In the last decades of the nineteenth century and early years of the twentieth, a new class consolidated its wealth and political power in most Latin American countries. Busy ports, expanding rail networks, and cities striving to remake themselves in the image of fashionable Paris, with grand avenues and beaux arts opera houses—these were material evidence of the emergence of this class, which Latin Americans would call “the oligarchy.” The unprecedented wealth of the oligarchs derived from flourishing export economies that supplied sugar, cotton, coffee, beef, copper, and other primary products to the industrializing countries of the North Atlantic.