# Abolitions in Latin America  
The early rebellion that gave birth to the Mexican War of Independence in 1810 was a popular movement. Its leaders called attention to the problem of racial and social inequalities that separated white Creole elites from the great majority of the poor colonial population of colour (Andrews, 2004, p. 87). Two years after Mexico's independence, on 26 September 1823, the Constituent Assembly passed a decree that prohibited the transatlantic slave trade to Mexico. Even though the Mexican Constitution of 1824 did not address the issue of slavery, constitutions of various Mexican states, enacted between 1824 and 1827, either abolished slavery or determined that newborns should be manumitted (Legaspi, 2013, pp. 22-26). Eventually, President Vicente Guerrero issued a decree on 15 September 1829 ending slavery in Mexico. Still, slavery continued to be the object of decrees, and it was included in the articles of the next two Constitutions of Mexico, suggesting that it remained a crucial problem until the eve of the Mexican Revolution (Baumgartner, 2015).  
Between 1811 and 1842, the Atlantic slave trade to the various former Spanish colonies in Central America and South America was legally abolished. Yet from 1843 to 1847 it reopened in Peru, and in Argentina and Uruguay between the 1820s and the early 1830s (Borucki, 2015, pp. 50-51). Except for the Dominican Republic, which abolished both the slave trade and slavery in 1822, all the other former Spanish colonies adopted gradual abolition by first enacting free womb legislation and only later abolishing slavery. Chile and the Río de la Plata respectively enacted free womb laws on 15 October 1811 and on 31 January 1813 (Feliú, 1973, pp. 39-40; Andrews, 1989, p. 59; Edwards, 2020, p. 4). The regions of present-day Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, and Venezuela passed free womb legislation in 1821, Uruguay in 1825, and Bolivia and Paraguay in 1831 and 1842 respectively.