992, the first led by Lieutenant Colonel Hugo Chávez. Both failed, but Pérez was forced from office in 1993 under charges of corruption. Rafael Caldera was then elected president again and promptly freed Chávez. While Caldera struggled to prevent a banking collapse, Chávez and his army allies launched the left-wing Fifth Republic Movement, a new political coalition outside the existing two-party system.

By 1998, more than half of all Venezuelans were living in poverty. That year, Hugo Chávez won the presidential election promising to help the poor, reform the government, and root out corruption. His coalition also captured the most seats in the legislature. The following year, Venezuelans elected a mainly pro-Chávez constituent assembly to draft a new constitution, which voters then approved. It gave more power to the president and to the federal government.

After Chávez and his coalition won another round of elections in 2000, the legislature gave him the authority to rule by decree on a variety of topics for one year. Protests and strikes followed, culminating in an April 2002 coup, which briefly removed Chávez from power. While the Organization of American States condemned the "alteration of constitutional order," the United States recognized the new government. Chávez was back in power in two days, arguing that the United States secretly supported the move against him.

That winter, the opposition mounted a massive general strike against Chávez. By 2004, it had gathered enough signatures to force a referendum on whether he should continue in office. Helped by the return of high oil prices, which fueled spending on programs for the poor, Chávez won the referendum easily, capturing 59 percent of the vote. The opposition cried foul, but international observers said the vote was free and fair. Chávez was elected president again in 2006, with more than 60 percent of the vote.

--Steve Sampson

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