The nineteenth century in Latin America is remembered as the century of independence. Forces for political change had been building up in Brazil as much as in Spain's colonies throughout the latter half of the eighteenth century. Thus there is an undeniable symmetry between the actions of Tupac Amaru II (José Gabriel Condorcanqui) who fought against the Spanish colonial regime in Peru only to be executed (May 1781) and Tiradentes (Joaquim José da Silva Xavier) who took on the colonial regime in Brazil and suffered the same fate (April 1792), but the way in which independence eventually came about in the two colonies in the 1820s proved to be very different. Napoleon's invasion of the Iberian peninsula in November 1807 had an impact in Caracas as much as in Rio de Janeiro, persuading Simón Bolívar to take up arms against the Spanish monarchy (in June 1808 Napoleon's elder brother, Joseph ‘Pepe Botellas’ was to be installed on the Spanish throne), and forcing the entire Portuguese court to leave Lisbon and sail, escorted by the British Navy, to Brazil, where it arrived in early 1808. Spain's war with its colonies – declared as a result of the insubordination of Bolívar and San Martín – proved to be a costly and bloody affair which was only resolved by the final rout of royalist troops in 1824. Brazil's transition to independence was, by contrast, relatively smooth. When Napoleon's troops were driven from the Iberian peninsula in late 1808, the King Dom João VI returned to Portugal, leaving his son, Dom Pedro, in charge as Prince Regent. When ordered home in 1822, Dom Pedro refused to return to Portugal, thereby in effect bringing about Brazilian independence, though it was an independence which retained the political structure of the monarchy. Unlike the Spanish colonies, Brazil had not needed to go to war with Europe to achieve independence.

There were differences too in the way that the printed word interacted with the independence movement in the two colonies.