So, the issue with comparing Latin America to Africa and Asia in terms of colonialism is that miscegenation between European colonizers and their indigenous subjects was far more extensive and commonplace in Latin America than anywhere else. The Spaniards and the Portuguese instituted a strict racial hierarchy in order to determine one’s social, economic, and even political placement within the colonial realm. Furthermore, unlike the later, nineteenth century African and Asian colonial holdings, Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the Americas had a complex legal system where indigenous peoples were considered a separate entity from the European colonists. This took a while to formally set up, but the king of Spain was considered the monarch of two separate “republics”, one for Spaniards, the other for the indigenous. These republics had separate sets of laws that governed the relevant subjects. For instance, at least for most of the colonial history of Latin America, indigenous people were not subject to the jurisdiction of the Holy Office of the Inquisition. While originally the Inquisition was responsible for forced conversion and baptism of indigenous people under church figures like Juan de Zumárraga, this repression took place during a period when the church was not completely unified and its stance towards whether indigenous people had souls, whether they could be enslaved, whether they could convert and receive baptism, etc. Later, the Inquisition became more of an internal policing mechanism with jurisdiction only over baptize Catholics.

However, the reason why mainly whites and mestizos make up a great deal of the ruling classes of Latin American countries after independence is because of this racial hierarchy from the colonial era. In this hierarchy, a white, Catholic Spaniard born in the Americas was considered slightly inferior to a white, Catholic Spaniard born in Europe. Theoretically, two brothers can have completely different sets of social and political rights within the Spanish empire just by virtue if the fact that one was born in Europe while the other was born in the Americas. The European-born “peninsulares” were given greater opportunities to serve in the colonial administration than American-born “criollos”, especially after the Bourbon Reforms of the mid-eighteenth century. The disenfranchisement experienced by many criollos was the primary impetus behind this particular group of people as a social actor to pursue independence from Spain while the mother country was weakened during Napoleon’s invasions in 1808. The fact that the criollos became the main force behind the struggle for independence in many Latin American countries meant that, after achieving independence, they became the political, social, and economic elite, a status that their descendants enjoy this day. Mestizos in these countries are more likely to succeed where there was a greater degree of miscegenation amongst white Europeans and indigenous people, which mainly occurred in Central America, the Caribbean, and parts of the Andean region, not to mention Brazil.