It's very diverse, 3. Napoleon makes everything complicated, and 4. As we've seen in the past, sometimes revolutions turn out not to be that revolutionary. Witness for instance the New England Revolution, who instead of like trying to form new and better governments are always just kicking balls around like all the other soccer teams. Right, so before independence, Latin American society was characterized by three institutions that exercised control over the population. The first was the Spanish crown, or if you were Brazilian, the Portuguese crown. So as far as Spain was concerned, the job of the colonies was to produce revenue in the form of a 20% tax on everything that was called the Royal Fifth.