orchids and orchidology in central america. 500 ... - lankesteriana.org

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The era of lIberalIsm
“Paz, educación y prosperidad material”
(= ‘Peace, education and material prosperity’)
Slogan of the liberal reform in Guatemala, 1871
“The immense ideological power of the Church
was a notorious characteristic in the formation of
Central American society… The establishment of
secular power was slow and difficult; a first attempt
was made in the second half of the XVIII century,
under the Bourbons of enlightened Spain. But one has
to wait until the end of the XIX century to observe a
moderate laic triumph: this is the liberal era, the era of
positivism, of education controlled by the State and the
definitive consecration of freedom of religion (Pérez
Brignoli, 2000: 27)”. “... the fight between liberals and
conservatives (clericals) fills the history of Central
America in the second half of the century...” (Halperin
Donghi, 2001: 258).
In Guatemala the liberal revolution triumphed
in 1871, dominated by the figure of president Justo
Rufino Barrios, who was responsible for a radical
agrarian reform and the expropriation of ecclesiastical
possessions. In 1876 liberal ideas gained strength in
El Salvador, during the presidency of Rafael Zaldívar
(1876-1885) and under strong Guatemalan influence.
Nicaragua and Honduras were an exception, with
reforms that were frustrated or incomplete. While
Walker’s defeat in Nicaragua was followed by more
than thirty years of conservative governments, regional
fragmentation, difficulties in communications and
backwardness hindered in Honduras the consolidation
of the State. In Costa Rica, the liberal reforms initiated
in the forties by president Braulio Carrillo were
continued by president José María Castro Madriz, who
fought for public education and for the freedom of
the press, and by the ‘progressive authoritarianism’ of
dictator Tomás Guardia (1870-1882). The first public
schools and the first universities of Central America
were founded during those years.
“After most of Latin America achieved independence
from Spain in the early nineteenth century, foreign
naturalists began to visit the new republics, as part
of a flood of foreign soldiers, miners, engineers,
adventurers, missionaries and others. The botany
practiced by these foreign naturalists was essentially
LANKESTERIANA
LANKESTERIANA 9(1—2), August 2009. © Universidad de Costa Rica, 2009.
extractive. They extracted botanically significant plants
in much the same way that foreign corporations such
as the United Fruit Company extracted bananas from
Central America… By the late nineteenth century, the
most important herbaria of Latin American plants were
to be found in Europe and North America… Beginning
in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, however,
many Latin American countries began to produce
their own botanical inventories and national floras.
The growing official interest in the natural world
coincides with the liberal era in Latin America that
lasted roughly from 1870 to 1930. National botanical
inventories appealed to Latin America’s liberal elites
for ideological and practical reasons. During the liberal
era, national governments pursued the goals of ‘order
and progress’, enlisting science and technology to
help rationalize and modernize the state, the economy,
and society. They pursued economic growth through
the export of tropical commodities – ranging from
industrial commodities such as rubber and henequen
to luxury foods such as coffee, sugar and bananas.
This meant that during the liberal era many Latin
American economies -and by extension the states-
depended heavily upon plants… The leaders in each
country began to take an interest in botany that offered
the possibility of increasing the production of existing
export crops and of discovering new ones. Many Latin
American governments established or revived national
botanical gardens, agricultural experiment stations,
and natural history museums, whose research agendas
included surveying the nation’s plants, compiling
national herbaria and, most significantly, producing
national floras” (McCook, 2002: 514-515).
Liberal ideas also led to the creation of private
gardens and collections, combining leisure with
scientific interests. In the history of the orchids of
Central America the legendary orchid hunter began to
be displaced by the scientific collector. Although great
quantities of plants where still collected and sent to
Europe and later to the United States, the shipments of
herbarium specimens began to outnumber those of live
plants. A further contribution to this development were
the improvement of methods for the reproduction of
orchids from seed in England, which began in 1849 and
the production of the first hybrids by John Dominy in
1854. “Gradually […] the interest in imported species
waned as commercial success in orchid hybridization