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Recent scholarship has shown that during the first half of the eighteen century the governorships of strategic provinces in Spanish America —those susceptible to foreign attacks or to the frequent introduction of contraband— underwent a process of militarization similar, and almost chronologically parallel, to that of border and coastal corregimientos and politico-military governorships in Spain. This process brought the end of the traditional practice of selling appointments to provincial governorships and a significant decline in the proportion of Spanish Americans who gained access to them. Yet direct exclusion of Spanish American’s from office may not have been the most significant way in which this reform affected local elites’ capacity for influencing local government. By analyzing the dynamics and mechanisms through which provincial governors created family and client networks within the societies they governed from the late seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth century, this paper argues that the tendency to appoint experienced military officers, with long years of service in the Iberian Peninsula and the Mediterranean, weakened the capacity of local elites for co-opting provincial governors, for creating mutual opportunities for personal gain, and for influencing local government across Spanish America. Unlike provincial governors of the late seventeenth century, military officers appointed to provincial governorships in the Indies from the 1720s appeared less inclined towards building strong familial networks in the societies they governed. While many of them remained single for life, others chose to travel to the Americas without their families. Most showed clearly that they were primarily interested in transforming their service in the Indies into social and political capital back in Spain. As a result, even if opportunities for negotiating royal policies were still available, a cleavage began to emerge between local elites and governing officials who increasingly saw each other as having different interests and identities.