Spanish American Wars of Independence

The Spanish American wars of independence were the numerous wars against Spanish rule in Spanish America that took place during the early 19th century, after the French invasion of Spain during Europe's Napoleonic Wars. The conflict started with short-lived governing juntas established in Chuquisaca and Quito opposing the composition of the Supreme Central Junta of Seville. When the Central Junta fell to the French invasion, numerous new juntas appeared across the Spanish domains in the Americas. The conflicts among these colonies and with Spain eventually resulted in a chain of newly independent countries stretching from Argentina and Chile in the south to Mexico in the north a little over a decade later. After the death of King Ferdinand VII, in 1833, only Cuba and Puerto Rico remained under Spanish rule. Spanish control over these islands lasted until its defeat by the United States during the Spanish–American War in 1898.

These conflicts have been characterized both as wars of national liberation and as civil wars, since, while the goal of one group of belligerents was the independence of the Spanish colonies in the Americas, the majority of combatants on all sides were Spanish Americans and Native Americans. Some of the Spanish Americans believed that independence was necessary, rather most who supported the creation of the new governments saw them as a means to preserve the region's autonomy from the French. Over the course of the next decade, the political instability in Spain and the absolutist restoration under Ferdinand VII convinced more and more Spanish Americans of the need to establish independence from the mother country.

The events in Spanish America were related to the other wars of independence in Haiti and Brazil. Brazil's independence, in particular, shared a common starting point with Spanish America's, since both conflicts were triggered by Napoleon's invasion of the Iberian Peninsula, which forced the Portuguese royal family to resettle in Brazil in 1807. The process of Latin American independence took place in the general political and intellectual climate that emerged from the Age of Enlightenment and that influenced all of the Atlantic Revolutions, including the earlier revolutions in the United States and France. A more direct cause of the Spanish American wars of independence were the unique developments occurring within the Kingdom of Spain and its monarchy during this period.