The director of the RAE (Royal Spanish Academy) Santiago Muñoz Machado writes a condescending history of the political evolution of Latin America with little knowledge of recent historiographical contributions.
'De la democracia en Hispanoamérica' deliberately seeks to be the Hispanic version of 'De la démocratie en Amérique', published in 1835 and 1840 in two thick volumes. The director of the RAE, Santiago Muñoz Machado, shares with Tocqueville the same condescending view of the history of Latin American democracy.
Unlike the French scholar who briefly ascribed the origin of the democratic failure of the first Hispanic republics to Spanish ignorance, arbitrariness and violence, Muñoz Machado blames them on the political chaos of independence, generated by the Napoleonic invasions and the mismanagement of a precious constitutional legacy that was the Cortes of Cadiz, a process to which he devotes two and a half chapters out of six.
