Liberal promises of liberty, equality, and sovereignty inspired Latin America's various independence movements, but those ideas came up short when faced with the prospect of building national unity across the lines that divided the many different people who lived in the new nations. Nation building--the process of constructing a sense of national unity among people of different cultural, religious, and linguistic backgrounds--is never an easy prospect. In the context of widespread destruction of infrastructure, economies, and political systems occasioned by the wars of independence, however, the difficulty of forging national identity compounded.
Amid the post-independence *chaos*, strongmen known as caudillos seized power in their individual nations.