Exile became a major feature of political life, inherent in the specific patterns of configuration of modern politics and political regimes in 19th-century Latin America. When the polities reached higher levels of institutional consolidation, exile was already internalized in the political culture as part of an exclusionary politics of exit, prevailing over more open and pluralistic politics of voice, in the terms of Albert Hirschman. In this chapter, we examine the evolution of exile in the newly formed states, focusing on what we define as a three-tiered format of early exile, in which displaced individuals and communities played an increasingly important role in the politics of exit as well as on the formation of state identities and collective imageries.

The Three-Tiered Format of Early Exile

The crystallization of the new states did not preclude overlapping territorial claims. The political class of each region continued to exercise extensive influence on the equation of political forces in the neighboring countries. The intricate connections among Peru, Bolivia, and Chile analyzed in the preceding chapter are not unique.