 Liberal political discourse was dominant in Latin America during most of the nineteenth century. Initially, in the first half of the century, it was a discourse of liberation from colonial rule in Hispanic America. Liberal ideas provided the political language to articulate the urgently needed new kind of legitimacy for the emerging republics. Later, in the second half, liberalism was firmly established as an ideology of nation building in most of the region. However, by the mid twentieth century, liberalism had mostly vanished from the political scene, except in Colombia where the liberal party continued to be a live political option until the end of the century. Despite the fact that it became the dominant political discourse in the nineteenth century, there is no such thing as Latin American or Hispanic American “liberalism”, if by the latter we mean something like a unified and internally coherent body of political doctrine (“Hispanic American” refers to Spanish-speaking America as opposed to Portuguese speaking, i.e., Brazil). Instead, what emerged in the nineteenth century were various political movements that can appropriately be called “liberal” to the extent that political actors either espoused liberal ideas or identified themselves as “liberals”, or both. Though such political movements began to take shape in the aftermath of the wars of independence from Spain and Portugal, self-identification as a member of a liberal group became possible around the mid-century when the liberal position became more definite in relation to usually “conservative” adversaries.