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we can have just our usual flag, with the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the skull and cross-bones.”
    Latin Americans for the most part reacted like survivors of an earthquake. The United States was unaware and disdainful (as José Martí had noted) of the reality of life and feeling in Spanish-speaking America. It could not recognize the historic impact of its actions on those countries to the south, little understood by most Americans. Ariel , that meditative book by an intellectual of the end of the nineteenth century, was a natural product of the Hispanic reaction. It came at an opportune moment, as an expression of the unfortunate encounter between the two Americas that had been brewing all along the nineteenth century, and it foreshadowed a more extensive conflict that would last till nearly the end of the twentieth.
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    THE CYCLE of admiration and disenchantment had begun long before 1898. At least three generations of Latin American Liberals had turned toward the United States as a model. They were eager to create a constitutional and secular republic distinct from and opposed to the absolute and Catholic monarchy from which they had seized their independence (and whose inheritance was defended, with differing nuances, by the political groups, clergy, soldiers, and intellectuals known as Conservatives). In some cases, the respect for the United States veered close to a total assimilation of what were seen to be its virtues. The Mexican Constitution of 1824, the first to declare the Mexican nation a federal republic, included an introduction in which the legislators, headed by the brilliant journalist Lorenzo de Zavala, took pride in their emulation of the North Americans. The Mexican Congress, it affirmed, “is happy to have had a model to imitate in the flourishing Republic of our neighbors to the north.” (Consistent federalist that he was, Zavala would end his days composing the constitution of the Republic of Texas and becoming its first vice president.)
    Simón Bolívar, the Liberator of Latin America, was much more cautious and suspicious of the United States, which, unlike England, had remained neutral during the wars of independence. Bolívar thought it was preferable for these new republics to build strong connections with England, the major naval power of the period. In the English (and other European) systems, he saw more of the balance he favored between order and freedom, with a strong executive power and centralized government. But even Bolívar admired the “promising” example of the United States of America:
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    Who can resist the victorious attraction of the full and absolute enjoyment of sovereignty, independence, freedom? Who can resist the love that inspires an intelligent government to simultaneously unite private and general rights; that erects the supreme law of the individual will upon the common will? Who can resist the authority of a benevolent government that, with a skillful, active and powerful hand, directs, always and everywhere, all its resources toward social perfection, the sole goal of human institutions?
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    Halfway through the nineteenth century, the admiration on the part of the Liberals (commonly called “progressives”) was almost continental. In the far south the distinguished writer Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (who would later become president of Argentina) liked to call himself Franklincito (“little Benjamin Franklin”). His praise for the United States knew no bounds. He spent six months traveling through the country in 1847, after a long trip to Europe, and would constantly compare it, very favorably, to France:
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    I am convinced that the United States has the most educated people on earth, the ultimate result of modern civilization . . . The only nation in the world where the masses read, where writing is used for every necessity, where 2000 newspapers satisfy the curiosity of the