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If independence allowed popular participation in politics, the local elites, not just Spaniards, were against it. It was more like class or even ethnic warfare than an independence movement, and it united all the elites in opposition. When Hidalgo’s army sacked Guanajuato on September 23, they killed the intendant, the senior colonial official, and then started indiscriminately to kill white people. In Mexico the political attitudes of the elite had been shaped by the 1810 Hidalgo Revolt, led by a priest, Father Miguel Hidalgo. The first declaration of independence took place in La Paz, Bolivia, in 1809, though it was quickly crushed by Spanish troops sent from Peru. It was only a matter of time before they began to sense the possibility of becoming truly independent from Spain. There was much dispute about whether to recognize the authority of the Junta Central, and in response, many Latin Americans began to form their own juntas. The collapse of the Spanish state with the Napoleonic invasion created a constitutional crisis throughout colonial Latin America. These demands were all anathema to the elites of South America, who were still ruling an institutional environment shaped by the encomienda, forced labor, and absolute power vested in them and the colonial state. It also called for the end of special privileges and the introduction of equality before the law. In 1812 the Cortes produced what became known as the Cádiz Constitution, which called for the introduction of a constitutional monarchy based on notions of popular sovereignty.
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Here the Junta formed a parliament, called the Cortes.
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Finally it reached the port of Cádiz, which, though besieged by Napoleonic forces, held out. The Junta met first at Aranjuez, but retreated south in the face of the French armies. A national junta, the Junta Central, took his place, taking the torch in the fight against the French. By September the Spanish king Ferdinand had been captured and had abdicated. By May they had taken Madrid, the Spanish capital. In February 1808, Napoleon Bonaparte’s French armies invaded Spain. The contrast between the constitutional process that took place at the time of the independence of the United States and the one that took place a little afterward in Mexico is stark. The document that the delegates sat down to write in Philadelphia in May 1787 was the outcome of a long process initiated by the formation of the General Assembly in Jamestown in 1619. It should now be apparent that it is not a coincidence that the United States, and not Mexico, adopted and enforced a constitution that espoused democratic principles, created limitations on the use of political power, and distributed that power broadly in society.